BIG DATA : From hype to reality

Abstract: Big data is all of a sudden everywhere. It is too big to ignore!It has been six decades since the computer revolution, four decades after the development of the microchip, and two decades of the modern Internet! More than a decade after the 90s “.com” fizz, can Big Data be the next Big Bang? Big data reveals part of our daily lives. It has the potential to solve virtually any problem for a better urbanized global. Big Data sources are also very interesting from an official statistics point of view. The purpose of this paper is to explore the conceptions of big data and opportunities and challenges associated with using big data especially in official statistics. “A petabyte is the equivalent of 1,000 terabytes, or a quadrillion bytes. One terabyte is a thousand gigabytes. One gigabyte is made up of a thousand megabytes. There are a thousand thousand—i.e., a million—petabytes in a zettabyte” (Shaw 2014). And this is to be continued…