June Meetup: Bringing Big Data to Your Organization, Vertical Recommendation

Here are the topics for the June 10th meetup; additional details to follow.

NOTE: This is a different PayPal office from the last meetup!

#1 Panel: Brining Big Data into an Organization: War Stories from People on the Front Lines (45 minutes, 15 minute Q&A)

• Axel Winter, Global Head of Process & Data Architecture, Standard Chartered Bank

• Chris Choy, Assistant VP of SmartHub at StarHub

• John Berns, SVP, Head of Data Science at Lazada

• Adam Drake, CTO, Skyscanner

#2 Paypal: “Vertical Recommendation using Collaborative Filtering” (25 minutes, 5 minute Q&A)

#3 Presto in the Cloud

Presto is a fast SQL query engine from Facebook. In this talk, I will talk about our experience offering Presto as a Service on Amazon Web Services as part of Qubole Data Services. In our world, Presto clusters are ephemeral - they are instantiated on demand and remain operational as long as necessary and shutdown when not used. We will talk about autoscaling mechanisms that allow the cluster to scale up or down depending on the amount of work in the system - translating to cost savings. We will also talk about caching data in SSDs on new instance types that improves queries over frequently accessed regions of data. We will talk about how query performance improves considerably using the ORC format and present performance numbers to illustrate how Presto can be a great option for fast SQL execution in the cloud.

About the speaker

Hello there! I'm Siva Narayanan. In my current employment at Qubole, I strive to make Hadoop, Hive and Presto behave well in the cloud. Earlier, I worked on query processing and workload aspects in the Greenplum Parallel Database. I did my undergrad at BITS, Pilani, India and my Ph.D. in Computer Science at The Ohio State University.