The NoSQL Matters conference took place in Cologne, Germany from April 28th to April 30th. If you weren't able to make it, don't worry, because the presentation slides are becoming available now! You can find them all on the NoSQL Matters website, but for a taste of what's available, here are some noteworthy entries:

Johnny Miller's "Going Native with Apache Cassandra"

This topic will introduce the Apache Cassandra native protocol, asynchronous native drivers and Cassandra Query Language (CQL). It is important for developers to be aware of this new asynchronous way of integrating with and querying Cassandra – without using Thrift or RPC. There are various ways of tuning that integration and modelling your data – all intended to make it easier and more productive to build against Cassandra with some additional performance benefits.

Mark Needham's "Dating Algorithms with Neo4j"

The iDating industry cares about interactions and connections. Those two concepts are closely linked. If someone has a connection to another person, through a shared friend or a shared interest, they are much more likely to interact. Graph databases are optimized for querying connections between people, things, interests, or really anything that can be connected. Dating sites and apps worldwide have begun to use graph databases to achieve competitive gain. Neo4j provides thousand-fold performance improvements and massive agility benefits over relational databases, enabling new levels of performance and insight. Join Amanda Laucher to discuss the five graphs of love, and how companies like eHarmony, Hinge and AreYouInterested.com, are now using graph databases to create algorithms to help people find more interactions, connections and hopefully love!

Tobias Trelle's "NoSQLUnit - Test Automation for NoSQL Databases"

Enterprise developers are used to run unit tests against embedded JDBC databases, either manually or automated within a CI environment. Doing so with NoSQL databases isn't that easy, mostly because they have non-standard APIs and are harder to embed in-process.NoSQLUnit may be a solution to this issue, at least for the most common NoSQL datastores like Cassandra, Redis, MongoDB and some more. NoSQL is a JUnit extension that launches the database process and loads test data with a just a few lines of code. I'll also show how to use the PaaS "Travis CI" to run JUnit tests depending on NoSQL datastores.

And there are plenty a more. Take a look at the full list and see what else went on at NoSQL Matters.