NoSQL Smackdown 2012

Skill Level:
Abstract

Alternative databases continue to establish their role in the technology stack of the future—and for many, the technology stack of the present. Making mature engineering decisions about when to adopt new products is not easy, and requires that we learn about them both from an abstract perspective and from a very concrete one as well. If you are going to recommend a NoSQL database for a new project, you’re going to have to look at code.

In this talk, we’ll examine three important contenders in the NoSQL space: Cassandra, MongoDB, and Neo4J. We’ll review their data models, scaling paradigms, and query idioms. Most importantly, we’ll work through the exercise of modeling a real-world problem with each database, and look at the code and queries we’d use to implement real product features. Come to this session for a thorough and thoroughly practical smackdown between three important NoSQL products.

Per request, the presentation slides won’t be made available.

Tim Berglund

Tim is a full-stack generalist and passionate teacher who loves coding, presenting, and working with people. He believes the best developer is one who is well-informed of specifics and can also make deep connections between software development and the broader world. He has recently been exploring non-relational data stores, build systems, and how software architecture should resemble an ant colony.

His firm, the August Technology Group, helps clients with product development, technology consulting, and technology upgrade projects on the JVM. The August Group’s technology preferences reflect the generalist sensibilities of its founder, and its development practices are always lightweight, self-improving, and humanizing by design.

Tim is a speaker internationally and on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour in the United States, and is co-president of the Denver Open Source User Group, author of the open-source Groovy Liquibase DSL, co-author of the DZone Clojure RefCard, co-presenter of the best-selling O’Reilly Git Master Class, co-author of Building and Testing with Gradle, and a member of the O’Reilly Expert Network.

He lives in Littleton, CO with the wife of his youth and their three children.