In the last five years, the number of people accessing and using the internet has almost doubled from a little under 2 billion to around 3.7 billion. Half of the global population are now online.
With the number of internet users increasing, and with networks evolving, more data is being added to existing datasets each year. In 2016, global internet traffic was 1.2 zettabytes (which is 1.2 billion terabytes) and it is expected to grow to 3.3 zettabytes by 2021.
This enormous amount of data that is generated every year means that it is imperative that databases and data stores in general can scale and process our data efficiently.
The term big data was first coined in the 1980's by John Mashey (http://static.usenix.org/event/usenix99/invited_talks/mashey.pdf), and mostly came into play in the past decade with the explosive growth of the internet. Big data...
