A more appropriate title for the class would be "a brief introduction to Databricks". Very disappointing class. There are Youtube tutorials out there with more content than this class. This is one of the only classes that I have ever taken on Coursera where I could complete 2 weeks worth of all the lectures, assignments, and quizzes in a Sunday afternoon. I think this class was hastily slapped together, there is so little content. If your organization uses Spark and is not a Databricks client (as mine is), you will learn absolutely nothing here. The lectures are extremely short and devoid of any substance. I am still looking for a good online class in Spark. It certainly is not this one.

very superficial using databricks. The courses misses depth to be of any use. It is more a Databricks commercial. Executing pieces of available course without sufficient practice

it was an interesting course in as much as it has got me interested in spark and it was doable. I think it tried to cover too much ground in not enough depth. After completing I have gone off and am doing the datacamp spark courses which are also interesting.

The implementation stuff in databricks was really annoying in that the platform used a ´´ whatever it actually was - i still dont know!!!! i just had to copy and paste it every time...it was never mentioned that it didnt work like sql with [] or that it wasnt a apostrophe or whatever.

The use of jupyter notebooks itself was nice, and the exercises were also nice as a learning exercise, i got a lot out of them by having to actually find out some things and see ah ha thats how it works.

The presenters were very good. I could be critical of a few points but i wont as i am guessing its there first mooc or so, and my personal opinions are irrelevant in my annoyances :-)

All in all a nice course as it has good me interested and actually up and running with spark, so i can see where and how it fits and will look further...

Many thansk!

The first module felt more like a sales pitch for DataBricks than anything else, and the last module was about machine learning, and not distributed computing. So, in my opinion, only 2 of the weeks attempted to focus on distributed computing, but even they failed. The course seemed to focus way more on SQL, and less on Spark and how it works. Sure, there were pieces of information on how to how to change the number of partitions, but how partitions work, or how Spark actually handles distributed computing was lackluster at best. If you have even a rudimentary understanding of data engineering, you should be able to ace this course with minimal effort, but you'll likely not take much away from it. Great course for absolute beginners though.

I did not like the flow of content explained! I expected a lot from this course but at then end I just have basic idea of queries at the end of the course! Nothing in deep about Spark's core concepts. Also the assignment quiz on queries were very weird and not properly formed! The Week 3 assignmnet was not displaying feedback! It was a really messy course!

The course assumed that the learner knows a lot of things about apache spark beforehand. It did not explain concepts very deeply, given very brief overview in a very haste manner. There should have been given some solid understanding of concepts.

This course is highly outdated and almost unusable. None of the forum questions regarding the content is being answered either.

There is no way to take the test, the link doesn't work, it's absurd to have to pay and not be able to obtain a certificate

Broken course content

I highly recommend this course for anyone in the BI and Data space interested in learning Spark. The course gives an easy to understand to the framework and applicable hands on examples.

Great introduction to Spark with Databricks that seems to be an intuituve tool! Really cool to do the link between SQL and Data Science with a basic ML example!

This has been an amazing course. What is worth mentioning is how the content was delivered. Nice hands on. Highly recommended for anyone who is new to Spark

Extremely informative for those who are seeking to learn the fundamentals for distributed computing using Spark SQL.

very useful

A highly polished presentation, however I still feel only a superficial understanding of partitions and other Spark optimisation techniques. In Course 4 of this Specialization, I had to google myself how best to set partition parameters (ie. how to choose a value) which perhaps shouldve been covered in this course.

High-level definitions are given, but not so much in way of actual application to clarify the concepts.

The course was too introductory.

It is named "Distributed Computing with Spark SQL" but it seems to be a DataBricks advertisement course. It use their platform, it only shows their tools. Also, after starting this course I was contacted to my email by a DataBricks seller... I wasn't expecting this course to be a way to collect people information to spam with selling emails.

The Peer Review assignment ask you to upload a file produced by DataBricks which includes your email, so your reviewer is able to contact you by your personal/work email!

I COULDNT LOAD THE FILE IN DATA BRICKS AND COULDNT GET A RESPONSE SO I COULDNT COMPLETE THE CERTIFICATE

This course is not good for practice as mounting part is not working properly its too problematic

Amazing course that really cuts through the fundamentals of using distributed computing power to analyze and manipulate data. Well organised structure on fundamentals

A good course to learn the fundamentals of databricks, distribtued computing, and spark unified analytics platform.

Solid course. Taught me lots of useful things

this course was very interesting and helped me to better understand how I can use SQL.

Expecting more advance material

This course was a good introduction to Spark SQL, but they tried to cram too much into one course and ended up not being very clear about most of the material. This could be broken down into a specialization and it would be more effective. I got through by Googling a lot, and I already have a background in Machine Learning, but for someone new to the material it would be overwhelming. I wish they'd explained things like how parallelization works more effectively instead of rushing through too much material. The instructors clearly know their stuff, but they need to work on breaking these concepts down for people who don't have much experience in computer science.

Even though the course is informative, it lacks support from course instructors. You would find many unanswered questions on the discussion board. Coursera should look into that.