This looks like an interesting set of presentations: “Have You Tried Rubbing A Database On It?”
HYTRADBOI was a day of lightning talks about turning a data-centric lens onto familiar problems to yield strange new solutions (and maybe exciting new problems). Talks ranged from wild ideas and unlikely experiments to cutting-edge research and production war stories.
Being loosely affiliated with the Berkeley Computer Systems Mafia (TM) the general theme of “let’s talk intersection of data management and everything else,” is near and dear to my heart. Gotta give a shout out to CIDR as an analog, but strictly from the academic R&D perspective. And definitely without the radical format experiment!
Really useful background information and conference postmortem
Background
Fundamentally, every computer system is about storing, moving and transforming data. The line between operating system, database and programming language is somewhat arbitrary - a product of specific problems, available hardware and historical accident.
But today the problems and the hardware have changed dramatically, and as a result we’re starting to see people experimenting with redrawing the lines.
Postmortem
A lot of people expressed a surprising amount of support for the conference. I think there is a lot of pent up demand for a database conference that isn’t just SaaS ads. That support meant that people were very willing to help promote the conference and were forgiving of the many technical issues. Many people bought tickets knowing that they wouldn’t be able to attend, because they wanted something like this to exist.