really sums things up: "While many vendors are talking the talk, when it comes to really performant enterprise solutions, they are not proactively offering us useful alternatives" Even though the database vendor community is not alone in attracting such unhappiness in its licensing models, the despair evident here makes this a challenge that software vendors should ideally address in the short term. However, it's evident that some are dragging their feet as they enjoy additional income from the mismatch between traditional commercial models and new deployment options. So with understanding and use of "big data" solutions at relatively low levels, this raises the question of how pressing is the demand to implement such systems to analyse big data sources such as those emerging from high volume data streams? High volume data feeds In the emerging realm of big data, much is made of the potential for organisations to extract nuggets of valuable information from very large, unstructured data sources. One example of this envisages organisations analysing high volume data feeds such as event logs, click streams or security logs etc. in something approaching real time. But is there much demand to analyse such data pools? The answer is a qualified 'yes' (Figure 4). As can be seen from Figure 4, around one in five respondents report they already make extensive use of high volume data feeds from either internal or external sources, with over a quarter using such data sources in at least some areas of the business. Only around