There are many use cases for big data, in the public and private sectors.

The most common experience people have using a big-data-based system is in Internet search, such as Google. To run these systems, a search needs to be carried out over billions of websites in a fraction of a second. Doing a basic text-based search would be inadequate to deal with such a problem. Simply storing the text of all those websites is a large problem. In order to deal with queries, new data structures and data mining methods need to be created and implemented specifically for this application.

Big data is also used in many other scientific experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider, part of which is pictured below, that stretches over 17 kilometers and contains 150 million sensors monitoring hundreds of millions of particle collisions per second. The data from this experiment is massive, with 25 petabytes created daily, after a filtering process (if filtering was not used,...