Today is my morning of big data storage events, I’m attending two from two different vendors in about four hours. One down so far, and it was pretty good, until…
I’ve bashed sales reps before (on twitter and on this blog), I’ve even offered lists of things not to do. Well today’s presentation was on par with some of the best I’ve seen. I was engaged, and we had a good discussion of the architecture of Hadoop, and the kind of data applications where it really sense. I was engaged, and wasn’t bashing the vendor on twitter like I sometimes do.
But Then,
The vendor had a slide with the Hadoop ecosystem up–there are a lot of components there. And they aren’t all needed. I though a really good comparison would be to SQL Server, we don’t always need replication or analysis services installed, but if we want to have a database we need the engine. Hadoop is a lot like that–you can get by with just a few components out of the total stack.
At that moment the presenter mentioned SQL Server, and I thought, great this will be a really great example. Then he asked “What is the core engine to SQL Server?” (The right answer I think is Sybase, then it was rewritten for 2005, iirc, someone correct me if I’m way off) He eventually responded with “Jet Database” using the example that you can install SQL Server without installing Jet. As far as I can tell and from my twitter queries, SQL has never run on jet, but Jet may run on SQL Server now.
Anyway, the trivia isn’t the point–if you are quoting a fact in your presentation, be certain of it, and if you aren’t either don’t use that fact, or clarify, saying “I think this to be the truth, but I’m open to facts”. After this, A) I didn’t trust the speaker’s credibility and B) I was distracted trying to confirm the fact the Jet was never a part of SQL Server.
I guess I can add one more thing for sales reps not to do–don’t make $&%# up, you may have a subject matter expert in the room, and you will look like an idiot.