Book Image

Scala and Spark for Big Data Analytics

By : Md. Rezaul Karim, Sridhar Alla
Book Image

Scala and Spark for Big Data Analytics

By: Md. Rezaul Karim, Sridhar Alla

Overview of this book

Scala has been observing wide adoption over the past few years, especially in the field of data science and analytics. Spark, built on Scala, has gained a lot of recognition and is being used widely in productions. Thus, if you want to leverage the power of Scala and Spark to make sense of big data, this book is for you. The first part introduces you to Scala, helping you understand the object-oriented and functional programming concepts needed for Spark application development. It then moves on to Spark to cover the basic abstractions using RDD and DataFrame. This will help you develop scalable and fault-tolerant streaming applications by analyzing structured and unstructured data using SparkSQL, GraphX, and Spark structured streaming. Finally, the book moves on to some advanced topics, such as monitoring, configuration, debugging, testing, and deployment. You will also learn how to develop Spark applications using SparkR and PySpark APIs, interactive data analytics using Zeppelin, and in-memory data processing with Alluxio. By the end of this book, you will have a thorough understanding of Spark, and you will be able to perform full-stack data analytics with a feel that no amount of data is too big.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Introduction to SparkR

R is one of the most popular statistical programming languages with a number of exciting features that support statistical computing, data processing, and machine learning tasks. However, processing large-scale datasets in R is usually tedious as the runtime is single-threaded. As a result, only datasets that fit in someone's machine memory can be processed. Considering this limitation and for getting the full flavor of Spark in R, SparkR was initially developed at the AMPLab as a lightweight frontend of R to Apache Spark and using Spark's distributed computation engine.

This way it enables the R programmer to use Spark from RStudio for large-scale data analysis from the R shell. In Spark 2.1.0, SparkR provides a distributed data frame implementation that supports operations such as selection, filtering, and aggregation. This is somewhat similar...