Big Data, Data Warehousing and the Strata Conference

Having keynoted, spoken at and attended the inaugural O’Reilly Media Strata Conference in Santa Clara over the past few days, I wanted to share a few observations.

With over 1,200 attendees, the buzz was palpable.  This was one of the most energized data conferences I’ve attended in at least a decade.  Whether it was the tag line “Making Data Work”, the fact it was an O’Reilly event or something else, it was clear that the conference captured the interest of the data community. 

Having keynoted, spoken at and attended the inaugural O’Reilly Media Strata Conference in Santa Clara over the past few days, I wanted to share a few observations.

With over 1,200 attendees, the buzz was palpable.  This was one of the most energized data conferences I’ve attended in at least a decade.  Whether it was the tag line “Making Data Work”, the fact it was an O’Reilly event or something else, it was clear that the conference captured the interest of the data community. 

The topics on the agenda were strongly oriented towards data science, “big data” and the softer (aka less structured) types of information.  This led me to expect that I’d be an almost lone voice for traditional data warehousing topics and thoughts.  I was wrong.  While there certainly were lots of experts in data analysis and Hadoop, there was no shortage of both speakers and attendees who did understand many of the principles of cleansing, consistency and control at the heart of data warehousing.

Given the agenda, I was also expecting to be somewhat of the “elder lemon” of the conference.  Unfortunately (in my personal view), in this I was correct.  It looked to me that the median age was well south of thirty, although I’ve done no data analysis to validate that impression.  Another observation, which was a bit more concerning, was that the gender balance of the audience was about the same as I’ve seen at data warehouse conferences since the mid-90s: about the same mid-90s percentage of males.  It seems that data remains largely a masculine topic.

The sponsor / vendor exhibitor list was also very interesting.  There were only a few of those that turn up at traditional data warehouse conferences.  Of course, the new “big data” vendors were there in force, as well as a few information providers.  Of the relational database vendors, only ParAccel and AsterData were represented.  Jaspersoft and Pentaho represented the Open Source BI vendors. While Pervasive and Tableau rounded out the vendors I recognized from the BI space.

As a final point, I note that the next Strata Conference has already been announced: 19-21 September in New York.  Wish I could be there!