I don't know, it still walks and quacks like a duck to me. Sure, everybody's got more data and guess what? There's valuable information in there! I think we used to call it Data Mining. We had to validate our models then too. I'm failing to see what has fundamentally changed. If the term 'Big Data' gets the people who sign the checks to be more likely to invest in harvesting their data assets then I think that's a good end result. From a career perspective as a DBA, you don't want to find yourself going from managing small databases to big ones and not be prepared. IMO, it's a whole different ball game.