Description

The main goal of this course is to analyze the technological and engineering needs of Big Data Management. The enabling technology for such a challenge is cloud services, which provide the elasticity needed to properly scale the infrastructure as the needs of the company grow. Thus, students will learn advanced data management techniques (i.e., NOSQL solutions) that also scale with the infrastructure. Being Big Data Management the evolution of Data Warehousing, such knowledge (see the corresponding subject in Data Science speciality for more details on its contents) is assumed in this course , which will specifically focus on the management of data Volume and Velocity.

On the one hand, to deal with high volumes of data, we will see how a distributed file system can scale to as many machines as necessary. Then, we will study different physical structures we can use to store our data in it. Such structures can be in the form of a file format at the operating system level, or at a higher level of abstraction. In the latter case, they take the form of either sets of key-value pairs, collections of semi-structured documents or column-wise stored tables. We will see that, independently of the kind of storage we choose, current highly parallelizable processing systems using funtional programming principles (typically based on Map and Reduce functions), whose processing framework can rely on temporal files (like Hadoop MapReduce) or in-memory structures (like Spark).

On the other hand, to deal with high velocity of data, we need some low latency system which processes either streams or micro-batches. However, nowadays, data production is already beyond processing technologies capacity. More data is being generated than we can store or even process on the fly. Thus, we will recognize the need of (a) some techniques to select subsets of data (i.e., filter out or sample), (b) summarize them maximizing the valuable information retained, and (c) simplify our algorithms to reduce their computational complexity (i.e., doing one single pass over the data) and provide an approximate answer.

Finally, the complexity of a Big Data project (combining all the necessary tools in a collaborative ecosystem), which typically involves several people with different backgrounds, requires the definition of a high level architecture that abstracts technological difficulties and focuses on functionalities provided and interactions between modules. Therefore, we will also analyse different software architectures for Big Data.