This year’s Strata conference focused on Big Data, Hadoop and the world of SQL and NoSQL. We were looking to answer three questions: does the world need another Hadoop distribution? How is Big Data impacting the current market? And, What is going on in the colliding worlds of SQL and NoSQL? So we searched for guests, such as Hadapt, WANdisco and Hortonworks to give us the answers.

Wikibon’s David Floyer highlights the difference between last year’s conference and this year’s: the mood shifted from big data uncertainty to big data support.

Big Data

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The Strata conference had some interesting speakers, such as Julie Steele, who introduced some of the cool gadgets O’Reilly had for the conference. There were two main gadgets: the first one was a remote from its Data Sensing Lab. The remote measured temperature, humidity, sound and motion. Its main purpose was to remind attendees that data comes from a place very physical before it gets to a spreadsheet. The second device was called the Awesome Button, which is pretty self-explanatory. If you thought a presentation was awesome, you simply hit the button.

Kenneth Neil Cukier, Data Editor for the Economist, discusses what Big Data exactly means to our generation and also admits that we don’t really know how to measure market size in data.

Peter Wang, co-founder and president of Continuum Analytics, discussed how he sees that there was a disruption in storage and ETL end of Big Data space.

Hadoop

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Microsoft has partnered with Hortonworks, which took a year and a half to form and serves as a Hadoop data platform for Windows. The platform was the industry’s first and only Hadoop distribution for Windows as well as Linux. Bob Page was recently announced as the vice president of products of Hortonworks, putting him in charge of tailoring future versions of  Hortonworks Data Platform to market demand.

WANdisco announced its Non-Stop NameNode availability, which is claimed to have 100 percent of uptime solutions for Hadoop. Non-Stop NameNode’s job is to get rid of the single point of failure that risks data availability that tracks data locations within a Hadoop cluster and coordinates client access to it. Greenplum also wanted a taste of the Hadoop action and announced its distribution of Pivotal HD.

 SQL and NoSQL

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CEO and Founder of Drawn to Scale, Bradford Stephens, discusses the concept of real-time and how providers can differ. According to Stephens, Databases are the “root of all evil,” such as when something breaks when it cannot be implemented and when too much data is stored in a traditional database, everything will collapse. He explained SQL is like the “Rosetta Stone for data” and how there is a lot of value in integrating SQL queries into Hadoop.

Kevin Hanson, Solutions Architect at 10gen, discussed  the leading NoSQL database, at the Strata Conference this year. Also, MongoDB 2.4 is said to release something this spring that will strengthen its role in NoSQL.

The flash layer of in-memory is definitely no fad and will be here to stay. The biggest change in flash for Aerospike? Price and density. And speaking of companies bringing something fresh to the table, the young company Sqrrl’s main focus in NoSQL is the security and scalability.

As new developments in Big Data continue to surface, it will be interesting to see what themes arise for the next Strata event. Where will SQL and NoSQL be? What will change in the Big Data market?  Let us know your thoughts and expectations, along with the questions you’d like to ask the industry’s top experts.