"I learned right away how important Data manipulation and cleaning was to managing business affairs", — Matthew D. Groves
Tags: datascience, nosql, distributedsystems, bigdata
Published: 2021-04-08 05:10:11

Hello wonderful people! 

What are you doing on the 16th of April? We are running the online Data Love Conference. [FOR FREE!!!](https://datalove.eventbrite.com/)

Data Love is the conference for Data Engineers, Data Scientists, and everyone who wants to dive into the data-driven world. 
Check out [the full program](https://datalove.konfy.care/schedule) on our website. You can customize it!

Along with the great tech content, here are some additional activities that will help make your experience worthwhile:
* Connect and network with like-minded individuals from all over the world at our SpatialChat space.
* Extended live Q&A sessions with speakers

Our next marvelous speaker is [**Matthew D. Groves**, Product Marketing Manager at Couchbase.](https://twitter.com/mgroves)

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Matthew D. Groves is a guy who loves to code.  It doesn't matter if it's C#, jQuery, or PHP: he'll submit pull requests for anything.  He has been coding professionally ever since he wrote a QuickBASIC point-of-sale app for his parent's pizza shop back in the 90s.  He currently works as a Product Marketing Manager for Couchbase. His free time is spent with his family, watching the Reds, and getting involved in the developer community.  He is the author of AOP in .NET (published by Manning), a Pluralsight author, and a Microsoft MVP."

**How did you become interested in Data?**

My first job out of college was working with data for a business office that was running all of their operations on a large amount of Microsoft Access databases. I learned right away how important data manipulation and cleaning was to managing business affairs. I was able to use the basic SQL skills (that I learned in college) right away to start creating value. Ever since my programming focus has always been on data and back-end systems.

**What are you working on right now? What drew you to your company?**

Couchbase is working on making their NoSQL database even more accessible to relational developers. The most recent and upcoming versions of Couchbase have added features like ACID transactions, scopes, and collections that can be mapped to relational concepts. This makes the initial transition easier. Combine that with Couchbase being the first NoSQL database to have the complete SQL implementation for querying, and Couchbase becomes a very compelling offering for developers looking for scale, performance, high availability, AND familiar relational concepts.

My work is just a small part of that overall effort: creating content and tools to help developers starting to make that transition.

What first drew me to Couchbase was a simple sounding, yet powerful feature: SQL for NoSQL. The SQL syntax that I know and love with the flexibility of JSON data. Couchbase is so much more than that, but that was the initial draw for me.

**What is your favorite project or a project that you’re particularly proud of?**

Right now, I'm having a lot of fun with my SqlServerToCouchbase experimental [project] (https://github.com/mgroves/SqlServerToCouchbase). I'm able to combine all my technical experience (.NET, SQL Server, Couchbase) into one project that I hope will help developers understand key concepts of NoSQL and will help me (and all of Couchbase) to better understand the risks and costs and work to reduce them.

I'm also very excited that Couchbase has entered the DBaaS (database-as-a-server) market with [Couchbase Cloud] (https://www.couchbase.com/cloud). I think this will allow companies of all sizes and developers to more easily get started using Couchbase in the cloud (Azure and AWS right now, with more to come) and allow Couchbase experts to do all the infrastructure management.

**Are your projects similar, do they have common focus points, or they can be completely different?**

In my current role as a (technical-focused) product marketing manager, the projects I'm involved in can vary wildly! One day, I can be deep into coding, heads down, hammering away in Visual Studio. The next day, I could be presenting a slide-deck to an industry analyst. It's an exciting time to be working at Couchbase!

**Big data. Cloud data. ML, AI training data, and personally-identifying data. Data is all around us. The world is data-centric. What are some of the industries your clients come from?**

Couchbase's customers and users come from a wide variety of industries. With Couchbase Server 7 (currently in beta, available at couchbase.com/downloads), the use cases continue to expand. Some of the most notable industries that Couchbase has served for a while including travel and hospitality (Amadeus, Marriott, Ryanair, United Airlines), social media/high tech (LinkedIn, cvent), finance (PayPal, Concur, Wells Fargo), commerce/retail (eBay, cars.com, Carrefour, Tesco, Tommy Hilfiger), and many more.

**‘I love working with data because…'**

I love working with data because there are so many interesting ways to ask questions about data and provide useful answers to end-users and customers.

**What's Your Data Resolution for 2021?**

My resolution is to continue to explore the transition from "SQL to NoSQL", or more accurately a "relational to document database" transition, in whatever form that takes. I love the SQL language and I love the flexibility of document databases, and I love that can explore both of these with my team at Couchbase.

**Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to share?** 

If you've worked with relational databases a lot, and are intrigued by the idea of JSON document databases, but are concerned about losing things like ACID and JOINs, then make sure to come to check out my session at Data Love. I think you'll be surprised at the advances that NoSQL databases have made in recent years.

We thank Matthew for the thoughtful answers! 

At the conference, he is going to speak on the topic: [Don't Drop ACID - Transactions in Distributed NoSQL](https://datalove.konfy.care/schedule/)
If you want to attend Matthew’s talk and to discuss some questions “in person” you can join us on the 16th of April! 

The lineup of speakers is incredible. Topics are diverse. Suitable for any level. Interesting Q&A sessions in Spatial Chat. New career opportunities. 

_Data is all around you._

[Registration is free](https://datalove.eventbrite.com/)
[Website](https://datalove.konfy.care/) 
[Twitter](https://twitter.com/_datalove) 

Join us!