New York’s Javits Center is a cavernous triumph of form over function. Giant empty spaces were everywhere at this year’s empty-though-sold-out Strata/Hadoop World, but the strangely-numbered, hard to find, typically inadequately-sized rooms were packed. Some redesign will be needed next year, because the event was huge in impact and demand will only grow. A few of those big tent pavilions you see at Oracle Open World or Dreamforce would drop into the giant halls without a trace – I’d expect to see some next year to make some usable space available.
So much happened, I’ll post a couple of pieces here. Last year’s news was all about promises: Hadoop 2.0 brought the promise of YARN enabling new kinds of processing, and there was promise in the multiple emerging SQL-on-HDFS plays. The Hadoop community was clearly ready to crown a new hype king for 2014.
This year, all that noise had jumped the Spark.