the event ended. The comment that the “NoSQL movement is like the Ron Paul movement—they are unhappy, don’t like what they have, and have little to offer” was well received by an audience full of “database types”.
The panel discussion was lively; there were very few subjects where the panelists were unanimous in their opinion. Each brought a different perspective to the problem, a perspective reflecting their areas of expertise (and the target markets of their company’s products).
Even terms as commonplace as “Pure Cloud” and “Enterprise Cloud” are not uniformly defined, and this is a reflection of the immaturity and rapid change in the field. “Clouds are nebulous things,” one panelist quipped.
However, there was a unanimous view that Data Warehousing in the cloud was a distant vision, primarily because of bandwidth limitations, highly variable latencies and bandwidth between storage, memory and CPU, and the lack of robust security infrastructures in the cloud. Participants seemed to agree that cloud adoption in the next year would be characterized by slow migration of low risk and non-production activities, as more companies take their first steps in this direction.
The preliminary result of a survey of attendees indicates that participants are most concerned about issues relating to scalability, data quality and security in the cloud. A significant number of attendees are concerned about issues related to scientific computing with large data sets. Surprisingly, a very small number are interested in Data Warehousing as a Service. The next Big Data event will be in January, and we will be deciding the topic based on the input we received in this survey.
If you have comments about yesterday’s event or you would like to help with the next event, or be a sponsor for the event, please contact me. It is our goal to make these events accessible to everyone at no cost to the attendees and build a vibrant technical forum for DBMS and IM professionals in the Boston area.
