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Comment by jdrock | Hacker News Reader

Anyone saying the interactive section is not tech-focused is out of the (tech) loop.

Case in point: I attended the Infochimps Data Cluster Meetup. They kicked it off with a debate around SQL vs NOSQL. 5 minutes into one of the NOSQL guys saying why his stuff is great, Werner Vogels gets up and basically lays the smack-down on the guy. This talk is followed up by BOFs on different aspects of working with big data.

I guess this wasn't an official SXSW party, but you'd really have to not be keyed into the events around the conference to not know it was going on.

EDIT: I should also point out that the guys from Factual, WolframAlpha, Rackspace, Cassandra, (oh and me from 80legs :) were there. It was really awesome.

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First that type of panel was rare. For every panel like that there were four such as "Twitter and Dating in 140 Characters or Less", "Crowd Sourcing Innovative Social Change", "Interactive Documentaries: A Multidimensional Narrative", "Millionaire or Artist? how about Both?"

Second "tech" focused has different meanings for different folks I don't think debating SQL vs NOSQL is very tech-focused. Tech focused for me is here's this thing, maybe some of why/how we built it, but definitely some how you can use it, and esp here's the code.

SXSWi maybe a tech conference. It sure isn't a developer conference. But, I'm glad it's not. People whining that SXSWi is not the type of conference they want need to stfu and go to the correct conference.

Well I think your definition of tech-focused is too narrow for me, but fair enough.

User Groups are more for that stuff. The cool thing about SXSW is that you can totally set up an impromptu user group and get 20-50 attendees if you want. In fact, that is how the Data meetup happened last year.

"here's the code"? I thought "tech" was short for "technology" only part of which involves code.

Could you summarize the "smackdown" please?

My take is that NoSQL is a return to the hierarchical databases that the relational model replaced for many uses (both have a place of course).

Did anybody get some video of this smack-down?

I think they had video there.. check the Infochimps blog for info: http://blog.infochimps.org/ (not there yet, but hopefully they'll post it if it exists).

The first video should be available today from The Changelog, and a better quality copy in the next few days: http://twitter.com/changelogshow/status/10581052288

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