Depends, of course, who you are and what you're doing. Ryanair isn't going to get any value out of Big Data techniques, because Ryanair doesn't have big data.

Depends, of course, who you are and what you're doing. Ryanair isn't going to get any value out of Big Data techniques, because Ryanair doesn't have big data. If you took every single piece of data that Ryanair has ever collected from every one of its millions of customers and flights in its thirty-year history... it'd probably all still fit on a laptop hard drive. Airlines as a rule just don't produce that much data -- I'd imagine it's in the kilobytes per passenger-flight. It's silly to try to apply big-data techniques when your data isn't all that big, and even sillier to go around calling your modest-sized data science problems "Big Data" just because you think it sounds cool.