Fair enough. I think the reason people struggle with classifying this stuff is because there are a lot of gray areas and it's difficult to verbalize all the de

Fair enough. I think the reason people struggle with classifying this stuff is because there are a lot of gray areas and it's difficult to verbalize all the details meaningfully. One could say "Oh...RDBMSes!"...but teradata is still relational...it's just distributed. "Oh! OLAP vs OLTP!"...but it's not really that either. One _could_ use teradata for a couple gig data mart just fine (and argue that it's not big data). That's why i tend to fall back to the 3 / 4 Vs that have tended to typify the 4 aspects of "big data" (volume, velocity, variety, veracity).