Big data overview

The first magnetic storage devices were, large, bulky, and expensive, and required massive amounts of power and cooling. They also failed quite often. But, as time has progressed, the sizes of computing components – especially storage – have shrunk, and costs have decreased. However, the capabilities, reliability, and power of those components have increased. This allows us to store much more data, and since we've had those technologies longer, we've been able to store more data over time.

And what can we do with it all — why keep it? Given a system that processes and delivers the data quickly enough, there are actually quite a few examples of specific use cases for large sets of data. The most basic use of big data is to simply query it, using standard T-SQL or Multidimensional Expressions (MDX).