Yeah, you're absolutely right. For a lot of people, big data means Hadoop. For others, it means NoSQL. What I really think it means is just having all of your d

Yeah, you're absolutely right. For a lot of people, big data means Hadoop. For others, it means NoSQL. What I really think it means is just having all of your data in one live, accessible and analytics-ready place. That means logs, customer info, geographic info, demographic data, weather patterns, and just about anything you could ever think of. I like to think that big data is more about aggregating the information available in multiple datasets, and then figuring out how you can read those entrails, as it were. Honestly, big data today is mostly about a potential replacement for data warehouses. The real revolution around big data is that we now have a place to put it for analysis. That was a big hole that Hadoop filled. Now, the next 10 years will be spent actually figuring out how to analyze these big pools of data effectively. Frankly, that's the harder task, I think. We now have the ability to ask questions of ALL the data. Too bad we have no clue what the questions should be.