This assessment has two parts. For Part A, students are required to write an academic report as per the format outlined in chapter 5 of the textbook. The report must follow the CQU APA referencing style. See the American Psychological Association (APA) abridged guide updated Term 3 2019 available from: CQU APA referencing style. Please note that the prescribed textbook uses APA referencing guidelines. See also the Referencing Style subsection below. Part B is a viva component. Viva questions will be based on the submitted Report. The Part A Report is to be based on the following case study. A white paper by International Data Corporation (IDC) reports that the global data volume has grown exponentially from 4.4 zettabytes to 44 zettabytes between 2013 and 2020. It also predicts that the volume of data will reach 175 zettabytes by 2025. Zettabyte is a unit that is used to describe the amount of data, and 1 zettabyte equals 1021 bytes (that is, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes!). The world has officially entered zettabyte era and data is still being generated at a staggering speed. For example, in retail Walmart processes more than 1 million customer transactions every hour; in tech, Facebook users upload more than 350 million photos every day. With such an amount of data and the speed at which data is being generated, comes the desire to analyse and extract information from the datasets. Often the information that is extracted from a big dataset as a whole is much more useful than the collection of information extracted from small individual datasets. This desire gives rise to big data, which, as a field, studies the techniques that analyse and systematically extract information from datasets that are too large or complex to be processed by traditional data processing techniques.