In information technology, big data consists of datasets that grow so large that they become awkward to work with using on-hand database management tools. Difficulties include capture, storage, search, sharing, analytics, and visualizing. This trend continues because of the benefits of working with larger and larger datasets allowing analysts to "spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime." Though a moving target, current limits are on the order of terabytes, exabytes and zettabytes of data. Scientists regularly encounter this problem in meteorology, genomics, connectomics, complex physics simulations, biological and environmental research, Internet search, finance and business informatics. Data sets also grow in size because they are increasingly being gathered by ubiquitous information-sensing mobile devices, aerial sensory technologies (remote sensing), software logs, cameras, microphones, Radio-frequency identification readers, wireless sensor networks and so on." Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created and 90% of the data in the world today was created within the past two years. (Excerpt from Wikipedia article: Big data)
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