Imagine all the information you alone generate each time you swipe your credit card, post to social media, drive your car, leave a voicemail, or visit a doctor. Now try to imagine your data combined with the data of all humans, corporations, and organizations in the world! From healthcare to social media, from business to the auto industry, humans are now creating more data than ever before. volume, velocity, variety, and veracity.
Volume: Scale of Data
Big data is big. It's estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes (2.3 trillion gigabytes) of data are created every day. By 2020, we are expected to create 40 zettabytes (that's 43 trillion gigabytes) of information.
The amount of information being collected is so huge that modern database management tools are becoming overloaded and therefore obsolete. The need to find new ways of supporting big data helps explain the need for more data.
Velocity: Analysis of Streaming Data
The sheer velocity at which we are creating data today is a huge cause of big data. Each time you drive, sensors in your car monitor items like fuel level and tire pressure; modern cars use close to 100 such sensors. For this reason computer systems within cars are becoming more advanced in be able to process the large amounts of data collected by cars' sensors every minute. As we continue to create more data, we will use more methods to monitor the information, too. Variety: Different Forms of Data big data is taking on a larger variety of forms. As hospitals continue to adopt systems for electronic medical records, this number can only increase. By 2014, there will be an estimated 420 million wearable, wireless health monitors in use, storing constant data about our bodies that was never monitored so extensively before. And then there's common internet consumption: currently, we watch over 4 billion hours of video on YouTube and share 30 billion pieces of content on Facebook each month. Remember, only a