After 2 intensively immersive days on big data at the Berlin Buzzwords (#bbuzz) conference in Berlin, the bigdata.be crew is back in Belgium again. Those two days were a rollercoaster ride of meeting smart people and listening to great talks on everything big data, NoSQL datastores and scalable search.
There were quite some bigdata.be people present at the event: Andre Kelpe, Wim Van Leuven and Steven Noels (who presented on Lily) with 2 of his colleagues at Outherthought. Of course we weren’t noticeable amongst the crowd of about 450 data geeks: we might have missed some other Belgians out there. So, if you were there or know somebody who was, please step forward and get in touch! We want you!
The conference itself was a great lineup of two keynotes and numerous sessions on three tracks (store, scale and search) by the most knowledgeable people in our specific domain. Check out the agenda for Monday and Tuesday! Slides are posted here as they become available.
There were a few presentations that kept simmering through the hallways. Jonathan Gray‘s exposé on Realtime Big Data at Facebook with Hadoop and HBase was much bespoken because a bit controversial. Remember that Apache Cassandra was developed at and open-sourced by Facebook in 2008.
Also, during the second day keynote, Ted Dunning challenged the Hadoop, and more generally, the Apache community. He postulated that the days as a community are over. Too many stakeholders participate with too many conflicting interests. For the first time in its existence, the Apache Software Foundation is confronted with such a large scale community. A community that is becoming an ecosystem. And the ASF is not the right body to manage it. A provocative but also challenging thought. But what is the right structure to manage that eco-system? A Linux-like guerilla approach? Or an overly structured standards body? These are some thoughts that I have been discussing with Lars George, but of course without finding an answer. There’s only a sense of future promises. A future that looks difficult but interesting …
Remember if you were there, or not, but you are interested in big data, we want you! Get in touch and join!!!
