Confessions of an Unlikely Big Data Skeptic

The Director of Training for a major Big Data vendor should be on board with the Big Data project, right? So it would seem. But consider everything that goes wrong when a database goes big: we give us transactionality, consistency guarantees go out the window, and relational algebra we grew up with is banished back to the textbooks from whence it came.

Worse than that, big data analytics present us with a theory of knowledge which we ought to find highly suspect: we create engines capable of discovering correlations we never could have found just a decade ago—and we declare ourselves masters at discerning cause and effect in a complex and multivariate world. We should know better.

Yet the world accelerates its embrace of the systems that have these very problems, and that same world is probably not crazy for doing so. In this session, we’ll explore the reasons why Big Data transactional and analytics systems are still the right way forward for the most exciting systems we have to build next.

Tim is a teacher, author, and technology leader with DataStax. He is a conference speaker internationally and in the United States, and contributes to the Denver, Colorado tech community as president of the Denver Open Source User Group. He is the co-presenter of various O’Reilly training videos on topics ranging from Git to Mac OS X Productivity Tips to Apache Cassandra, and is the author of Gradle Beyond the Basics. He blogs very occasionally at http://timberglund.com, and lives in Littleton, CO, USA with the wife of his youth and their three children.