What I saw at Big Data Camp SF 2012

Last night, some 400 others and I attended the Big Data Camp, held the night before the #strataconf kicks off.

I saw:

• The Bay Areas version of Matt Milan run an unconference with 400 participants, and manage it very, very, well.

• A group of engineers argue that the definition of real time varied by the application, and that the issue of time-data reconciliation in a cluster nodes, the universal clock problem, could be avoided by building systems that avoid imposing a single definition of time altogether.

• Justin from BigML use one of his beautiful predictive models.

I heard:

• Meaningful jargon. Words meant what I knew them to mean.

• Repeated distinctions between transactional data and sensor data. (For some reason?)

• No real distinction between the term Big Data and Hadoop – probably just a sign of the crowd that showed up. (???)

There were a lot of great conversations. It was a real unconference in both spirit and execution. It scaled. 400 folks came out. Pretty amazing.

I thank the organizers and the sponsors for doing the event.

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I’m Christopher Berry.
I tweet about analytics @cjpberry
I write at christopherberry.ca