I was at the PASS Summit last week in Seattle and once again the final keynote, from Dr. David DeWitt, was amazing. This year he talked about NoSQL, and Hadoop in particular, which Microsoft is supporting. There was a series of integration points with Hadoop announced last week from Microsoft, including Hadoop in the Azure space and an ODBC driver for Hadoop. Dr Dewitt's talk was voted on by the community, and he spent his time talking about NoSQL, Hadoop, and the changing world of Big Data.

I watched his talk and a few things struck me. First big data is big. The definition might vary for many of us, but when you get into the multi-petabyte range, it's big. eBay and Facebook were used as examples, each with around 60PB of data. For those of you thinking your systems aren't big, it's all relative. Many of us at smaller companies have smaller budgets, less hardware, and ten, or even one, terabyte might be big.

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