You've read that the relational model is old and busted, and there are newer, faster, web-scale ways to store your application's data. You've heard that NoSQL databases are the future! Well, what is all this NoSQL stuff about? Is it time to ditch Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server in favor of the new guard? To be able to make that call, there's a lot you'll have to learn.

In this session, we'll take a whirlwind tour of several representative non-relational data stores, including Cassandra, MongoDB, and Neo4J. We'll learn the very different ways they represent data, and we'll see their unique strengths and weaknesses in various kinds of applications. Along the way, we'll learn why new technologies must be introduced to address today's scaling challenges, and what compromises we'll have to make if we want to abandon the databases of our youth. We'll review what ACID means, think about query idioms, and talk about the CAP theorem. It's an exciting time to be storing and retrieving data, and the opportunity is now before us to learn things we could ignore just a few years ago. Come to this session for a solid introduction to a growing field.

Tim Berglund, President of August Technology Group, is a full-stack generalist and passionate teacher who loves coding, presenting, and working with people. He believes the best developer is one who is well-informed of specifics and can also make deep connections between software development and the broader world. He has recently been exploring non-relational data stores, continuous deployment, and how software architecture should resemble an ant colony.

His firm, the August Technology Group, helps clients with product development, technology consulting, and technology upgrade projects atop the JVM. The August Group's technology preferences reflect the generalist sensibilities of its founder, and its development practices are always lightweight, self-improving, and humanizing by design.

Tim Berglund

President of August Technology Group

Tim is a speaker internationally and on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour in the United States, and is co-president of the Denver Open Source User Group in the Denver area, co-author of the DZone Clojure RefCard, co-presenter of the best-selling O'Reilly Git Master Class, co-author of Building and Testing with Gradle, and a member of the O'Reilly Expert Network.

He lives in Littleton, CO with the wife of his youth and their three children.