On a typical day, the international courier Fedex handles some 100 million individual transactions. Worldwide, VISA records 150 million purchases. Every 24 hours, more than 300 million long distance calls stream over ATT’s telephone network. Every one of these shipments, purchases or calls generates a file of data, and this staggering amount of data increasingly drives our information-dominated age.It is routinely archived away as a valuable storehouse of insights and value. Yet the sheer volume of data, and the increasing rate at which this is produced, also pose a problem — how to avoid drowning in it, and how to find useful ways to get meaningful insight out of it.