Big Data Doesn’t Exist

Companies brag about the size of their datasets the way fishermen brag about the size of their fish. They claim access to endless terabytes of information. The advantages seem obvious: the more you know, the better.

Twitter processes around 8 terabytes of data per day.

But how much of that data is the actual content of tweets? Twitter users create 500 million tweets per day, and the average tweet is 60 characters. If we do the simple math, that’s just 30 gigabytes of actual text content per day — about half a percent of 8 terabytes.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/10/big-data-doesnt-exist/#.cojcdo:AbOG