Customers with moderate data sizes often did fairly large queries, but customers with giant data sizes almost never queried huge amounts of data. An alternate definition of Big Data is “When the cost of keeping data around is less than the cost of figuring out what to throw away.” I like this definition because it encapsulates why people end up with Big Data. Are you really generating a huge amount of data? If so, do you really need to use a huge amount of data at once? If so, is the data really too big to fit on one machine? If so, are you sure you’re not just a data hoarder? If so, are you sure you wouldn’t be better off summarizing?

Source: Big Data is Dead