David DeWitt’s Keynote Topic

Back by popular demand, Microsoft Technical Fellow, Dr. David DeWitt, will once again take center stage at PASS Summit. In an effort to ensure he covers topics that are of interest to the community, Dr. Dewitt asked for the community to vote between the two topics covered off below.

Voting for Dr. David Dewitt’s Keynote topic is now closed. The community has spoken and the winning topic is:

Big Data – What is the Big Deal?

Are you ready for the exploding world of big data?  Do you know the difference between Hive and Pig?  Do you know why MapReduce is being taught in many universities rather than SQL?  If not, pay attention because this talk will help get you started in understanding this new world. While sometimes the Hadoop toolkit (which includes HDFS, MapReduce, Hive, Pig, and Sqoop) is used as an alternative to relational database systems such as SQL Server, more frequently customers are using it as a complementary tool. Sometimes it may be used as an ETL tool or to perform an initial analysis of a freshly acquired data set to determine whether or not it is worth loading into the data warehouse, and sometimes to process massive data sets that are too big to even contemplate loading into all but the very largest data warehouses. In addition to covering the basics of the various parts of the Hadoop stack, this talk will discuss the strengths and weakness of the Hadoop approach compared to that provided by relational database systems and explores how the two technologies can be used productively in conjunction with one another.
 

Join us live in Seattle in just a couple of months to enjoy the keynote in person. In the meantime, click here to rewatch Dr. DeWitt's wildly popular PASS Summit 2010 keynote on Query Optimization.