Tableau and big data
Perhaps the first challenge of big data is defining it adequately. It's a term so widely used as to be almost meaningless. For example, some may refer to data exceeding 1,048,576 rows as big data (which is the row limit in Excel 2010 and 2013) while others would only apply the term to datasets in the multiple petabyte range. Definitions found on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data) and Webopedia (https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/B/big_data.html) are so broad as to encompass both of these examples. True, it is probably simplistic to consider data that merely exceeds Excel's row limitation as big data; nevertheless, from the perspective of an individual for whom Excel is the traditional data-processing application, the preceding definitions fit.
Rather than try to provide an adequately narrow definition of what is essentially a buzzword, this section will primarily focus on one aspect of big data: massively parallel processing. However...