The three V's of big data
It wasn't that long ago that it was customary to purge any log produced by an application after 90 days or so. Companies lately have come to the realization that they were throwing away gold nuggets of information. Additionally, storage has become cheap enough that it's a no brainer to keep these logs. Also, the cloud, the internet, and general advances in technology create even more data now. The number of devices storing and transmitting data, from smartphones to IoT gadgets, industrial sensors, and surveillance cameras have proliferated exponentially around the world, contributing to an explosion in the volume of data.
Figure 4: The three V's of big data
According to IBM, 2.5 exabytes of data were generated every day in 2012. That's a big number by any measure. Also, about 75% of data is unstructured, coming from sources such as text, voice, and video.
The fact that so much of the new data being created is...