In a couple of weeks, I will be presenting the PASS Business Analytics Conference in San Jose, CA (and this weekend at SQL Saturday Chicago.) This topic feels like it has been a couple of years in the making—I got into “big data” when I was at Comcast, where we had a large number of effectively append-only applications which were running on very expensive relational database engines on top of a lot of equally as expensive enterprise SAN space. Even as recently as two years ago, the solutions weren’t fully enterprise ready, unless you had a really specialized team of engineers. However, now Hadoop is much easier to build and manage, there are SQL and other tools that make connecting to the data very easy. I had been wanting to build this session since I started with it to illustrate from infrastructure, application and business perspective of why the toolsets are changing, and how you can use these new toolsets to gain richer analysis of your data.
This session isn’t just going to be about Hadoop—you will learn about how SQL Server (and other platforms) can be used as very powerful analytics platform across large volumes of data. You will learn the infrastructure that drives big data and analytical solutions, and how to decide on whether to deploy on-premises or to the cloud. You will learn about the skills needed to work on Hadoop and some of other toolsets, and I might even crack a few jokes about Oracle.
Joseph – I saw your presentation at SQL Sat Chicago this past weekend. It was very enlightening! I was wondering if I could get a link or copy of the PPT deck you presented?