The Women in Big Data (WiBD) Training Committee organizes technical training sponsored by WiBD industry sponsors. On November 30th 2016, SAP offered free SAP HANA Vora hands-on Training to our members. Tina Tang, Senior Director of Product Marketing at SAP, who is one of the WiBD Executive Committee members, opened the sessions by welcoming members to the SAP HQ in Silicon Valley. The 30 attendees (of whom approximately 50% were new to WiBD) were either introduced to WiBD by other members or were drawn by their own curiosity. In addition, women in networking and collaboration attended, as did three male supporters of WiBD.

The SAP HANA VORA Technical Training was delivered by Puntis Jifroodian, Senior Data Scientist at SAP. She started the class with the history and background of SAP and Big Data, spotlighting various industry use cases. Next came a review of Vora architecture, HANA Data Source, views and tables. The hands-on session included working with hierarchies of SAP HANA Vora (creating, querying, and joining hierarchies with other tables, as well as using UDFs with hierarchies); Vora Modeler; partitions and annotations; and more.

On top of gaining free technical training in various Big Data tools offered by our sponsors, attendees also heard from HR representatives who discussed open job requisitions, encouraging people looking for career opportunities to contact them directly (and several women did just that).

All in all, we had a blast, and feedback from attendees was very positive. To check out the training materials, please click here.

WiBD will continue to offer trainings on a regular basis. Watch for announcements.