Book Image

Big Data Analytics

By : Venkat Ankam
Book Image

Big Data Analytics

By: Venkat Ankam

Overview of this book

Big Data Analytics book aims at providing the fundamentals of Apache Spark and Hadoop. All Spark components – Spark Core, Spark SQL, DataFrames, Data sets, Conventional Streaming, Structured Streaming, MLlib, Graphx and Hadoop core components – HDFS, MapReduce and Yarn are explored in greater depth with implementation examples on Spark + Hadoop clusters. It is moving away from MapReduce to Spark. So, advantages of Spark over MapReduce are explained at great depth to reap benefits of in-memory speeds. DataFrames API, Data Sources API and new Data set API are explained for building Big Data analytical applications. Real-time data analytics using Spark Streaming with Apache Kafka and HBase is covered to help building streaming applications. New Structured streaming concept is explained with an IOT (Internet of Things) use case. Machine learning techniques are covered using MLLib, ML Pipelines and SparkR and Graph Analytics are covered with GraphX and GraphFrames components of Spark. Readers will also get an opportunity to get started with web based notebooks such as Jupyter, Apache Zeppelin and data flow tool Apache NiFi to analyze and visualize data.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Big Data Analytics
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 4. Big Data Analytics with Spark SQL, DataFrames, and Datasets

As per the Spark Summit presentation by Matei Zaharia, creator of Apache Spark (http://www.slideshare.net/databricks/spark-summit-eu-2015-matei-zaharia-keynote), Spark SQL and DataFrames are the most used components of an entire Spark ecosystem. This indicates Spark SQL is one of the key components used for Big Data Analytics by companies.

Users of Spark have three different APIs to interact with distributed collections of data:

  • RDD API allows users to work with objects of their choice and express transformations as lambda functions

  • DataFrames API provides high-level relational operations and an optimized runtime, at the expense of type-safety

  • Dataset API that combines the worlds of RDD and DataFrames

We have learned how to use RDD API in Chapter 3, Deep Dive into Apache Spark. In this chapter, let's understand the in-depth concepts of Spark SQL including exploring the Data Sources API, the DataFrame API, the Dataset API,...