NOSQL EU is a conference about non-relational database systems. It is sprung out of the observation that the era of the "one-size-fits-all database" seems to be over. Instead of squeezing all your data into tables, we believe the future is about choosing a data store that best matches your data set and operational requirements. It's a future of heterogeneous data backends, polyglot persistence and choosing Not Only SQL but sometimes also a document database, a key-value store or a graph database.

That future is already here. Many organizations today choose to stray off the well-trodden path of the relational database -- some because the sheer volume of their data breaks all RDBMS barriers, others because the complexity of their domain imposes impossible demands on static, pre-defined tables.

NOSQL EU will gather the best and brightest of the NOSQL community to discuss the opportunities and limitations of putting non-relational data stores in production. It will focus on how to use the various NOSQL alternatives and experiences from actually putting them in production.

With two full conference days and one day of hands-on workshops, NOSQL EU will be the largest NOSQL event to date. Please join us Apr 20-22 in London to discuss the practical implications of one of the hottest trends right now.

NOSQL EU was co-founded by Øredev, Neo Technology and RedMonk.

The program committee consists of Matt Patterson, Tim Anglade and Emil Eifrém.

The director of the conference is Michael Tiberg.

The website and nosql-CMS is maintained by Olof Adell.

Conference days

April 20 - 21

Register before March 21st to get our early bird price: €280

After march 21st: €350

Workshop day

April 22

Register before March 21st to get our early bird price: €280

After march 21st: €350

Full

April 20 - 22 (Conference Days and Workshop day)

Register before March 21st to get our early bird price: €440

After march 21st: €550

For Swedes: According to Swedish VAT rules, Swedish VAT will be added since this event is managed from Sweden.

Speakers

Alex Popescu (InfoQ)

Bryan Fink (Basho)

Emil Eifrém (Neo Technology)

Enda Farrell (BBC)

James Governor (RedMonk)

Jon Moore (Comcast)

Jonathan Ellis (Rackspace)

Kevin Weil (Twitter)

Makoto Inoue

Mathias Stearn (10gen)

Matthew Ford

Matthew Wall (The Guardian)

Neil Robbins

Simon Willison (The Guardian)

Tim Lossen (Wooga)

Werner Vogels (Amazon)

Skills Matter

116 Goswell Road

London

EC1V 7DP

United Kingdom

Europe

map

Werner Vogels

Dr. Vogels is Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company's technology vision, which is to continuously enhance the innovation on behalf of Amazon's customers at a global scale.

Prior to joining Amazon, he worked as a researcher at Cornell University where he was a principal investigator in several research projects that target the scalability and robustness of mission-critical enterprise computing systems. He has held positions of VP of Technology and CTO in companies that handled the transition of academic technology into industry.

Vogels holds a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has authored many articles for journals and conferences, most of them on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing. He was named the 2008 CTO of the Year by Information Week for his contributions to making Cloud Computing a reality. For his unique style in engaging customers, media and the general public, Dr Vogels received the 2009 Media Momentum Personality of Award.

Session: On the Birth of Dynamo

Mathias Stearn

Mathias Stearn is a Software Engineer for 10gen, where he works on the core MongoDB server and maintains the C language driver. Previously, he worked at FactSet where he used MongoDB in a log analysis application. He has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland.

Description

Session: Document-oriented databases and MongoDB

Workshop: MongoDB

This workshop is led by one of the developers of MongoDB. We'll present the fundamental principles of MongoDB, how to set up and interact with the database, and what to consider when building applications using a document-based data model. We'll contrast MongoDB with relational databases and with some NoSQL counterparts. This workshop will cover:

    * New features in MongoDB 1.4

    * How to install and configure MongoDB
    * Basic administration via MongoDB's JavaScript console
    * How the MongoDB drivers work, and how to use them to build applications
    * Data modeling with MongoDB documents
    * When to use MongoDB, when another database type might be a better choice
    * Scaling with MongoDB (master/slave configurations and auto-sharding)
    * Unique database features, including capped collections, large file storage, and atomic updates

Emil Eifrém

Founder of the Neo4j graph database project and CEO of Neo Technology. Programmer by passion the first 15 years on this planet and by passion & profession the remaining 15. First free software project at age 16. Now mainly focused on spreading the word about the powers of graphs and preaching the demise of tabular solutions everywhere. Presents regularly at conferences such as JAOO, Øredev, QCon, and OSCON.

Session: Graph databases and Neo4j

Most applications today handle data that is deeply associative, i.e. structured as graphs (networks). The most obvious example of this is social networking sites, but even tagging systems, content management systems and wikis deal with inherently hierarchical or graph-shaped data.

This turns out to be a problem because it's difficult to deal with recursive data structures in traditional relational databases. In essence, each traversal along a link in a graph is a join, and joins are known to be very expensive. Furthermore, with user-driven content, it is difficult to pre-conceive the exact schema of the data that will be handled. Unfortunately, the relational model requires upfront schemas and makes it difficult to fit this more dynamic and ad-hoc data.

A graph database uses nodes, relationships between nodes and key-value properties instead of tables to represent information. This model is typically substantially faster for associative data sets and uses a schema-less, bottoms-up model that is ideal for capturing ad-hoc and rapidly changing data.

This session will introduce the open source, high-performance, transactional and disk-based graph database Neo4j, which frequently outperforms relational backends with >1000x for many increasingly important use cases.

Workshop: Neo4j

Bryan Fink

Bryan Fink is Engineering Manager at Basho Technologies, where he is a member of the core team developing Riak.  Prior to Basho, Bryan worked on a distributed number-crunching and transaction processing system for the financial analysis industry, as well as bus-testing hardware for the aerospace industry. Bryan graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004 with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering.

