Today the term big data draws a lot of attention, but behind the hype there's a simple story. For decades, companies have been making business decisions based on transactional data stored in relational databases. Beyond that critical data, however, is a potential treasure trove of non-traditional, less structured data: weblogs, social media, email, sensors, and photographs that can be mined for useful information. Decreases in the cost of both storage and compute power have made it feasible to collect this data - which would have been thrown away only a few years ago. As a result, more and more.
