My predictions for "big data" in 2013 were recently published in the Fourth Quarter 2012 issue of Loyalty Management Magazine, and I wanted to share them here too:

1. Streaming data from gadgets, cars and other devices will become an even bigger and more important data source.
2. Social data will be used to make important business and policy decisions, not just for marketing and sharing information with friends
3. The industry will better distinguish between big data BI and big data analytics.  Neither is better than the other; but, companies will need to understand which is best suited for their business.
4. A Hadoop cluster will become considered a core element of a company’s "analytics platform"
5. NoSQL people will acknowledge the utility of a general purpose table-oriented query language, and SQL people will agree that relaxing some tenets of the relation model can bring huge advantages to other dimensions of data management problems.

The magazine wasn't sure what to bold in that last statement and neither am I, actually, so I'll leave it as it stands. If you have any bold predictions for the year, let me know here or on Twitter.

Learn more from SAS "big data" experts in this special 32-page report on high-performance analytics.