Session: Key-value stores and Riak

The concept of a key-value store is the most basic of the storage systems.  So basic, in fact, that nearly all other data stores can be (and often are) used as if they were key-value stores.  So what makes key-value stores special in their own right?  Bryan Fink will discuss the benefits that key-value stores bring to the table, as well as the differences among the modern implementations, including the awesome features derived from their simplicity.

Workshop: Riak

Bryan Fink will demonstrate the basics of using Riak by walking
through the creation of a basic wiki-like application.  The workshop will cover:
 * installing Riak
 * setting up a development node
 * setting up a set of production nodes
 * storing, retrieving, updating data in Riak
 * dealing with update conflicts
 * simple link walks and map/reduce queries

Kevin Weil

Kevin Weil leads the analytics team at Twitter, building distributed infrastructure and leveraging data analysis at a massive scale to help grow the popular micro-blogging service. With millions of monthly site visitors and many more interacting through API-based third party applications, Twitter has one of the world's most varied and interesting datasets. Prior to joining Twitter, Kevin led the analytics team at the Kleiner Perkins-backed web media startup Cooliris. Kevin earned his bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Physics from Harvard University, and has a master's degree in Physics from Stanford University.

Session: Twitter's use of Cassandra, Pig and HBase

James Governor

James Governor is co-founder of RedMonk, the open source analysis company, which specialises in developer advocacy. He advises enterprises, startups and major companies like IBM, Microsoft on innovation, community and technology strategy. He is co-author of the O’Reilly publication Web 2.0 Design Patterns: what architects and entrepreneurs need to know.

RedMonk makes extensive of social media tools in its business operations - James, aka @monkchips, has more than 8k followers on twitter. He was also listed in the top 5 analysts worldwide by the Institute of Analyst Relations.

James led the creation of the Greenmonk sustainability advisory service, a RedMonk subsidiary. He is also chairman of SAP's external panel for stakeholder assurance in Sustainability Strategy and Reporting. James serves as an adviser to the Movement Design Bureau and associated projects such as the Akvo open source water quality project.

Panel debate

James Governor will moderate the panel debate that ends the second day.

Jon Moore

Dr. Moore is the Chief Engineer at Comcast Interactive Media (CIM), a division of Comcast Corporation dedicated to developing and operating online and cross-platform entertainment and media businesses, including: Comcast.net, Fancast.com, and Xfinity.com. He guides technical choices that allow CIM to bring innovative products to our customers ever more quickly.

Prior to joining CIM, he has been a consultant, system administrator, network engineer, programmer, and researcher. Moore received his Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania, where his research focused on the application of programming language design and implementation to networking settings.

Session: Why Big Enterprises are Interested in NoSQL

Comcast is one of the United States' leading providers of entertainment, information and communication products and services to residential and commercial customers. In this talk we'll cover some of the dynamics that are driving a large enterprise to look at technologies to supplement the good old RDBMS; for us, "NoSQL" is definitely "Not Only SQL." We'll also talk about some of the main criteria we use when evaluating projects and companies in the NoSQL space.

Enda Farrell

Enda Farrell is one of the software architects for the BBC's new technology platform. By using open source software with (almost) commodity hardware to build a new dynamic content platform, the BBC can cost-effectively and securely allow developers to build faster, better scaling and interactive applications.

Enda joined the BBC to lead the technical team for one of the main content management systems in 2006, having spent 9 years as an engineer and then architect at Sapient. In 2008 when the new platform was granted board approval, the content management team merged in with the platform team to get things going. His Mechanical Engineering degree from UCD is somewhat languishing in a box somewhere, largely unused.

Session: CouchDB at the BBC

Apache CouchDB is is now heavily used in production at the BBC. Learn that it is entirely possible to take "young" technologies and make them as robust as the BBC and get an insight into the approach we took in making this happen. See some hard stats about its usage, see why our circumstances led us to choosing CouchDB and hear some of the lessons we learnt along the way.

Tim Lossen

Short talk: Memory as the New Disk: Why Redis Rocks
Redis is not simply a 'better Memcached'. It has some unique properties -- like blazing read and write speed, rich atomic operations and asynchronous persistence -- which makes it ideally suited for a number of situations. This talk will highlight the main differences between Redis and other NoSQL offerings.

Makoto Inoue

Short talk: Tokyo Cabinet, Tokyo Tyrant and Kyoto Cabinet: the world of Mikio ware
Tokyo Cabinet is one of the first "Key Value" stores. It was released in 2007, but surprisingly small number of people knows what it is really capable of. Makoto Inoue, the maintainer of Tokyo Cabinet Wiki (http://tokyocabinetwiki.pbworks.com) will unveil the core philosophy and exciting features behind these products.

Neil Robbins

Short Talk: Thomas Kuhn predicted the fate of the relational database

Paradigms form because they're useful in answering certain questions; they get asked more questions; they get bloated trying to answer some of these new questions, which makes them less elegant/efficient; they fail to answer some of the new questions at all; some of the old questions become less relevant. People search for new paradigms; period of crisis & revolution (fertile period for experimentation and new ideas). The path of the RDBMS can be seen to mirror this basic cycle, so what does this tell us about the future.

Matthew Ford

Short Talk: Notes from the field: Different NoSQL tools in Production

Matt has followed the development of NoSQL databases with great interest and used them to solve many problems. In this talk, he will share his experiences of working with NoSQL whilst building web applications at Bit Zesty. He will evaluate the different databases he has encountered, as well as discuss the drawbacks in this emergent technological field.

Alex Popescu

Alex Popescu is co-founder and Senior Software Engineer at InfoQ.com. He also maintains the myNoSQL blog featuring the best daily NoSQL news, analysis and articles covering all major NoSQL projects and following closely all things related to the NoSQL ecosystem.

Session: An overview of NoSQL