Strata Conference 2012 is all about big data, a term that has gotten considerably bigger since last year, thanks to a market-wide shift and companies like Cloudera, HortonWorks and MapR.  Yesterday we covered Day 1, where alongside the usual influx of launches – including a big announcement from Talend and Yahoo’s spun-off analytics crew – pundits covered the topics extensively. One particular point of interest was the web, and how and why companies should make use of that huge pool of data.

For day 2, it was all about usage and efficiency. Pervasive Software CTO Mike Hoskins laid out the main pitch behind his company’s flagship offering, the DataRush platform. The exec sees the solution as Pervasive’s big opportunity to elbow its way into a seat between the largest players in the Hadoop ecosystem, thanks mainly to its focus on optimizing usage. And just like Talend and many other open-source vendors, the firm is also hoping to leverage a healthy developer community facilitated by a free version to achieve this goal.

Next up is Cloudera. CEO Mike Olson discussed the “return per byte of data” of Hadoop , and how the analytics engine can be used to bridge the gap between traditional data warehousing environments to the new age.

Some of the other keynotes were also quite interesting. Greenplum co-founder Luke Lonergan talked about a case studies and how actual companies are making use of big data analytics to achieve business edge – the same topic Olson discussed. In addition, we also heard an extension of the debate over the web and how all that data can be used up. Usman Haque of Pachube.com observed how ‘open data’ ties in with the explosion of end point devices, which contribute to the generation of larger quantities of it.