It seems that as the amount of data being produced continues to expand at an unprecedented rate, it will become essential to master Hadoop which seems to be the gold standard for managing big data - would anyone disagree with this?
Or you can set up a system that will incrementally summarize the data, and then you could do smaller queries against those summaries. That is the goal of Storm AFAIK.
I think that is better model for a lot of applications. The model of having your production systems save terabytes of raw data and then analyzing it in a big batch job leaves a lot to be desired. It works but it's not very flexible and has this latency problem.
Hadoop is good in that it's the only open source solution I know of that can churn through hundreds of terabytes of data. But I wouldn't say it's a complete solution for "managing big data". It's part of one.