While I'm not planning to run out and see the new movie The Five-Year Engagement (ahh, it seems like it's a "chick flick," right?), I can tell you that this year's IDEAS conference will be the fifth in which I've been in attendance. I always look forward to making the trip to see the gang every October and learning tips and tricks from some of the most intelligent folks in the data management industry. The fact the conference is in Las Vegas is certainly very exciting; I can't help but wonder if anyone from the conference will end up having a Vegas wedding?

During last year's conference, I was lucky enough to sit in on a panel where we had a chance to talk about our predictions for the coming year in the data management industry. My two predictions were that Big Data was going to be huge and that Open Data was going to begin to get some attention. Too bad last year's conference wasn't in Las Vegas because man, was I right on the money with these two bets.

"Big Data"

In September of this year, Forbes came out and stated "the hottest tech trend of the year is Big Data," and here on the Data Roundtable we've had our fair share of posts on the topic. During last year's event I mentioned there was something like a 25% increase in Big Data job postings in just one month, while postings for other data management keywords were somewhat static. Guess what? We're now tracking well over twice as many Big Data job postings as we were only one year ago, and the bad news is that postings for other data management keywords have suffered a slight reduction.

"Open Data"

While not quite as dramatic as Big Data, Open Data has certainly got its share of attention in the last year as well. Like many other government organizations, the two closest cities to my home (Washington D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland) have now begun to publish different Open Data data sets, so this topic is really starting to become personal for me. Certainly it's peaking my interest both as a citizen as well as a data geek. A few vendors have popped up in the Open Data space with COTS products to try to make implementing sharing data with the public easier (e.g. Socrata).

What's next?

Well, I'm back on the "predictions" panel this year at IDEAS and I'm certainly going to gloat a bit that my predictions were better than everyone else’s! Big Data is huge and Open Data is making data personal for me. As for predictions in 2013 – well, we're going to be in Las Vegas so it doesn't really matter where I place my bets for this year because the likelihood of me making a good bet in Vegas is pretty poor.

Until next time...Rich

p.s.  Please feel free to introduce yourself at IDEAS, I'd love to hear your stories too...