Nestoria Blog

Avid readers will note that the Nestoria engineering team attended YAPC::Europe 2008 in Copenhagen a couple of weeks back.  As usual, the conference featured many interesting talks, two of which were given by members of the Nestoria team.  Marc Tobias related some of the lessons we have learned building a high-volume / high-performance ETL system from scratch.  His talk was very well attended and sparked some interesting discussions about FOSS ETL and Business Intelligence systems.  I (Mike) spoke on a topic of much interest in the Nestoria world - profiling and optimization.  As always in the perl world, there are lots of different tools out there and some are more right for the job than others.  Encouragingly, many of the best packages are relative newcomers - clarly demonstrating that Perl is alive and kicking.  Thanks in particular to Tim Bunce for helping me prepare and for giving me something to talk about.

Conferences are not just about prepared talks, though.  You can sometimes learn a lot more at lunch and during coffee breaks.  Lots of informal discussions lead me to believe that our development team is doing all of the right things, but that we still have a few tricks to learn.  One very notable area of development is distributed applications and cloud computing.  Systems like EC2 and Google App Engine are becoming more and more of a fixture in the technology landscape.  It remains to be seen how we will integrate these new developments into the Nestoria engine (if all all).  There is no doubt that new technologies are presenting many opportunities for building faster, more scalable systems.

Many thanks to the Copenhagen.pm for pulling together an excellent conference.  The waterfront dinner was a particular highlight and perfect example of the high level of organization and style that characterized the entire event.  Also thanks to Marc Tobias for preparing a few notable images from the conference.

A variety of memorable images from YAPC::Europe 2008