FOSDEM 2010 NoSQL Talk

Let me take a minute to wrap up my FOSDEM 2010 experience. I was part of the NoSQL DevRoom organized by @stevenn from Outerthought, who I had the pleasure to visit before a few months back as an HBase Ambassador.

First things first, the NoSQL DevRoom was just an absolute success and I had a blast attending it. I also made sure to not walk around and see other talks outside the NoSQL track while there were many and plenty good ones. I did so deliberately to see the other projects and what they have to offer. I thought it was great, a good vibe was felt throughout the whole day as the audience got a whirlwind tour through the NoSQL landscape. The room was full to the brim for most presentations and some folks had to miss out as we could not have had more enter. This did prove the great interest in this fairly new kind of technology. Exciting!

The focus of my talk was about the history I have with HBase starting with it in late 2007. At this point I would like to take to the opportunity to thank Michael Stack, the lead of HBase, as he has helped me many times back then to sort out the problems I ran into. I would also like to say that if you start with HBase today you will not have these problems as HBase has matured tremendously since then. It is an overall stable product and can solve scalability issues you may face with regular RDBMS's today - and that with great ease.

So the talk I gave did not really sell all the features nor did it explain everything fully. I felt this could be left to the reader to look up on the project's website (or here on my blog) and hence I focused on my use case only. First up, here are the slides.


My Life with HBase - FOSDEM 2010 NoSQL -

After my talk and throughout the rest of the day I also had great conversations with the attendees who had many and great questions.

Having listened to the other talks though I felt I probably could have done a better job selling HBase to the audience. I could have reported about use-cases in well known companies, gave better performance numbers and so on. I have learned a lesson and am making sure I will be doing a better job next time around. I guess this is also another facet of what this is about, i.e. learning to achieve a higher level of professionalism.

But as I said above, my intend was to report about my life with HBase. I am grateful though that it was accepted as that and please let me cite Todd Hoff (see Hot Scalability Links for February 12, 2010) who put it in such nice words:

"The hardscabble tale of HBase's growth from infancy to maturity. A very good introduction and overview of HBase."

Thank you!

Finally here is the video of the talk:



I am looking forward to more NoSQL events in Europe in the near future and will attempt to represent HBase once more (including those adjustments I mentioned above). My hope is that we as Europeans are able to adopt these new technologies and stay abreast with the rest of the world. We sure have smart people to do so.