Spark, Hadoop, and Snowflake for Data Engineering (Coursera)

Offered by Duke University,
Spark, Hadoop, and Snowflake for Data Engineering (Coursera)

This is primarily aimed at first- and second-year undergraduates interested in engineering or science, along with high school students and professionals with an interest in programming. Gain the skills for building efficient and scalable data pipelines.

Class Deals by MOOC List - Click here and see Coursera's Active Discounts, Deals, and Promo Codes.

Explore essential data engineering platforms (Hadoop, Spark, and Snowflake) as well as learn how to optimize and manage them. Delve into Databricks, a powerful platform for executing data analytics and machine learning tasks, while honing your Python data science skills with PySpark. Finally, discover the key concepts of MLflow, an open-source platform for managing the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle, and learn how to integrate it with Databricks.
This course is designed for learners who want to pursue or advance their career in data science or data engineering, or for software developers or engineers who want to grow their data management skill set. In addition to the technologies you will learn, you will also gain methodologies to help you hone your project management and workflow skills for data engineering, including applying Kaizen, DevOps, and Data Ops methodologies and best practices.
With quizzes to test your knowledge throughout, this comprehensive course will help guide your learning journey to become a proficient data engineer, ready to tackle the challenges of today's data-driven world.

What you'll learn

  • Create scalable data pipelines (Hadoop, Spark, Snowflake, Databricks) for efficient data handling.
  • Optimize data engineering with clustering and scaling to boost performance and resource use.
  • Build ML solutions (PySpark, MLFlow) on Databricks for seamless model development and deployment.
  • Implement DataOps and DevOps practices for continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) of data-driven applications, including automating processes.

Syllabus

Overview and Introduction to PySpark
This week, you will learn how to work with different data engineering platforms, such as Hadoop and Spark, and apply their concepts to real-world scenarios. First, you will explore the fundamentals of Hadoop to store and process big data. Next, you will delve into Spark concepts, distributed computing, deferred execution, and Spark SQL. By the end of the week, you will gain hands-on experience with PySpark DataFrames, DataFrame methods, and deferred execution strategies.

Snowflake
This week, you will explore the Snowflake platform, gaining insights into its architecture and key concepts. Through hands-on practice in the Snowflake Web UI, you'll learn to create tables, manage warehouses, and use the Snowflake Python Connector to interact with tables. By the end of this week, you'll solidify your understanding of Snowflake's architecture and practical applications, emerging with the ability to effectively navigate and leverage the platform for data management and analysis.

Azure Databricks and MLFLow
This week, you will practice the essential skills for seamlessly managing machine learning workflows using Databricks and MLFlow. First, you will create a Databricks workspace and configure a cluster, setting the stage for efficient data analysis. Next, you will load a sample dataset into the Databricks workspace using the power of PySpark, enabling data manipulation and exploration. Finally, you will install MLFlow either locally or within the Databricks environment, gaining the ability to orchestrate the entire machine learning lifecycle. By the end of this week, you will be able to craft, track, and manage machine learning experiments within Databricks, ensuring precision, reproducibility, and optimal decision-making throughout your data-driven journey.

DataOps and Operations Methodologies
This week, you will explore the concepts of Kaizen, DevOps, and DataOps and how these methodologies synergistically contribute to efficient and seamless data engineering workflows. Through practical examples, you will learn how Kaizen's continuous improvement philosophy, DevOps' collaborative practices, and DataOps' focus on data quality and integration converge to enhance the development, deployment, and management of data engineering platforms. By the end of this week, you will have the knowledge and perspective needed to optimize data engineering processes and deliver scalable, reliable, and high-quality solutions.

Go to Class
MOOC List is learner-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Related Courses

Machine Learning Rapid Prototyping with IBM Watson Studio (Coursera) Coursera
IBM

Machine Learning Rapid Prototyping with IBM Watson Studio (Coursera)

An emerging trend in AI is the availability of technologies in which automation is used to select a best-fit model, perform feature engineering and improve model performance via hyperparameter optimization. This automation will provide rapid-prototyping of models and allow the Data Scientist to focus their efforts on applying domain knowledge to fine-tune models. This course will take the learner through the creation of an end-to-end automated pipeline built by Watson Studio’s AutoAI experiment tool, explaining the underlying technology at work as developed by IBM Research.

