You can either hire a Stanford PhD. . .or, get some knowledge from companies like Cloudera.

Today's interview is with Mike Olson, the CEO of the relatively new (2009) Palo Alto-based company called Cloudera.

Essentially, the company is comprised of experts from Yahoo!, Google, and Facebook who have developed expertise in the rare skills of manipulating large files.

We are talking file up to 50 petabytes!

During the interview, Olson explains that he doesn't think the term "big" is a fair description of the kind of data that Cloudera excels in.

It is unstructured and extremely variable.

Listen to hear Olson talk about concepts like Hbase, Hive, Sqoop, Flume, and Oozie.

The federal government is no stranger to Cloudera's offerings - there are applications in cyber security, geospatial, emergency response and bioinformatics.