Alpes JUG and Geneva JUG

While in Europe to attend and talk at the NoSQL Matters conference, I was also invited to talk about ModeShape at several Java User Groups. Fortunately, the schedules worked out to talk to two JUGs: the Alpes JUG in Grenoble, France, and the Geneva JUG in Geneva, Switzerland.

My talk was basically a more detailed introduction to ModeShape, and I covered the various high-level features (like consistency, elasticity, transactions, in-memory storage, etc.) as well as spending more time showing how to use the hierarchical nature of ModeShape.

Both groups had lots of great questions. Then, after each meeting we had a great time eating, drinking, and talking at a local restaurant. The food and drink were excellent, and that was when I got to pepper them with questions about their regions, culture, jobs, and all sorts of other things.

Merci beaucoup to all the Alpes JUG and Geneva JUG members for making the evenings very enjoyable and memorable. But I would especially like to thank Emmanuel Hugonnet and Chris Laprun in Grenoble and Xavier Bourguignon and Maxime Nowak in Geneva for inviting me, for coordinating their group’s schedules to make my visit possible, and for all their help and for answering my logistical questions.

If you ever get an opportunity to visit Grenoble or Geneva, please do! I had a great time and hope to go back as soon as I can.

Filed under: appearances, jcr, presentation

NoSQL Matters 2013

Last week I traveled to Cologne, Germany, to attend the NoSQL Matters 2013 conference. There were lots of great talks, including both beginner and intermediate talks about all things NoSQL. It’s also really good to see the audiences have more familiarity with a variety of database technologies, and are more keenly aware that they have to choose wisely from the many different kinds of NoSQL databases out there.

That’s a point we try to make here, too. Sure, there are lots of scenarios where eventually consistent key-value and document databases are a great solution, just like there are still lots of scenarios where relational database technology is still appropriate. But eventually consistent databases can require your application to manage conflicts, and this may or may not be easy. Sometimes, it’s just easier and more natural to write code that relies upon ACID transactions to guarantee strong consistency.

I gave a talk about using ModeShape as a consistent, in-memory, hierarchical database. Again, it was primarily an introductory talk that covered most of the features that distinguishes it from other database technologies, including relational, key-value, document, and even graph databases.

I also attended several really interesting talks. One of them was “Processing a trillion cells per mouse click” by Alex Hall. Alex talked about how Google needs to very quickly process vast amounts of data so that internal tools can enable Google’s employees to interactively drill down into ad click data to look for various usage patterns. The resulting solution uses a variety of interesting techniques to optimize the indexes to support these drill-down queries. You can read more about it in this paper.

Another great talk was given by Simon Willnauer, who showed how easy it is to use ElasticSearch to query and search your data, even when that data might be stored in another system. (We’re considering having ModeShape use ElasticSearch for our indexing and search uses, so this was quite timely.)

Tug Grall gave one of my other favorite talks. He’s from Cloudbase, and this talk focused on how you use Map-Reduce style JavaScript functions to build indexes from your documents. I’ve talked with Tug before, and it was great to see him again.

Kudos to the NoSQL Matters 2013 organizers for doing such a great job organizing and running the conference . The talks were quite good, it was well attended, and the meals and snacks were above par. I also have to say that Cologne is a fantastic city with incredible charm and history. What a great place for a conference!

Filed under: appearances, features, jcr, presentation

JUDCon Brazil 2013

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to attend the first JBoss Users Conference held in Latin America. I’m not sure there’s a better place than a JUDCon where JBoss users, community members and core developers can get together and talk, work, and socialize.

JUDCon Brazil 2013 was very successful and really well attended — much like the other seven previous JUDCons. I met in person a lot of people that before this I had only known online as part of the JBoss communities or even by reputation. Plus, I was able to meet quite a few of the folks that work at Red Hat in Brazil.

I gave two talks at the conference. The first was about ModeShape 3 and was an introduction to using ModeShape as a consistent, in-memory, hierarchical database. I covered how you can make your content adhere to a schema, be completely schema-less, or something in between. I also talked about sequencing and federation, two features that are unique to ModeShape.

My second talk was an overview of the JBoss Enterprise Data Services (EDS) platform, which one of Red Hat’s supported middleware platforms that allows you to virtualize your existing databases and data services into unified virtual databases. In effect, you can turn the data you have into the information you need, in real-time. Applications see these virtual databases just as regular database, and they use JPA, JDBC, ODBC, or web services (RESTful and SOAP) to query and update the data. But as the applications interact with the virtual database, EDS transparently operates against the actual underlying (and heterogeneous) data stores and services. It really is a very cool piece of technology.

The slides for these talks are not yet online, but hopefully they’ll be available in the next few weeks. When they are, I’ll let you know.

And finally, the big news of the conference was that JBoss announced the new name for JBoss Application Servers: WildFly.

 

Filed under: appearances, features, jcr, presentation