Taming Big Data

There's a rush of information terraforming the IT world. It flows from the data generated by 4.3 billion cell phones and 2 billion Internet users worldwide, and joins the roiling torrent of 30 billion RFID tags and hundreds of satellites incessantly sending more signals with each passing second. Now, nobody ever has to deal with all the world's data all at once. But when the whole pie grows, everyone's slices get larger. When you start measuring the pie in zettabytes, even a small piece starts to get pretty filling. Here's a sobering statistic: Twitter alone adds 12 terabytes of data every day—all text, and all added at a maximum of 140 characters at a time.