Speaker Interview: Matt Davis

Matt Davis will be giving his presentation on Measuring Distributed Databased Across the Globe on SCALE 13x Sunday at 11:30. The SCALE Team caught up with Matt to ask him about his talk.

Q. Can you please introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about your background?

A. I am a Site Reliability Engineer at OpenX, on the team responsible for operational support of our data platforms and distributed systems. My technical background is largely operations: datacenter and storage, complex and clustered, network and hardware. My schooling was all music, and that discipline has become an important part of my role as a systems engineer.

Q. I saw you are giving a talk on Measuring Distributed Databases Across the Globe. Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?

A. This is just one perspective, a view into how we've approached understanding our global data systems. As a primary example, the talk will not only illustrate how we manage our Riak clusters world-wide, but also touch on other methods and materials we use for Hadoop and data warehouse applications.

Q. Over the past few years the term "Big Data" has been misused, abused and has transformed into a buzzword for the media. What are your thoughts on the term "Big Data"?

A. The term always makes me ask, well how big is big, how much is large? What does it look like? Is it statistically significant, ​does it show distinct usage rhythms? Which part of the data is important? It is certainly a balance of performant and reliable systems that support deep data complexity and availability. And the more data we gather, the higher  our analytical ​precision, and the more accurately we can forecast for capacity. So yeah, to me, t​here's a lot more to the universe that "big data" refers than is describable in just those two words. :)

Q. Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?

A. This is my first SCaLE, but not my first conference. I expect it will be varied and interesting on every level, and hope to make a good contribution!

Q. IT is an ever changing industry, every year there is another new specialty to focus one's career. For someone like yourself who specialises in a particular field, could you give some advice for aspiring Jr. Admins who are interest into getting into your line of work?

A. You have to find your groove, explore all avenues and discover a passion, those areas of specialization will evolve naturally.

Q. Is there anything else you'd like to add that the people at SCaLE would like to know?

A. Follow me @dtauvdiodr and looking forward to hanging out and experiencing the weekend! 

[SCALE Team interview by Sean McCabe and Garick Chan]