Demystifying Big Data for Oracle Professionals

Ever wonder about Big Data and what exactly it means, especially if you are already an Oracle Database professional? Or, do you get lost in the jargon warfare that spews out terms like Hadoop, Map/Reduce and HDFS? In this post I will attempt to explain these terms from the perspective of a traditional database practitioner but getting wet on the Big Data issues by being thrown in the water. I was inspired to write this from the recent incident involving NSA scooping up Verizon call data invading privacy of the citizens.