Last week I was fortunate enough to attend Enterprise Data World in Washington DC. I was not just at EDW as an attendee, I was also presenting two sessions. Since it was my first EDW that meant I had no idea what to expect either as an attendee or as a presenter. On top of that I was only in town for two full days so I had to make the most of my time. I did my best to meet as many people as possible. I walked the exhibit hall floor talking with vendors for much of Wednesday afternoon.

I thought that EDW was well executed considering the hotel was undergoing some lobby renovations making it difficult at times to find a place to network effectively. Having helped run a few events you might have heard about I know how challenging it can be to pull everything together. I enjoyed many aspects of EDW but two items in particular stand out to me because I believe I see a relation between them.

First, during my session on Wednesday morning, I asked the audience how many were attending their first EDW. Almost every hand went up. It reminded me how at PASS events we often find 40-50% of the people in the room are new to the event. 

The second item happened in the exhibit hall where I came across a product that claims to be the “only Hadoop RDBMS”. Here’s a link to Hortonworks describing what Hadoop is: distributed computing. So, not quite a traditional relational database. The need for this product must exist. I cannot imagine a company would invest their time and money in making a product without having a market in which to sell.

Now, think about those two things put together. Not only did a company decide that there was a need to take something non-relational and somehow add a layer of abstraction to make it relational, but there are more and more people looking to gain knowledge about data, data modeling, and data architecture.

I think it’s about time we realize that 50% new attendees to data-focused events is not the result of marketing efforts, it’s a result of the changing nature of data professionals.

In other words, the future is bright for all data professionals. Our world keeps evolving; always something new to learn.

Looks like I need to learn about relational Hadoop.