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This makes a completely valid point when you constrain the meaning of Big Data to “the largest dataset one can fit on a single computer”.

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At companies I've worked at "Big Data" was often used to mean "too big to open in Excel" or in the extreme case "too big to fit in RAM on my laptop"

Annoyingly medium data is my term for this.

Around 0.5 to 50 GB is such an annoying area, because Excel starts falling over on the lower end and even nicer computers will start seriously struggling on the larger end if you're not being extremely efficient.

Databases do fantastic with this amount of data, and even quite a bit more. If we would stop using Excel where it makes no sense then the world would be a happy place.

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