Rittman Mead BI Forum Atlanta Special Guest: Alex Gorbachev

A few days back, I introduced our special guests for the Rittman Mead BI Forum in Atlanta, focusing first on Cary Millsap. Today I'd like to talk about our other special guest: Oracle ACE Director Alex Gorbachev. Alex was an inspiration for me back in the Oracle Database 10g and early 11g days when I was administering Oracle RAC for several data warehouse customers, and wondering whether RAC was the right platform for BI. Of course it was... and every time I read one of Alex's blogs (he was quite a prolific blogger back then... we all were once upon a time) or saw him speak, I felt empowered to go take on Cache Fusion.

Alex joined Pythian in Canada as a DBA team lead in 2006. Just two years later, he moved to Australia to successfully startup Pythian Australia. In 2009, he returned to Canada and took up the mantle of Chief Technology Officer, a title he still holds today. He is a member of the distinguished OakTable Network (as is Cary Millsap... something I forgot to mention yesterday), and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG). Alex founded the Battle Against Any Guess Party, a movement promoting scientific troubleshooting techniques. During his time in Australia he also founded Sydney Oracle Meetup, a vibrant local community of passionate Oracle professionals.

Its fortuitous that Mark blogged yesterday on Hadoop... as this is exactly what Alex is speaking on at the BI Forum. His presentation is titled "Hadoop versus the Relational Data Warehouse." He'll discuss some of the technical design principles of Hadoop and the reasons for it's rise in popularity. We'll get to see the position that Hadoop currently occupies in the enterprise data center, it's possible future trajectory, and how that trajectory compares with the more traditional relational data warehouse. For the BI developers in the crowd who have perhaps never seen Alex speak... you're definitely in for a treat. He's set to speak first thing Friday morning to kick off the last day of the Forum. If you know Alex, you're obviously aware that he's an excellent technologist, but you also likely know how much fun he is to be around, so it will be good to have him at the social meet-ups in and around the conference.

I'd really like to thank our friend and business partner Pythian for always supporting Rittman Mead and ensuring that Alex would speak at the Forum. And of course... I'd be remiss if I didn't say: Love Your Data!