Arnon Rotem-gal-oz argues that “big data” is often a misnomer:
I couldn’t find numbers from Google but others say that by 2017 Google processed over 20PB a day (not to mention answering 40K search queries/second) so Google is definitely in the big data game. The numbers go down fast after that, even for companies who are really big data companies — Facebook presented back in 2017 that they handle 500TB+ of new data daily, the whole of Twitter’s data as of May 2018 was around 300PB, and Uber reported their data warehouse is in the 100+ PB range.
Ok, but what about the rest of us? Let’s take a look at an example.
I often fight with this myself—SQL Server can easily handle multi-billion row data sets, for example. It’s the same problem in Azure with SQL Data Warehouse: the “you must be this tall to ride the rides” marker is set pretty high.