Confession: I don’t believe there’s any real difference between “big data” and “small data” and frankly, I don’t care.
[If you watched my selfie video already, like and move on ;-)]
In my mind, it really comes down to efficiency and ease of use versus unlimited scale and unlimited control at the cost of pain caused by complexity. [and yes, we wrote a blog post called “Big Data is Dead”]
In the 2010s myself [at BigQuery] and other Silicon Valley influencers sold this vision of future pain. Pain that you’d experience if data continued to grow and you didn’t have the unlimited data platform scalability to handle that growth. I believed what I was saying and It worked - people built massive distributed architectures with the belief that one day they’d truly need the power. I was wrong. The industry was wrong. The growth of (useful) data never materialized to the degree we thought it would for the vast majority of businesses and the growth has been offset by the rise in compute power.
I feel very guilty for using a fear as a marketing tactic, and striving so very hard to repent for that with our work at MotherDuck. We’re working with many of our customers to take the fear, complexity and pain out of analytics and add simplicity, usability and tons of fun.
So, let’s have fun together— whether the data world is contracting or expanding, we can bring the fun.
I invite you to join me! If this resonates with you or you just want to express how pissed you are at me and others for creating fear amongst data people for a half decade, let me know in the comments.
And… join me and a kick ass lineup of speakers and workshop leads to celebrate at Small Data SF conference in one month. In celebration of my birthday, I’m offering a $92 discount with code RyanBday. Expires end of Wednesday October 8th.
