O'Reilly Strata/Hadoop World NYC 2014

O’Reilly’s Strata/Hadoop World NYC 2014 Conference, just like its predecessors, was a good learning and networking opportunity. Even at its new location, the NYC Javits Center, the conference sold out with over 5,500 attendees. So it is now a big conference.

With all that money going into big data, lots of vendors and lots of interest that was probably inevitable. One downside of such a big conference was that even some of the non-sponsored talks had become very “pitchy”, with speakers touting their products. That should be confined to sponsored talks or the vendor expo. I don’t mind a slide or two on company affiliation but a product walk through or demo is not how I want to spend valuable conference learning time.

Still some excellent technical talks on Hadoop YARN and HBase!

I had looked very much forward to the Spark tutorial. The morning overview was excellent. Unfortunately, the afternoon hands-on session was very rushed as the Databricks presenters tried to cram a tutorial created for a full day into half a day. Still good material but would have benefited from extra time.

Fortunately, Databricks provided all the material on a USB stick so we can now cover that material more at our leisure. Spark was definitely a hot topic and even at Strata/Hadoop should have had some more sessions. Looking forward to trying this out in depth.