18. Big Data

Introduction

Digital data is constantly being produced. With each day that passes, hundreds of millions of data points are being generated and collected in a variety of mediums. They might be coming from social media, from monetary transactions, or from files and photos being uploaded to the internet. It’s estimated that over 2 exabytes of data is now produced on the internet everyday, that’s over 2 million terabytes! This rate of data creation is increasing, and there is plenty of data generated offline as well. We call this Big Data.

Big Data is the result of you, and billions of other people, generating data everyday. In this chapter we look at the journey these data points take, how they are used, and why we are interested in them the first place.