By Gregory Piatetsky, @kdnuggets, Jul 17, 2014.

Latest KDnuggets Poll asked: What was the largest dataset you analyzed / data mined?

The results, based on 392 votes, show a pattern that has remained surprisingly stable over the last 3 years

• over 50% of answers are in the Gigabyte range (median answer between 11 and 100 GB for each each year 2012-14)
• a small number (2-3%) of Big Data miners are working with internet-scale data sets (over 100 PB), at companies like Google and Facebook.
• a small but significant gap, with almost no answers in 1-100 PB range, which separates analysts who work with Terabyte-size commercial data warehouses and 100 PB+ Internet-scale data stores.

 


We can see the trends more clearly by grouping the answers into ranges for Megabytes (< 1GB), Gigabytes (1-999 GB), Terabytes (1-999 TB), and Petabytes (>1 PB). We will call data scientists with largest dataset analyzed in each range Megabyte analysts, Gigabyte analysts, etc.

The global percent of Gigabyte analysts slightly increased from 53% in 2012 to 54% in 2014. The percent of Megabyte analysts has steadily declined, as expected, while percent of Terabyte analysts has grown slightly, from 16% to 18%.



Here is a similar chart just for the US, which shows decline of in percent of Gigabyte analysts and the corresponding growth in Terabyte and Petabyte analysts.



Regional participation was

• 38%, US/Canada
• 31%, Europe
• 18%, Asia
• 6.9%, Latin America
• 3.3%, Africa/MidEast
• 2.6%, AU/NZ

 
The chart below shows the distribution of Largest Dataset Ranges by Region, sorted by % of TB+ answers. We see that US/Canada and AU/NZ lead, with about 30% of their data miners having worked on TB-size databases. Next is Europe (19%), Latin America (15%), Asia (10%), and Africa/MidEast (7.7%).



Here are the results of past polls:

• 2013 KDnuggets Poll Results: largest dataset analyzed / data mined.
• 2012 KDnuggets Poll: largest dataset you analyzed / data mined?.