Perhaps the first challenge of big data is defining it adequately. It's a term so widely used as to be almost meaningless. For example, some may refer to data exceeding 1,048,576 rows as big data (that is, the row limit in Excel 2010 and 2013) while others would only apply the term to datasets in the multiple petabyte range. Definitions found on Wikipedia and Webopedia are so broad as to encompass both of these examples. You can find them in the following links, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data and https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/B/big_data.html.
True, we should probably not consider data that merely exceeds Excel's row limitation as big data; nevertheless, from the perspective of the individual for whom Excel is the traditional data-processing application, the preceding definitions fit.
Rather than try to provide an adequately narrow definition...
