Day 2 of the O’Reilly Strata Conference is starting here in Santa Clara, California and the focus is very much on data. In 2005, Tim O’Reilly predicted: “Data is the Next Intel Inside.” At VMware, big, fast data has never been so critical for our customers and innovations are transforming the cloud applications landscape at an unprecedented rate. This conference comes at the perfect time to reset what everyone knows about big, fast data.

The conference kicked off yesterday with several brief 20 minute keynotes. They were all  succinct and to the point. Greenplum‘s Scott Yara reflected on how the big data market has grown tremendously over the past few years and mentioned several key data scientist practitioners.  Scott also mentioned the increased investment in open source Hadoop. Of course, Strata comes on the heels of the Greenplum Pivotal HD  announcement on Monday which launched their distribution of Hadoop which can improve performance 50X to 500X when compared to existing SQL-like services on top of Hadoop.

Another great keynote presentation was from Yael Garten, a Senior Data Scientist from LinkedIn. Yael leads the mobile data analytics team. She began by polling the audience and noting that many in the audience had already been on 3 different devices that morning and it wasn’t even 9:30 am yet. She noted we’re constantly connected, and we need to use data to personalize the experience for users no matter what device we’re on.  She had an interesting graph highlighting device use and laptop use during our morning time of ”coffee to couch”.  And those uses are different in the US compared to places like India.

The show floor is dominated by Hadoop distribution vendors and the what’s striking this year compared to last year is how important SQL has become. There’s a lot of talk about using SQL to directly access data stored on Hadoop. It seems that map/reduce is somewhat out of favor now.  This is somewhat like our take at VMware on adding a SQL interface into what was previously only available to Java developers, just how SQLFire added a SQL interface to GemFire.  SQLFire seems like a good complement to what’s trending in Big Data with SQL.

If you are around today, please drop by booth #809 and see what VMware has to offer for big, fast data solutions—you’ll be sure to learn something and may even get to win our Apple iPad raffle too!

Feel free to connect or see some of these links to learn more:

• Hashtags to check out: @strataconf, @vFabric, and @greenplum.
• Learn more about GemFire or SQLFire.
• Check out the new vFabric Reference Architecture—tutorials, videos, and how to get started by downloading and setting up the entire architecture for cloud apps and big data.

About the Author: Blake Connell is a software product marketing professional with twenty years of industry experience at Fortune 500 technology companies and small/medium businesses. Direct experience targeting diverse market segments including consumers, developers and enterprise IT groups. Blake has worked for VMware for 2 years and is responsible for vFabric GemFire; in-memory data management for enterprise and cloud applications.