Sam Alapati is a Big Data Principal Administrator at Sabre, in Southlake, Texas, just outside Dallas. He has been working in the big data area for the past few years, after a long stint as an Oracle database administrator. Sam works with Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, and now with Cassandra as part of his efforts to learn the role of NoSQL and other modern databases in the big data world. He has published several books on various areas of Oracle database administration, as well as a comprehensive handbook on administering Apache Hadoop.