Data collection has been the Achilles heel of all research endeavors. Proper data can be hard to find, acquiring it is often prohibitively expensive and cleaning everything up is time-consuming.

Editor's note: This article was originally published in 2016 and has been updated for 2018. We practitioners of the technological arts have a tendency to use specialized jargon. That's not unusual.

Big data is data that exceeds the processing capacity of conventional database systems. The data is too big, moves too fast, or doesn't fit the strictures of your database architectures. To gain value ...