Big Data

• Oracle has a tape library with an Exabyte of data.
• An Exabyte is one quintillian bytes; that's 10^18 bytes; that's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.
• It's claimed that all the words ever spoken could be stored in approximately 5 exabytes.
• There are various estimates, but one is that we generate 2.5 exabytes of data every day (as of 2012).
• The point is that there's a lot of data out there, and we need ways to handle it.
• In particular, can we use these vast data sets to derive some useful information.
• For example, can Google make use of the billions of queries it gets every day?
• In this case this has been called mining the exhaust of Internet superhighway.