Big data as you said is the collection of large data sets that are collected mostly from the social networks world wide. This data is of huge importance as it shows how the people react to a situation or changes though social networks, these changes are being captured from big data and analysed.

For Example : If a branded clothing company is providing some schemes for their customers offering discounts on their products, the same is being discussed world wide in social networks and stuffs like in facebook and twitter. using the hash tags we can identity and analyse how the people are responding to this offer and what could be done for better customer satisfaction and stuffs like that..

we use big data not only for this kind of scenario but there are lot many examples like this.

And big data is not going to replace business warehouse as both are entirely different. Business Warehouse is for extracting data from a source, transforming / cleansing the data and loading / reporting to other database or creating reports (from the data collected) to the concerned group of persons.

Data warehousing or business intelligence will not be replaced but they will help in analyzing the data that we obtain from Big Data.

Hi,

I think you should know about purpose of data mining frist. If you start a data mining project without purpose, you have a big mistake. And Business Intelligence(BI) is one of many purposes of analyzing big data.

To answer your question about the challenges and opportunities of big data: it depends on many conditions: your purpose, your type of data, data size, response time, your resources ... I suggest you a book: Data Mining Concepts and Technique. You can get many useful information to answer your question as well.

I would suggest that confusion arises because business intelligence can be defined by gathering multiple sub fields and so does the buzzword big data. For example some definitions of business intelligence include data mining and analytics as core subfields (though I have heard business professionals make distinctions that analytics is a separate definition and not a subfield). Similarly Big data has also gathered additional meaning than just lots of data to include analysis and processing of big amounts of data (though I would agree with Anwar's comment that big data is just lots of data). Depending on who you talk, whether business professionals, business academics or research scientists you may hear different definitions of what big data is.

Big data help you company to take decision to increse revenue but using data warehousing can help to really know what is going on in your corporation and correct it for decision support.