So you have been hearing the talk about Big Data and you have decided to did a little deeper and find out what it means to you. Well then this is the session for you. In this session, we will first attempt to define what is Big Data. From there, we will explore not only the need for big data but also promise big data has for the technology world. We will finish by talking about the technology used to harness this data. We will talk about some of the parallel technology like Cassandra, MongoDB and Big Table but will focus deeper on Hadoop and its companion technologies like Hive and Pig. There will be some demos but this talk will serve as the introduction to the more in depth talks I will be doing on Hadoop.