---
title: "Refresh Recap: The Future of Data"
date: 2009-09-25T00:00:00+00:00
draft: false
canonical_url: https://www.viget.com/articles/refresh-recap-the-future-of-data/
---

Last night's [Refresh the Triangle](http://refreshthetriangle.org/)
meeting featured a fantastic talk from our own [Ben
Scofield](https://www.viget.com/about/team/bscofield) titled "The Future
of Data." Hosted by the kind folks at [Bronto](http://bronto.com/), 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosql) 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](http://www.rubynation.org/)
[technical](http://developer-day.com/events/2009-boston.html)
[conferences](http://windycityrails.org), 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](http://www.tylerstaproom.com/restaurants/durham)
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](http://www.slideshare.net/bscofield/the-future-of-data) and his
notes on his [personal
site](http://benscofield.com/2009/09/refreshing-the-triangle/). If
you're in the triangle area, we'd love to see you at
[Refresh](http://refreshthetriangle.org/) next month!