Big data can simply be defined as data too large to be processed by a single machine. Let us say that we have 1 TB of data and the reports that need to be generated from it cannot be processed on a single machine in a time span acceptable to us. Let us take the example of click stream analysis. Internet companies such as Yahoo or Google keep an eye on the activity of the user by capturing each click that the user does on their website. Sometimes the complete page by page flow is also captured. Google, for example, captures the position from the top of a search result page for a search on a particular keyword or phrase. The amount of data generated and captured is huge and may be running into exabytes every day. This data needs to be processed on a day-to-day basis for analytical purposes. The analytical reports that are generated from this data are used to improve the experience of the user visiting the website.

Is it possible to process an exabyte of data? Of course...