“Big Data is Essentially All Data” – B. Devlin

I would like to recommend you to Barry Devlin’s post here titled “Big Data is Dead… Long Live All Data”. The post ends with the paragraph:

“All this says to me that big data as a technological category is becoming an increasingly meaningless name.  Big data is essentially all data.  Is there any chance that the marketing folks can hear me?”

I could not agree more. If “big data” is meaningful then, as I have argued, it must be a new thing associated with several newish sources of data that come in large volumes like social media data or sensor data or log data. But the term is so abused that I no longer believe that it is salvageable. Big Data is all data… it is any data…

So of course it is true that business must prepare for it (here), that cloud computing must support it (here), that it is more than just a technology issue (here), that organizations need to be aligned (here)… and so on (note that these are just the four most recent tweets on my feed… I could go on and on). How can this be the driver of new IT spending? How can it be the driver of anything?

The point is that everything that has ever been said about data and data warehousing is being restated as new thinking related to big data. If we measured the information entropy we would find no new information is present.

Big Data is Big Hype… Fuel for Bloggers and Pundits…

Related articles (Yawn)…

• Big Data To Become Powerful Driver Of IT Spending – Gartner (misco.co.uk)
• Big Data News of the Week: BYOD (forbes.com)
• Bigger Big Data, Big Thoughts, and Big Ideas (ibm.com)
• Enterprises Are Spending Wildly On ‘Big Data’ But Don’t Know If It’s Worth It Yet (isykes.wordpress.com)
• Big data: a retailer’s guide to likes, tweets, reviews, customer data, and basically everything else (infographic) (venturebeat.com)
• Agile Cloud, Big Data and Mobility (sys-con.com)
• Big Data – You Can Start Small (isykes.wordpress.com)
• Big data: a retailer’s guide to likes, tweets, reviews, customer data, and basically everything else (infographic) (c24.co.uk)
• Big Data and Big Decisions: Learning from the 2012 Election (zenya.com)
• Big Thinkers on Big Data [Video] (liveramp.com)