Now that just about every data-management and business intelligence product claims that it handles “Big Data”, the term is approaching zero information content.

So, I’m shorting the term “Big Data”. In the next few months, the marketers will realize that their audience realize that the term means nothing and, in accordance with Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics, they’ll start coming up with new terms.

Have any of those terms been spotted in the wild yet?

Though I’m still not clear what exactly Big Data is, I am fond of the term “Big Data Architecture”. That term describes – fairly concisely, to the people who I want to understand me – the idea of a system where scalability is so important that it’s best not to assume that there is only one of anything; where scalability is so important that it’s worth revisiting all your assumptions; and where the raw performance of each component in the system is not paramount, because if the components can be composed in a scalable fashion, the system will meet its performance goals.

This architecture is going to be the standard for the kind of systems I build, so I think I’ll be using the term “Big Data Architecture” for many years to come. If you can come up with got a good alternative to that one, I might just buy you a pint.