Confessions of a big data skeptic

by Tim Berglund 

Thursday, 09 June 2016 16:30 @ Room 1

The Director of Training for a major Big Data vendor should be on board with the Big Data program, right? So it would seem. But consider everything that goes wrong when a database goes big: we give us transactionality, consistency guarantees go out the window, and relational algebra we grew up with is banished back to the textbooks from whence it came.

Worse than that, big data analytics present us with a theory of knowledge which we ought to find highly suspect: we create engines capable of discovering correlations we never could have found just a decade ago—and we declare ourselves masters at discerning cause and effect in a complex and multivariate world. We should know better.

Yet the world accelerates its embrace of the systems that have these very problems, and that same world is probably not crazy for doing so. In this session, we’ll explore the reasons why Big Data transactional and analytics systems are still the right way forward for the most exciting systems we have to build next.