What is Big Data? 

Big is an imprecise and relative term so it makes it hard to pin down a good definition for the term Big Data.  According to Snijders et al. (2012), “Big Data is a loosely defined term used to describe data sets so large and complex that they become awkward to work with using standard statistical software” (p. 1).  Though one of the best and most concise definitions for big data out there, the definition is one that changes over time.  Where in the early 2000’s a data set representing all the learning data for a university could be measured in gigabytes, today that has increased over 1000 fold into many terabytes.  The data that constitutes big data can be anything both structured and unstructured but most often it is the latter as tools and business intelligence has tackled many of the scaling problems related to processing structured data.