PASS Summit 2012 Day 3 Keynote

Today's keynote starts with a little song

Today's keynote started with a lovely little song by Buck Woddy and Rob Farley.  It was a song of woe and a slow query.  I would sing it for you but I wouldn't do it justice. 

Then a tribute to Wayne Snyder who ended his speech with:
"As you slide down the staircase of success, may the splinters of success stick into your career."

Now Dr. DeWitt is on stage by popular demand because he gives the best sessions.  The community actually insisted on having him speak this year and now he's going to speak about big data.  Big data is one of the next big pushes for Microsoft, and it's interesting because most people don't even think of these terms.  So basically, big data is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10s of PBs (petabytes).  It may be hard to wrap your mind around, but that's a pretty big number. 

No discussion on big data would have any meat at all if it didn't talk about nosql.  And nosql doesn't mean no sql at all, it just means not only sql.  And the nosql model needs lots of speed so it trades consistency models as eventual consistency. 

So Dr. DeWitt categorizes nosql into 2 types of systems:

Key/Value Stores
Examples: MongoDB, CouchDB, Cassandra, Windows Azure
This of these systems as nosql OLTP.

Hadoop
Scalable fault tolerant framework for storing and processing massive data sets.
typically no data model.
Records distributed file system.
Think of these systems as nosql warehouses.

Ok, so as usual, Dr. DeWitt's talk is already making my head spin so that's all I'll talk about for now.  It's time for me to pay more attention.

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• SQL Server