DSAN 6000: Big Data and Cloud Computing

Fall 2026, Georgetown University

Big Data: "When the size of the data itself becomes part of the engineering problem"

Can be processed on single machine?	No	Medium (Parallel Processing)	Big! Parallel + Distributed Processing
Can be processed on single machine?	Yes	Small (Your Laptop)	Medium (Data Streaming)
		Yes	No
		Can be stored on single machine?

Holidays / Irregular Lecture Days

Please keep in mind the following dates, when course meetings will be shifted or skipped:

Tuesday, September 8: The Week 2 meeting for the Monday section (Section 01) falls on a Tuesday, as the University follows a Monday schedule on this day (due to the Labor Day holiday on Monday, September 7)
Monday, October 12 and Thursday, October 15: No class due to Georgetown’s Mid-Semester Holiday
Monday, November 23 and Thursday, November 26: No class due to Georgetown’s 2026 Fall Recess

Welcome! This webpage contains slides, resources, and auxiliary writeups for DSAN 6000: Big Data and Cloud Computing, Fall 2026 at Georgetown University.

Section 01 of the course takes place on Wednesday from 3:30pm to 6:00pm in Walsh 394. Use the links in the sidebar, or in the table below, to explore the content for a particular week.

Title	Date
Week 1: Course Overview	Aug 31
Week 2: Using Cloud Resources for Horizontal Scaling	Sep 8
Week 3: Separating Data from Computation for Parallel Processing	Sep 14
Week 4: Columnar Data Formats and DuckDB	Sep 21
Week 5: From DuckDB to Polars	Sep 28
Week 6: Data Engineering	Oct 5
Week 7: Introduction to Spark	Oct 19
Week 8: SparkML, Spark NLP	Oct 26
Week 9: In-Class Midterm	Nov 2
Week 10: ETL Pipeline Orchestration with Prefect	Nov 9
Week 11: Vector Databases	Nov 16
Week 12: Final Project Preparation	Nov 30
Week 13: Final Project Presentations	Dec 7