If big data is about the explosion of data of all types — payment, location coordinates; attention, habits, machine data; my social data then only a fraction of that data (not yet information or knowledge) resides in traditional databases. Conceptually (the analysis of the data to create value) overwhelms traditional database and analytics tools, giving rise to a new generation of cloud computing technologies: the Hadoop data framework, NoSQL databases, and big data analytics. As addressed in the book, not all data is created equal (in value terms) and finding the right data, applying the right analytics to it, and letting it deal with real-world problems is hard work strategically. One session, in Davos (WEF) was called Decoding the Data Deluge, chaired by Jan Hesthaven, a professor of applied mathematics from Brown University, deals with the upside opportunity these huge data sets can enable. From the course description: It’s a funny thing about data: If you ...