Given all the focus and hype on Big Data, I was excited to have the chance at the recent O’Reilly Strata Show to sit down with Jeff Kelly, one of the top rated “Big Data” analysts, to give a MySQL perspective. Below is my interview with Jeff Kelly and David Floyer.

http://siliconangle.tv/video/cube-strata-conference-2012-lawrence-schwartz

In the segment, you’ll find a number of topics. These include indexing technology, NoSQL vs. MySQL, when to use flash drives, how to avoid partitioning, and customer uses cases.

David makes a particularly salient point in the discussion. He notes that the real end-game for Big Data is to have transactional and analytic data on the same database. His thought was that one could get maximum value out of designing analytics as part of operations. We think this is a critical area too — it is also one thing that TokuDB does really well. TokuDB plays here by allowing such high insertion rates, that it is easy to stand up many indexes and improve query performance on freshly arriving data. Likewise, having hot schemas gives analysts a lot of flexibility to slice and dice the data in a very dynamic fashion.

Jeff ended the conversation by asking what Big Data can do for society as a whole, a big picture question he posed to everyone on theCube at Strata. Our example for this was one of our users who is leveraging machine data for exploration of astrophysical phenomena with a fleet of satellites. There were other great examples from the conference keynote speeches as well. While on a day-to-day level we get caught up in the details of our data technologies, I hope the big picture topics get some exploration as well at the upcoming Percona MySQL conference. It’s these big picture questions that drive new and exciting approaches to Big Data and can also serve as the motivator for new talent to enter into the industry.