Tag Archives: nosqlsummer

NoSQL meeting report

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So I went to a NoSQLSummer meeting yesterday night. Upon entering the deathly empty MINC complex, I thought “startups never sleep?”, but I found most of Neo’s staff in a cosy war-room called “Innovation Lab”. No coffee, but soda bottles. Copies of the paper were spread around the large table.

We met. We hung out. And, walked through the *Dynamo paper*, which was released in 2007, and is quite self-contained. That makes it “a NoSQL classic”. Good paper with which to open a reading circle. Now we have some pre-understanding for upcoming papers.

Photo by kalavinka

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Neo4J’s Peter Neubauer, riffed on on Google’s data hugeness, which led us further afield: Google / Big Data; Crowdsourcing — WordNet; Concept: Discard 99% of the data, using the top 1%.

Thoughts on format

We’re currently toying with new/different perspectives/formats:

  • “Developer Perspective”
  • “Infrastructure/Scaling Perspective”
  • “Arch. Perspective”
  • “Apps/Ops Perspective”

Polyglot cases: How do you work with several multi-database setups?

Event bus usage: Some people use NoSQL stuff for the event buses. What are pros and cons here?

Do you need anything else there? I really enjoy this peek behind the scenes, implementation problems, etc. It is not something I can bring directly to my workplace and use, but I like the challenge of understanding large concepts together. The current format suits me well.a

Some hints and tips I picked up:

Google’s research end-of-level boss Peter Norvig’s talk at Berkeley (YouTube you-feel-lucky) — summarizing all the fields of research. (His official title is Director of Search Quality.)

A question: Is Stepanov’s Elements of Programming any good? Is it for me? (C++, math, beautiful type-setting.)

Next paper?

Google’s Bigtable? Cassandra? I cheated, and begun reading the Cassandra one. Let’s see how that goes.

Malmö tech city

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A summer’s rainy morning in Malmö.

I’ve just hopped off the morning train from Copenhagen, clutching a crumpled paper that I just finished. I got wind of it through the NoSQL Summer reading club’s Malmö instance.

On the way into the office, I saw my FOSS friend T, waiting for a car. Handing him the printed copy of the paper, I enjoyed a few minutes of database banter before heading into the building.

This is how I want my tech community to be like. Present, alive, and friendly. Thanks!

You can follow nosqlsummer on Twitter. Below is their pitch.

A seasonal, worldwide reading club for databases, distributed systems & NOSQL-related scientific papers.

A NOSQL Summer is a network of local reading groups, that will decipher & discuss NOSQL-related articles, from late June to early September 2010. Each group sets its own meeting pace (usually once a week or once every two weeks) and select which papers are up for discussion.

At every cycle, members read the selected paper at home and then meet up for an hour or so to discuss, debate and answer their own questions.

We then encourage you to produce an annotated version of the paper, or short summary that we can then publish here for the rest of world to peruse.

Please note that, in most cities, you do not need to sign up to attend NOSQL Summer meetings. You just need to have read the paper planned for the week by your local chapter and show up at the designated meeting place!

Feel free to skip a meeting or jump in at any time. We’re trying to make this low-maintenance and flexible, for everybody to get a chance to learn more about a fuzzy concept that’s here to stay.