A lot of big things are going on in the big data world, and this week’s Strata Conference was one of the more significant developments lately. The industry’s best minds met in  Santa Clara to thoroughly discuss an evolving topic, and naturally SiliconANGLE and Wikibon provided constant coverage. All the interviews and highlights can be found on SiliconANGLE.tv.

Those who attended the gathering provided their own unique insight and take on big data, even exploring the areas farthest away from Cloudera and its competitors. One example that stood out was that presented by Virginia Carlson of the Metro Chicago Information Center, who laid out the current state of the public sector in this regard. She highlighted that initiatives to make decision-related data more accessible are actually bad for historical information, which is the type that’s being used the most by organizations working for the common good.

As always, there were also plenty of updates coming from outside Strata as well. Not one, but two partnerships were announced between companies seeking to make analytics more visual and simpler for the data scientist. Pentaho and DataStax revealed their collaboration shortly before Tableau and Attivio debuted a project of their own integration of their offerings. Making things easier and closer to the business user has turned into a trend among business intelligence vendors, quite a few of which implemented this concept throughout the past few months.

Another trend that is emerging, and has been mentioned in Wikibon’s 2012 predictions for the big data market, is privacy – privacy advocates starting to take aim specifically at analytics. Target has been one such case and Google is another, after having stirred some concern over its latest policy change. The update essentially consolidates the data the company already possessed, but regulators are taking a lab at it nonetheless.