Berlin Buzzwords Recap

This week I had the pleasure to participate in the second edition of the Buzzwords Conference in Berlin where MarkLogic was invited to give a talk called ACID Transactions at the PB Scale with MarkLogic Server.

Hallo Berlin!

Let's start with a nice surprise: The city of Berlin. A city filled with great points of interest, energy and a great positive hacker mentality.

Some highlights would include a visit to the Tempelhof Airport, an airport transformed into a park, and the Soviet War Memorial, a burial ground for some soldiers whose words won't make justice. You can go visit C-BASE, a uber-geek club where the Buzzwords BBQ was held, and then proceed to the normal touristy attractions like the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, etc.

If you are looking for cool places to have a chat you can stop by The Barn for coffee, grab a meal in the Hackescher Markt area or even go for a cocktail near Görlitzer Park. But overall, Berlin is amazing and you should visit.

Fair warning: You might not want to leave! :)

Conference

For me there are two things that make a conference: People and people. Maybe that's why I'm naturally more drawn to un-conferences (maybe next year Buzzwords will have an un-conference track - who knows!)

In that regard Buzzwords was a pleasant surprise. Long time since I've met so many new faces in a single event; plus they are all either search or database geeks. From the surprising openness of Ryan Betts (VoltDB) about their lock-free transactional model and implications, passing by Dale Harvey's insight into CouchBase and the future of CouchDB, to Tim Anglade's talk on BigCouch failures and lessons learned, the venue was packed with great people and information. If Tim's name is familiar to you that's probably because of his famous Bloch and Hunter NoSQL Tape.

The overall target audience of this conference was search and database implementors so the sessions were naturally focused on topics like sharding, scoring and cool things like global IDF calculation on a sharded environment. Andrzej Bialecki's talk was right on the money and was the technical highlight of the conference for me. Ok, technical tie with Ryan's talk! :)

Talk

If you are curious about the talk you can get some related materials at lanyrd. This includes the slides plus code used in the demos. The session was recorded and will be added here once it's available.

Thank you!

The event went extremely well. No problems with schedule, internet worked great, speakers were awesome and very friendly to interact (hopefully I did ok too), and there was an overall good positive vibe in the room! Because organizing an event like this is no easy task, a sincere thank you for such a great event to Simon, Sylvia, Julia, Isabel and Jan.

So next year don't forget to register and pay Berlin a visit!