Atdhe Buja is a certified ethical hacker, DBA (MCITP, OCA11g), and developer with good management skills. He is a DBA at the Agency for Information Society / Ministry of Public Administration, where he also manages some projects of e-governance and has more than 10 years' experience working on SQL Server.

Atdhe is a regular columnist for UBT News. Currently, he holds an MSc degree in computer science and engineering and has a bachelor's degree in management and information. He specializes in and is certified in many technologies, such as SQL Server (all versions), Oracle 11g, CEH, Windows Server, MS Project, SCOM 2012 R2, BizTalk, and integration business processes.

He was the reviewer of the book, Microsoft SQL Server 2012 with Hadoop, published by Packt Publishing. His capabilities go beyond the aforementioned knowledge!

Amit Gurdasani is a software engineer at Amazon. He architects distributed systems to process product catalogue data. Prior to building high-throughput systems at Amazon, he was working on the entire software stack, both as a systems-level developer at Ericsson and IBM as well as an application developer at Manhattan Associates. He maintains a strong interest in bulk data processing, data streaming, and service-oriented software architectures.

Jakob Homan has been involved with big data and the Apache Hadoop ecosystem for more than 5 years. He is a Hadoop committer as well as a committer for the Apache Giraph, Spark, Kafka, and Tajo projects, and is a PMC member. He has worked in bringing all these systems to scale at Yahoo! and LinkedIn.

James Lampton is a seasoned practitioner of all things data (big or small) with 10 years of hands-on experience in building and using large-scale data storage and processing platforms. He is a believer in holistic approaches to solving problems using the right tool for the right job. His favorite tools include Python, Java, Hadoop, Pig, Storm, and SQL (which sometimes I like and sometimes I don't). He has recently completed his PhD from the University of Maryland with the release of Pig Squeal: a mechanism for running Pig scripts on Storm.

Davide Setti, after graduating in physics from the University of Trento, joined the SoNet research unit at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento, where he applied large-scale data analysis techniques to understand people's behaviors in social networks and large collaborative projects such as Wikipedia.

In 2010, Davide moved to Fondazione, where he led the development of data analytic tools to support research on civic media, citizen journalism, and digital media.

In 2013, Davide became the CTO of SpazioDati, where he leads the development of tools to perform semantic analysis of massive amounts of data in the business information sector.

When not solving hard problems, Davide enjoys taking care of his family vineyard and playing with his two children.