I'm at the airport heading home from Strata right now. I have to say the conference was very disappointing. There were far too many commercially "sponsored" sessions. There seemed to be no quality or content guidelines for the talks and most of them were either sales pitches, vague and fluffy but full of hype and buzzwords, or they were entry level.

This was my first time at Strata, but compared to other technical conferences, I walked away thinking it was a serious waste of time.

It's possible that's just a sign of the gold rushy nature of Big Data right now, but as a serious practitioner, I can't recommend this conference.

-- Edit I will add that it's possible my selection turned out to be very poor, and there were good sessions I didn't make it to. I really hope that was the case actually. If anyone was there, did you find any sessions particularly valuable? I would be interested in input from people who are doing Big Data now, not those thinking about it.