The cockpit recorder, which should have captured only the last 30 minutes of the flight, was severely damaged by the crash but its manufacturer assisted in retrieving data.

BBC: New evidence in Payne crash

Enterprises unduly focus on the low-level technologies and the process of retrieving the data.

FORBES: Tableau Software's Pat Hanrahan on "What Is a Data Scientist?"

Repeatedly searching and retrieving large data sets from thousands of computers would be extremely inefficient.

ECONOMIST: REPORT: COMPUTER NETWORKS: Computing power on tap | The

Retrieving and storing data from a hard-disk drive takes one million times longer than accessing it from server memory, a difference that can severely degrade application performance.

FORBES: Bridging The Data Deluge Gap

PDAs remained effective tools for retrieving bits of data on the run as long as they had been synced and poor tools for taking notes for an extended period of time.

ENGADGET: Switched On: Longhorn hardware advances could give PDAs a one-two punch

The challenge is storing, retrieving and prioritizing unprecedented volumes of data.

FORBES: To Manage Big Data, You Need Smarter Storage

That's significant because analyzing or manipulating data in memory is much faster than retrieving it from a hard disk.

FORBES