Fun with BIG Data with various databases

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Start was fine and fun but after some time it lost my intrest somehow. Also the presentation didn't feel prepared too me..

It seems that there was not enough time to such topic, and content prepared for presentation.

The title was probably the best thing about the presentation. The first 5 minutes were really nice, where you combine the large database overview and the need and lack of opportunity for switching to other databases.

After that the talk became very unstructured and the speaker quickly ran out of time. It seems like the talk wasn't timed properly. Too bad because the remaining material in the presentation look really interesting. By saving the 'new solutions' until the end the speaker managed to leave those pretty much out of the talk.

"Various databases" was really just MySQL.

Anonymous at 18:35 on 7 Jun 2013

Great topic, start was fun, but the presentation was full of spelling errors, examples showed the result, but still no clue how to do the things he did. Also some more structure would be nice.

A bit more of a focused presentation would be great. 45 minutes was a long time to sit through and felt like I learned nothing.

Interesting topic, but the speaker talked very fast and by that made it a bit difficult to follow at times.

You can not squish 3 hours of material in 45 minutes.

Your opening slide looked absolutely horrendous (but I suppose that was the point?). It's fine to say you don't like Powerpoint but then you have to come up with something better. What you used instead looked like it was designed by a 15 year old who learned some 'cool CSS tricks' back in 2005 when rounded corners were hip. I understand you may need some functionality that Powerpoint doesn't have, but this was just not very good at all.

Live demos are hard to do well. We don't really care that your query ran in exactly 0.14s, we'll take your word for it, just show us how you did it. Show us the difference between `big1` and `big2`.

You seem to have a lot of expert knowledge on database systems, show us more of that and less messing about copy pasting queries in a command line.

Anonymous at 11:01 on 8 Jun 2013

The talk didn't work for me. Between the lines you could see the speaker really knows his stuff, but he wasn't able to communicate any useful techniques or starting points.
Having the actual sql-commands running during the presentation also slowed it down a lot, and didn't add a lot for me.
Would have liked to know more about _how_ to optimize tables for your specific searches, and how to do this in more complex cases.

Start was good, but missed the solutions and conclusions part...too much information and details without a message

I was ok with the fact that the slides were not done with powerpoint or a similar program. What I'm not content about is that the presentation came to an end as soon as he reached the most interesting part. Perhaps he tried to cover a 3 hour talk in 45 minutes.

Unfortunately, I didn't get much out of the presentation. It seemed to be more of a "Look what I can do!" instead of "Look how you can do this."

I've nothing to add to comments already here. The speaker has a lot of knowledge about the topic I guess, but it was hard to follow.

I wondered why nobody mentioned all the typos in the presentation. Very sloppy. The talk was messy.

Was really looking forward to this talk. Shame it was rushed and didn't really learn anything new. It's clear David is an expert on the subject but he didn't manage to show the audience.

I thought there would be a prize or something if somebody would guuess how many typos there were.
If you're dyslectic: let you're audience know AND let somebody see your presentation before giving it. If not: please read your own presentation.

Great start with the whole powerpoint joke, but that's all the positive there is.

If you're gonna take a lot of time (too much?) to let people see the differences of performances between queries on different tables, you really HAVE TO take a little time to let them see some "show create tables" to show them what causes it. But only a phrase like "you should learn and use indexes" would have made your point. You could also mention the mysql limit (and common pitfall) of 1 index per query per table and mention explain, but you didn't.

It's ok to point out all the possibilities briefly (very useful even) but you've made the wrong choices of where to go in depth and where you did you did it in a wrong way. Because of this you couldn't even take the time to only point out all the topics.

Anonymous at 11:54 on 9 Jun 2013

The speaker has a lot of knowledge. Unfortunately there was too little time for him to explain everything. Perphaps, instead of wanting to show everything, it would have been more useful if he showed us óne single topic in-depth. Also, he could speak a little slower.

Interesting topic, I had high expectations about this talk. The speaker obviously has a lot of knowledge about the topic, but the presentation itself should have been prepared better.

In the end, I can't stop wondering why on earth you would ever want to use PHP and MySQL for this stuff; splitting a 20GB file with PHP just does not sound right. Sure, the speaker proved it was technically possible, and to store such a vast amount of data in MySQL, but that doesn't mean it makes sense to do so. There are far better tools out there for handling & analyzing Big Data.

The presentation was way too fast, both in information AND words per minute. It was very hard to follow at times.

It seemed the speaker was very knowledgeable, but couldn't get his point across.

It was difficult to follow because of the amount of information that was told in a to short amount of time.

The speaker himself has a lot of knowledge about the subject but he could not keep my attention.

Maybe it is just not possible to cover BIG data AND various databases in 45 minutes (Wonder if he ever made the whole talk in 45 minutes). I like the topic and I like David for his expert knowledge, but he was not able to communicate it within this time-frame.

What grits van kampen said.

The presentation had a few major flaws:
- HUGE amount of typos, to the point it became really annoying
- nowhere near fitting in the 45 minutes that were availible.

Altough the speaker seemed to have a lot of knowlegde on the topic, the talk never really grasped me. He showed some seemingly impressive results, but no clear explaination on how execactly these results where achieved. In the end, he had to race to the finish, no doubt having to skip some interesting things.

The speaker should have fit his talk better to the time that he had for it.

There is a lot of knowledge for sure, but conveying the knowledge to a public is problematic.
The talk appeared unpracticed or not well prepared. There was probably too much information crammed in the 45 minutes.
When using an "alternative tool for slides", make sure how to use it and where to put your mouse to show on your screen what you want to show.
Lots of parts were missing the explanation, so I'm still guessing on what caused the slow queries.

Anonymous at 09:17 on 24 Jun 2013

Way too many typos and spelling errors in the presentation. Mr Ennis may be a database expert but when it comes to explaining his ideas, he comes across as an enthusiastic amateur.
Rendering a map using PHP should not have as prominent a place in a presentation on BIG data as it did.