The Big Data Meetup, organised by VirtusaPolaris, is a quarterly forum, where industry professionals discuss the latest findings in Big Data tools and technologies and network. The event attracts a diverse crowd of like-minded individuals across industries and academia with the single passion of handling big data.

This quarter the forum moved away from the conceptual use of big data to the actual practicality of big data handling with the topic being ‘Digging into Big Data with Google’s BigQuery and Apache Spark’.

Sajeetharan Sinnathurai, Team Lead at DuoSoftware, delivered a session on Google BigQuery, which is a petabyte scale, low cost analytics data warehouse owned by Google. The second session of the evening was conducted by Dedunu Dhananjaya, Senior Software Engineer at Pearson Lanka, who delivered a session on Apache Spark, which is an open source framework that enables faster big data operations.

The meetup was conducted by Dinesh Priyankara, Microsoft MVP and Founder/Principal Architect at dinesQL and Dinesh Asanka, Microsoft MVP and Senior Architect at VirtusaPolaris.

[caption id="attachment_24254" align="alignnone" width="675"] Dedunu Dhananjaya, Senior Software Engineer at Pearson Lanka (left) and Sajeetharan Sinnathurai, Team Lead at DuoSoftware[/caption]