Yes, we call it "fat data" because of different approach to it, "bigdatey". E.g. it's not relational -- we don't JOIN it with anything (we intentionally designe

Yes, we call it "fat data" because of different approach to it, "bigdatey". E.g. it's not relational -- we don't JOIN it with anything (we intentionally designed it so that we stay scalable while growing), and it would perfectly fit a NoSQL datastorage (just don't confuse NoSQL with MongoDB :) After working in Google I (with another teammate) kinda "feel" what's big data: it's more about approach, mindset and toolset to work with it. I agree with you and @techdragon that if you can fit the data into one machine it's probably not really big. But one can also work with 1GB of data using bigdata approach, what we call "fat data". When we grow out of a single machine we won't need to rewrite our project. Nevertheless, this all doesn't prevent our sales team to say "big data" and "cloud" in every their phrase :)