Sharing

Publish Date: 2019-03-01

I took the course Big Data in the autumen semester 2018, opened by Dr. Ghislain Fourny, Department Information ETH Zurich.

Content

From the course introduction

This course gives an overview of database technologies and of the most important database design principles that lay the foundations of the Big Data universe. The material is organized along three axes: data in the large, data in the small, data in the very small. A broad range of aspects is covered with a focus on how they fit all together in the big picture of the Big Data ecosystem.

physical storage: distributed file systems HDFS, object storage S3, key - value stores
logical storage: document stores MongoDB, column stores HBase, graph databases neo4j, data warehouses ROLAP
data formats and syntaxes XML, JSON, RDF, Turtle, CSV, XBRL, YAML, protocol buffers, Avro
data shapes and models: tables, trees, graphs, cubes
type systems and schemas: atomic types, structured types :arrays, maps, set - based type systems ?, * , +
an overview of functional, declarative programming languages across data shapes SQL, XQuery, JSONiq, Cypher, MDX
the most important query paradigms: selection, projection, joining, grouping, ordering, windowing
paradigms for parallel processing, two-stage MapReduce and DAG-based Spark
resource management YARN
what a data center is made of and why it matters: racks, nodes, …
underlying architectures: internal machinery of HDFS, HBase, Spark, neo4j
optimization techniques: functional and declarative paradigms, query plans, rewrites, indexing
applications.

I happened to found all the course videos are avaiable on YouTube. Take it for free!

Experience

From my own experience, this course is very system-style. I didn’t have a strong background on this and made a lot of efforts to learn this course. The lecturer gives many recommended readings almost for each lesson. Reading them benefited me a lot while reading all of them was impossible 😂. Fortunately, the contents are not very difficult to understant but the course volume is quite big. Almost every week we were exposed to a different technology with many tools, regulations, applications and details. The final exam was more like an Encyclopedia knowledge contest, full of knowledge. Each piece of knowledge was not hard to memorize but the point was there were too much! Frankly speaking, this course is very useful in the practical as well as industrial fields. I have learnt a lot from it.