ABSTRACT
Recent years have witnessed an explosive growth in the amounts of data collected, stored, and disseminated by various organizations. Examples include (1) the large volumes of point-of-sale data amassed at the checkout counters of grocery stores, (2) the continuous streams of satellite images produced by Earth-observing satellites, and (3) the avalanche of data logged by network monitoring software. To illustrate how much the quantity of data has grown over the years, Figure 64.1 shows an example of the number of Web pages indexed by a popular Internet search engine since 1998.
