Sessions at Open Source Bridge 2011 about Databases on Thursday 23rd June

ETL. OLAP. BIDW. ELT. M/R. MPP. Windowing. Matviews. Data Marts. Column Stores. Are you at sea in a tidal surge of arcane terminology, trying to cope with big data problems?

While big data may be bigger today, and far more common, and while we have a lot of new tools for dealing with it, the essential practices of how to process, store, and visualize large quantities of data haven't changed very much in the last ten years. Data warehousing veteran Josh Berkus will give you a lightning tour of the techniques and tools for dealing with masses of data, including: the data processing pipeline, types of big databases, visualizing and summarizing, and tips on dealing with GB to PB. All in a friendly FAQ format.

This talk will give you everything you never wanted to know about data warehousing but were forced to find out. Or at least enough that you can Google the rest.

An experienced DBA who also happens to be a talking lion explains what normalization is, why it's a good idea, and how to do it. When his pupil complains about performance slowdowns, he goes on to explain about when, why, and how we should denormalize. There are slides as well as puppets.