Well today was the last day of Strata 2012 in Santa Clara, CA.

It was my first Strata conference and I’ve have to say I wasn’t that impressed. As far as conference presentations go, there’s always some winners and some losers. It felt like there were too many losers at Strata. Even some of the keynotes were embarrassingly weak.

So what was good?

  1. Avinash Kaushik quote Donald Rumsfield (known knows, known unknowns, and unknowns). A very energetic, engaging, and entertaining presenter. His material was interesting too. His exploration on improving the typical sort to focus not on the typical min/max but the estimate max value was inciteful as well as his examples illustrating techniques to make the reporting more actionable with suggested correlations and variable sensitivities for identifying unknowns.
  2. Mark Madsen relate BigData to the introduction of Data Warehousing. Not so much in a condescending manner but more about applying lessons previously learned. One main take-away, make your BigData platform reusable. He alluded to high-value projects that eventually fall through the cracks. We need to stay hungry.
  3. Arun Murthy describe what’s new in Hadoop 0.23 and what it takes. I have to say the novelty of hearing Chairman/Release Manager was more cool than the 0.23 features. With releases like that you can see the hype curve drop a little steeper. When asked about workload management for multi-tenant systems his answer was Hadoop already does that and apparently the answer is simply bigger clusters with more powerful components.
  4. Mike Oleson from Cloudera had a short keynote that was going interesting places. Platform agnostic, focused on industry areas for BigData — drugs, gun, and oil. Would of been nice to hear him take the story further.

Other notable entries: Alasdair Allan (illustrated all the data our mobile devices leak regardless or for lack of policy and its implications to us)

p.s. I had dinner with some Microsoft folks and they discussed their new appliance — MPP SQL Server on HP hardware. I think it scales to four cabinets @ 600TB. For small Microsoft shops it could make sense and gives Microsoft something to sell there.