Big Data is characterized by 3 V's, they are as follow:
1) Volume,
2) Velocity,
3) Variety
1) Volume (Data at Rest)
-> The name 'Big Data' itself is related to a size which is enormous. The size of data plays very crucial role in determining value out of data. Also, whether a particular data can actually be considered as a Big Data or not, is dependent upon the volume of data.
-> Here, the size of data is much more than terabytes to exabytes.
2) Velocity (Data in Motion)
-> The term velocity refers to the speed of generation of data from different sources. How fast the data is generated and processed to meet the demands, determines real potential in the data.
-> Big Data velocity deals with the speed at which data flows in from sources like business processes, application logs, network and social sites, sensors, etc.
-> Streaming data milliseconds to seconds to respond.
3) Variety (Data in Many Forms)
-> Variety refers to heterogeneous sources and the nature of data, both structured and unstructured or semi-structured. Earlier spreadsheets and databases were the only sources of data considered by most of the applications.
-> But now day's data in the form of emails, photos, videos, PDF's, audio, etc. is also being considered in the analysis applications. This variety of unstructured data create many issues for storage, mining and analyzing data.