Narasimhan Sampath and Avinash Ramineni share how Choice Hotels International used Spark Streaming, Kafka, Spark, and Spark SQL to create an advanced analytics platform that enables business users to be self-reliant by accessing the data they need from a variety of sources to generate customer insights and property dashboards and enable data-driven decisions with minimal IT engagement.

Kaushik Deka and Phil Jarymiszyn discuss the benefits of a Spark-based feature store, a library of reusable features that allows data scientists to solve business problems across the enterprise. Kaushik and Phil outline three challenges they facedsemantic data integration within a data lake, high-performance feature engineering, and metadata governanceand explain how they overcame them.

Netflix is exploring new avenues for data processing where traditional approaches fail to scale. Ryan Blue explains how Netflix is building on Parquet to enhance its 40+ petabyte warehouse, combining Parquet's features with Presto and Spark to boost ETL and interactive queries. Information about tuning Parquet is hard to find. Ryan shares what he's learned, creating the missing guide you need.

The advent of next-generation DNA sequencing technologies is revolutionizing life sciences research by routinely generating extremely large datasets. Tom White explains how big data tools developed to handle large-scale Internet data (like Hadoop) help scientists effectively manage this new scale of data and also enable addressing a host of questions that were previously out of reach.

Traditional data-warehousing techniques are sometimes limited by the scalability of the implementation tools themselves. Arun Thangamani explains how the advanced architectural approaches by tools like Apache Phoenix and HBase allow new, highly scalable live-analytics solutions using the same traditional techniques and showcases a successful implementation at CDK.