There's probably a parallel somewhere here between Jevons Paradox and this idea of what big data is all about. Jevons Paradox was the observation that the cons

There's probably a parallel somewhere here between Jevons Paradox and this idea of what big data is all about. Jevons Paradox was the observation that the consumption of coal increased, rather than decreased after steam engines came along (they originally thought steam engines using less coal would lead to less coal consumption overall). But what happened (obvious to us in the 21st century) was that steam engines made transportation itself more energy-efficient, and created increase in demand for fuel, of which coal was the primary type available at the time. In other words: the less costly a useful task becomes, the more we tend to do it "just because". Seems like the author is trying to say: storing a lot of data vertically "just because" does not big data make. But the author does not fully explain why this is significant. It is significant, though, because Jevons Paradox would predict that eventually companies will want to access so-called "frozen" data more frequently and will want to make that frequent access as cost-effective (and payload-efficient) as possible, which distributed NoSQL-type DBs do very well.