Essay --

1. INTRODUCTION Recent years have witnessed a dramatic increase in our ability to collect data from various sensors, devices, in different formats, from independent or connected applications. This data ood has outpaced our capability to process, analyze, store and understand these datasets. Consider the Internet data. The web pages indexed by Google were around one million in 1998, but quickly reached 1 billion in 2000 and have already exceeded 1 trillion in 2008. This rapid expansions accelerated by the dramatic increase in acceptance of social networking applications, such as Facebook, Twitter, Weibo, etc., that allow users to create contents freely and amplify the already huge Web volume. Furthermore, with mobile phones becoming the sensory gateway to get real-time data on people from different aspects, the vast amount of data that mobile carrier can potentially process to improve our daily life has significantly outpaced our past CDR (call data record)-based processing for billing purposes only. It can be foreseen that Internet of things applications will raise the scale of data to an unprecedented level. People and devices (from home code machines to cars, to buses, railway stations and airports) are all loosely connected. Trillions of such connected components will generate a huge data ocean, and valuable information must be discovered from the data to help improve quality of life and make our world a better place. For example, after we get up every morning, in order to optimize our commute time to work and complete the optimization before we arrive at once, the system needs to process information from trace, weather, construction, police activities to our calendar schedules, and perform deep optimization under the tight t... ...Data explains that in 2012, 23% (643 exabytes) of the digital universe would be useful for Big Data if tagged and analyzed. However, currently only 3% of the potentially useful data is tagged, and even less is analyzed. CONCLUSIONS Big Data is going to continue growing during the next years, and each data scientist will have to manage much more amount of data every year. This data is going to be more diverse, larger, and faster. We discussed in this paper some insights about the topic, and what we consider are the main concerns, and the main challenges for the future. Big Data is becoming the new Final Frontier for scientific data research and for business applications. We are at the beginning of a new era where Big Data mining will help us to discover knowledge that no one has discovered before. Everybody is warmly invited to participate in this intrepid journey.