Yea I&#x27;ve wondered that myself.  I picked up a book a while back called &quot;Data Science for Business&quot; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shop.oreilly.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;0636920028918.do" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shop.oreilly.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;0636920028918.do</a><p>Something that stood out to me was their discussion about &quot;Big Data technologies&quot; (Hadoop, HBase...) and how they &quot;support&quot; data mining techniques.  So sometimes I wonder if big data technologies are more for the processing of the data, like the ETL needed for data warehouses - but since it&#x27;s big, we need those special technologies to process it (and do additional data-sciencey things on it - like calculate a probability of churn, probability of loan default, etc).  End results can still be those high-performance in-memory objects that we can slice and dice, just like our data warehouses, if that&#x27;s how we need to see them.<p>This is all coming from no practical experience with Hadoop &#x2F; Big Data, just research so hopefully someone clarifies :)