Sep 14th 2026
4 Weeks
Big Data Integration and Processing (Coursera) Coursera
University of California, San Diego

Big Data Integration and Processing (Coursera)

At the end of the course, you will be able to: Retrieve data from example database and big data management systems; Describe the connections between data management operations and the big data processing patterns needed to utilize them in large-scale analytical applications; Identify when a big data problem needs data integration; Execute simple big data integration and processing on Hadoop and Spark platforms.

Sep 7th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Infonomics II: Business Information Management and Measurement (Coursera) Coursera
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Infonomics II: Business Information Management and Measurement (Coursera)

Even decades into the Information Age, accounting practices yet fail to recognize the financial value of information. Moreover, traditional asset management practices fail to recognize information as an asset to be managed with earnest discipline. This has led to a business culture of complacence, and the inability for most organizations to fully leverage available information assets. This second course in the two-part Infonomics series explores how and why to adapt well-honed asset management principles and practices to information, and how to apply accepted and new valuation models to gauge information’s potential and realized economic benefits.

Sep 14th 2026
4 Weeks
Foundations of mining non-structured medical data (Coursera) Coursera
EIT Digital

Foundations of mining non-structured medical data (Coursera)

The goal of this course is to understand the foundations of Big Data and the data that is being generated in the health domain and how the use of technology would help to integrate and exploit all those data to extract meaningful information that can be later used in different sectors of the health domain from physicians to management, from patients to care givers, etc.

Sep 7th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Big Data: el impacto de los datos masivos en la sociedad actual (Coursera) Coursera
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Big Data: el impacto de los datos masivos en la sociedad actual (Coursera)

La digitalización, la informática e Internet han producido lo que se puede denominar una revolución en la acumulación y utilización de datos. Podemos almacenar y conservar más datos que nunca antes en la historia. Podemos estudiarlos y analizarlos para tomar decisiones y mejorar procesos. Esta nueva capacidad tiene un enorme impacto en todos los ámbitos de la vida social.

Sep 7th 2026
4 Weeks
Media ethics & governance (Coursera) Coursera
University of Amsterdam

Media ethics & governance (Coursera)

This course explores some of the basic theories, models and concepts in the field of media ethics. We will introduce influential ethical theories and perspectives, explore changing societal demands and expectations of media creation and media use, and we will elaborate on existing ethical norms for media professionals. After following this course, you will be able to reflect on ethical dilemmas and develop a well-substantiated argumentation for ethical decision making in a variety of media-related contexts.

Sep 21st 2026
4 Weeks
Data Engineering Career Guide and Interview Preparation (Coursera) Coursera
IBM

Data Engineering Career Guide and Interview Preparation (Coursera)

This course is designed to prepare you to enter the job market as a data engineer. It provides guidance about the regular functions and tasks of data engineers and their place in the data ecosystem, as well as the opportunities of the profession and some options for career development. It explains practical techniques for creating essential job-seeking materials such as a resume and a portfolio, as well as auxiliary tools like a cover letter and an elevator pitch.

Sep 14th 2026
4 Weeks
Introduction to PySpark (Coursera) Coursera
Edureka

Introduction to PySpark (Coursera)

Welcome to Introduction to PySpark, a short course strategically crafted to empower you with the skills needed to assess the concepts of Big Data Management and efficiently perform data analysis using PySpark. Throughout this short course, you will acquire the expertise to perform data processing with PySpark, enabling you to efficiently handle large-scale datasets, conduct advanced analytics, and derive valuable insights from diverse data sources.

Sep 14th 2026
1 Week
Snowflake - SnowPro Core Certification Preparation (Coursera) Coursera
Board Infinity

Snowflake - SnowPro Core Certification Preparation (Coursera)

"Snowflake - SnowPro Core Certification Preparation" is a comprehensive course meticulously crafted to guide learners through the essentials of Snowflake, preparing them for the SnowPro Core Certification. Spanning three modules, the course begins with the fundamentals of Snowflake, exploring its architecture, data loading, and modeling. The second module delves into operational and management aspects, including account management, performance optimization, and security.

Sep 14th 2026
3 Weeks