The first time I heard of an “unconference” I was very sceptical. No program? No speakers? What kind of conference is that?

Well, it’s the kind of conference in which you skip sitting in the audience falling asleep because the speakers drone on or the panelists are just trying to get you to buy their products. It’s the kind of conference where people speak about what you want them to speak about because you make them to! In other words, a conference that is actually worth attending in person to instead of just watching and fast-forwarding presentations on YouTube.

In a couple of weeks, what looks like the first true unconference on NoSQL and Big Data is going to take place:

I’m planning to be there. I hope to discuss with other attendees things such as:

• key-value stores, document databases, graph databases, column stores etc. are all NoSQL databases. When and why would I choose one vs. another?
• is there a future for NoSQL in the enterprise? Which vendors? What business models?
• what are the requirements for data architectures in the cloud?
• what can we do to drive business adoption of Big Data technologies?
• how does Big Data relate to user-centric data and user-centric web applications?

I’ll bring a few slides on graph databases (such as InfoGrid), too, in case anybody would like me to talk about that. Most of the time I hope to spend discussing and learning and jointly exploring, however, as it usually happens at unconferences.

It will be moderated by good friend Kaliya Hamlin, who has a knack for making unconferences work. (I know, I have gone to all 10 of her very successful Internet Identity Workshops so far.) I’m looking forward to it. She tells me that a leaders and committers of a number of successful NoSQL open-source projects are already registered, so if you ever wanted to corner them for longer than just a few minutes in Q&A, this might be your chance!

See you there!

From my other blog:

NoSQL databases are a perfect disruptive technology in Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma model
…
I’m predicting that the relational database is going to die.

Read more.

Mind you, the NoSQL community still has a lot of work to do, years and years of work, InfoGrid and many other NoSQL technologies non-withstanding.

But I remember that when I first heard about what SQL is and what it does (particularly, what it can’t do), I thought: “this can’t be true. How many billions in revenue and market cap depend on that oddity?”. That was about when SQL was only about half as old as it is now… which makes this even scarier. (Try: no recursive queries. No abstract data types. No inheritance. No (meaningful) distributedness. No … <insert many other things here>. And how many thousands of lines would you like to write on object-relational mapping today? … )

So with that hat on, I’m proud to display this image as a bumper sticker, which comes from a presentation by Tim Anglade. May SQL never come near you If it does, run!

Disclaimer: I don’t build payroll systems for a living. If I did, I might think otherwise. But I think they have all been built, and the new stuff does require thinking much more along these lines.

See my post here.