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 big data

As seen in the preceding section, data analytics incorporates techniques, tools, and methodologies to explore and analyze data to produce quantifiable outcomes for the business. The outcome could be a simple choice of a color to paint the storefront or more complicated predictions of customer behavior. As businesses grow, more and more varieties of analytics are coming into the picture. In 1980s or 1990s , all we could get was what was available in a SQL Data Warehouse; nowadays a lot of external factors are all playing an important role in influencing the way businesses run.

Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Verizon, Macy's, and Whole Foods are all companies that run their business using data analytics and base many of the decisions on it. Think about what kind of data they are collecting, how much data they might be collecting, and then how they might...