Book Image

Hands-On Big Data Analytics with PySpark

By : Rudy Lai, Bartłomiej Potaczek
Book Image

Hands-On Big Data Analytics with PySpark

By: Rudy Lai, Bartłomiej Potaczek

Overview of this book

Apache Spark is an open source parallel-processing framework that has been around for quite some time now. One of the many uses of Apache Spark is for data analytics applications across clustered computers. In this book, you will not only learn how to use Spark and the Python API to create high-performance analytics with big data, but also discover techniques for testing, immunizing, and parallelizing Spark jobs. You will learn how to source data from all popular data hosting platforms, including HDFS, Hive, JSON, and S3, and deal with large datasets with PySpark to gain practical big data experience. This book will help you work on prototypes on local machines and subsequently go on to handle messy data in production and at scale. This book covers installing and setting up PySpark, RDD operations, big data cleaning and wrangling, and aggregating and summarizing data into useful reports. You will also learn how to implement some practical and proven techniques to improve certain aspects of programming and administration in Apache Spark. By the end of the book, you will be able to build big data analytical solutions using the various PySpark offerings and also optimize them effectively.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Changing the design of jobs with wide dependencies

In this section, we will change the job that was performing the join on non-partitioned data. We'll be changing the design of jobs with wide dependencies.

In this section, we will cover the following topics:

  • Repartitioning DataFrames using a common partition key
  • Understanding a join with pre-partitioned data
  • Understanding that we avoided shuffle

We will be using the repartition method on the DataFrame using a common partition key. We saw that when issuing a join, repartitioning happens underneath. But often, when using Spark, we want to execute multiple operations on the DataFrame. So, when we perform the join with other datasets, hashPartitioning will need to be executed once again. If we do the partition at the beginning when the data is loaded, we will avoid partitioning again.

Here, we have our example test case,...