Today’s keynote with Dr. DeWitt starts at 8:15am EDT. Click here to watch today’s keynote live. For information on today’s keynote, titled “Big Data – What is the Big Deal?“, see the SQLPASS.org page on Keynotes.

If you wanna hear about the first part of the keynote, you can see it here.  I introduce the topic of big data there.

So here we are listening to Dr. DeWitt talk about big data and specifically he’s talking about data loss and node failures in HDFS.  And in his usual fashion, this is a very detailed accounting of how the file system performs its redundancy.  I’m not going to go into detail because I really can’t, but I believe this discussion will be available online at the URL above.  However, I will say that the most interesting thing about HDFS is that it gets it redundancy without any use of mirroring or RAID.  The file system itself takes care of everything.

I’m going to break away from talking about the keynote and give an update on the rest on the Summit.  I personally manned the Enterprise Mgmt expert pod in 2-4hr shifts this week, and I fielded dozens and questions about everything from replication and backup, to how to do things in Powershell.  So it was an excellent opportunity for me to either give some users good answers to their questions, or bring their prod boxes down.  Only time will tell which one it was.

There have been lots of vendor parties as usual and so far the most noteable to me was the Idera party.  Now, what makes a noteable party to me?  The food of course!  And Idera had their party at the Tap House and they had these lovely pulled pork spicy sliders. 

Right after the Idera party was the big Summit party at GameWorks.  Frankly I’m not a very big game guy so I’m not usually interested in playing the games… I’m in it for the food.  And the food at GameWorks was horrible.  There was only one thing there was was done any good at all and it was actually done very well.  That of course is the roast beef.  For some reason, while the macaroni was mushy and bland, the salad dressing was bitter, and the mashed potatoes looked like instant, the roast beef on the slicing table was perfectly medium rare, and seasoned well.  I guess the cook doesn’t like that other stuff cause he never bothered tasting them.

I blogged on one of the other days that the best part of the Summit is getting to see our friends that live all over the world, and that still holds true.  And we were even talking yesterday with some of the top-level MS guys that the Oracle conference doesn’t have anything that even resembles this level of community.  If you go to OpenWorld, you’ll be surrounded by people in suits and none of the vendors are really that interested in talking to you unless there’s a real possibility of getting any money from you.  So all of us are pretty glad we’re on the MS side of things, and we’re thrilled to be able to come to the Summit and take part in all of this.  Now, I read everywhere for one event or another where people like meeting new friends, etc, but that really takes on a different meaning here.  Those of us who come every year are so close and we watch out for each other so well, that I think regular conference friends in other technologies would be surprised to see how we relate.  It’s an amazing group of folks we hangout with here… and yes, I’ve actually made some new friends this year that I really think will fold into the group just fine if they keep coming.