Kirk Borne posted this to twitter:
Now, ask yourself how much of that data is relevant to any query you made yesterday? Or within the last week?
There are some legitimately large data sets, genomic, astronomical, oceanography, Large Hadron collider data and so many more.
The analysis of some big data sets require the processing of the entire data set but even with the largest data sets, say astronomical data sets, you may only be interested in a small portion of data for heavy analysis.
The overall amount of data keeps increasing to be sure, making the skill of selecting the right data for analysis all the more important.
The size of your data set matters far less than the importance of your results.
Let’s see a list in 2016 of the most important results from data analysis, skipping the size of the data sets as a qualifier.