Big data is an evolving term that describes any voluminous amount ofstructured, semi-structured andunstructured data that has the potential to be mined for information.

Big data can be characterized by 3Vs: the extreme volume of data, the wide variety of types of data and the velocity at which the data must be must processed. Although big data doesn't refer to any specific quantity, the term is often used when speaking aboutpetabytes and exabytes of data, much of which cannot be integrated easily.

Because big data takes too much time and costs too much money to load into a traditional relational database for analysis, new approaches to storing and analyzing data have emerged that rely less on data schema and data quality. Instead, raw data with extendedmetadata is aggregated in a data lakeand machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) programs use complexalgorithms to look for repeatable patterns. 

Big data analytics is often associated with cloud computing because the analysis of large data sets in real-timerequires a platform like Hadoop to store large data sets across a distributedcluster and MapReduce to coordinate, combine and process data from multiple sources.

http://vcenter.ir