In this edition of the Talking Data podcast, writer Jack Vaughan recaps with colleague Ed Burns this year's Enterprise Data World (EDW14), which provided a mother lode of carefully honed data governance and data quality expert information. But the event, which is sponsored by DAMA International, also showed an undercurrent -- one carrying the message that data quality goals must sometimes be more flexible than rigid.

Session panelists adjudged that data quality in the age of social media may need a rethinking. When social media data is involved, data scientists are looking primarily for sentiments and trends, and the data can be a bit "soft." This requires a different strategy than when working with the kind of hard facts -- a bank account balance, for example -- that were traditionally central to data management.

The event drove home the notion that big data is more than just NoSQL and Hadoop. In fact, Robert Abate, a veteran of data analytics efforts at Walmart and EDW14 panelist, and now global director for enterprise information management and analytics at Kimberly-Clark Corp., said he is inclined to hold off on Hadoop implementation until it has more of the qualities of the databases it is intended to replace. Nevertheless, at Walmart and Kimberly-Clark, the amount of data with which he and colleagues are working is vast.