Refresh Recap: The Future of Data

Last night’s Refresh the Triangle meeting featured a fantastic talk from our own Ben Scofield titled “The Future of Data.” Hosted by the kind folks at Bronto, it focused on HTML5 client-side storage as well as alternatives to traditional relational databases. Client-side storage has a lot of interesting implications, both in terms of improving website performance by caching user-specific information locally, as well as building standalone offline applications that run in the browser. On the server side, the “NoSql” movement has been gaining a lot of attention among the web development community, and Ben stressed that all data storage systems have their roles, from simple key-value stores to sophisticated graph databases.

Ben’s given a similar talk at several technical conferences, and he did a great job refitting the presentation to suit the Refresh crowd of designers, developers, and “other.” A lively discussion followed the talk and continued at Tyler’s downstairs. Big thanks to Bronto for their gracious hosting, to Ben for a great talk, and to everyone who came out. To learn more, you can check out Ben’s slides and his notes on his personal site. If you’re in the triangle area, we’d love to see you at Refresh next month!