Category: News

It is time to meet up in real life! IBBT in Ghent, is so kind to host our very first meeting and you are invited. We have created a meetup-page and would like to ask you to subscribe, if you are interested in joining us for an informal  #bbuzz debrief and community introduction.  The event is free of charge and should be seen as a first contact event of our new little community.

If you are interested in big data and joining a brand new community, put your name on the attendee list!

Hope to see you there!

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!!!

We have been discussing it for a while now and we believe the time is right to start a big data community in our little part of the world. We stand for a group of people that have to deal with building or using solutions for the ever growing data needs of our employers or customers, which is commonly referred to as bigdata. We want to build a community in Belgium that shares knowledge and best practices in this area and we want you to become part of the fun.

We are independent of any vendor solution and we also do not try to sell you anything here; we are technical people from different backgrounds like CMS, digital maps etc. eager sharing our experiences and learning new things. We want to kick-off the community in .be  soon, so if you are interested in joining us, let us know. You can leave a comment here, contact us on twitter or join our google group! We are eager to get in touch!

Looking forward to all of you!

— André (@fs111)

P.S.: Some of us will be in Berlin for the Berlin Buzzwords conference next week, if you are also there, get in touch with us, if you cannot come to Berlin, but want to join us, please get in touch with us as well!

Welcome to our Belgian community about bigdata, NoSQL and anything cloud.

We will soon be organizing the kickoff of this community with our founding members. So keep coming back to see where our initiative is going, join us and hopefully participate actively to evangelize and promote the use of these new technologies throughout Belgium.