Book Image

Spark for Data Science

By : Srinivas Duvvuri, Bikramaditya Singhal
Book Image

Spark for Data Science

By: Srinivas Duvvuri, Bikramaditya Singhal

Overview of this book

This is the era of Big Data. The words ‘Big Data’ implies big innovation and enables a competitive advantage for businesses. Apache Spark was designed to perform Big Data analytics at scale, and so Spark is equipped with the necessary algorithms and supports multiple programming languages. Whether you are a technologist, a data scientist, or a beginner to Big Data analytics, this book will provide you with all the skills necessary to perform statistical data analysis, data visualization, predictive modeling, and build scalable data products or solutions using Python, Scala, and R. With ample case studies and real-world examples, Spark for Data Science will help you ensure the successful execution of your data science projects.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Spark for Data Science
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 4.  Unified Data Access

Data integration from disparate data sources had always been a daunting feat. The three V's of big data and ever-shrinking processing time frames have made the task even more challenging. Delivering a clear view of well-curated data in near real time is extremely important for business. However, real-time curated data along with the ability to perform different operations such as ETL, ad hoc querying, and machine learning in a unified fashion is what is emerging as a key business differentiator.

Apache Spark was created to offer a single general-purpose engine that can process data from a variety of data sources and support large-scale data processing for various different operations. Spark enables developers to combine SQL, Streaming, graphs, and machine learning algorithms in a single workflow!

In the previous chapters, we discussed Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs) as well as DataFrames. In Chapter 3, Introduction to DataFrames, we introduced Spark...