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• http://www.meetup.com/Big-Data-Berlin/events/215366592/

  

Thomas Bestfleisch (“Solution Engineer” at Exasol AG, Nürnberg) held a talk titled “A Tool for a Job“:

• https://www.xing.com/profile/Thomas_Bestfleisch
• the lawnmower pictures were “nice”, the analogy “impressive”
• the traditional DB systems are: Hadoop, MySQL, Postgres, Oracle
• the competitors “simply” extended these traditional DB systems
• some of them operate in main memory (“in core”), which is faster than operating on SSD, which is faster than operating on HD
• some of them use “columnar DBs” (i.e. time series …), which is more suitable than record oriented or special (distributed) file system based DB systems
• some of them added concurrency, Thomas stated – that sounds odd, as concurrency should be made use of simply “everywhere”, that’s so basic
• so far a proper though a little superficial introduction
• Thomas is rather clear to understand, though initially he was a little nervous, not keeping a constant close distance to the microphone, but moving back and forth instead
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data – for a deeper dive into the topic
• Thomas’s final statement: EXASOL (the product) is better then the competition, and it is way ahead of the competition, but Thomas did not explain, how they achieve that – no technical details at all

Ronert Obst (“Data Scientist” at Pivotal.io) held a talk titled “Smart Cars of Tomorrow: Learning Driving Patterns From Sensor Data“:

• https://www.xing.com/profile/Ronert_Obst
• a box connected to the car creates a stream of JSON data
• they are collecting the data, do some statistical analysis, they create predictions
• their database system is also way ahead the market – that’s what he says, they think themselves
• also: no explanation of their technical details
• his live presentation with “data plotting” screw up because of technical problems, but being an experienced guy, he was able to present a video as plan b – the video was “a little long” (actually <3 min. in total), but he could have restricted the video to the essential part – well, you know how impatient we I.T. guys are
• Ronert is also rather clear to understand
• the project’s outcomes seem to get used by the U.S. insurance industry; they are getting at behavioural data of the drivers; drivers with such boxes and behaving well get better insurance tariffs; this is the U.S. – just image the massive information privacy violation for a minute!

Both speakers are German native speakers, both do not mumble at all, excellent to understand after all, both may be great conference speakers a couple of years ahead, maybe with “a little” intense English training through living in an English speaking country for a couple of years. Having “lots of” non-native English speakers around in their offices isn’t really the same. I am looking forward to see both their follow-ups on their topics (getting more into the details), because I really quite like their styles and their kindness.

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I hope, you agree I am treating the speakers fairly.