Big Data Space Fungus

1. MOTIVATION The big data questions addressed in the database community remind me of the famous fable of the invention of Chess. "When the creator of the game of chess (in some tellings an ancient Indian mathematician, ...) showed his invention to the ruler of the country, the ruler was so pleased that he gave the inventor the right to name his prize for the invention. The man, who was very wise, asked the king this: that for the first square of the chess board, he would receive one grain of wheat (in some tellings, rice), two for the second one, four on the third one, ..."[wikipedia] The Big Data hype resembles the data scientist king who fanatically fills the squares of the board. Furthermore, it appears as is if the computer scientists and engineers acts as the faithful civil servants, to go after their treasure chest, putting on the board ever more powerful, increasing piles of hardware. Every 1.5 year we double the amount of data and processing power. A futile activity as the fable has clearly identified thousands of years ago. The corollary of the chess board payment scheme using rice (or wheat) is that not only you can not find enough of it in the universe, you will also never be able to consume the amount collected. The lesson is Don’t collect more rice (wheat) you can eat, otherwise it will rot away in storage. This also shows the way out of the data deluge dilemma. We should recognize and respect the natural laws of data freshness and rotting in the core of our Big Data analytics offerings.