Book Image

Learning PySpark

By : Tomasz Drabas, Denny Lee
Book Image

Learning PySpark

By: Tomasz Drabas, Denny Lee

Overview of this book

Apache Spark is an open source framework for efficient cluster computing with a strong interface for data parallelism and fault tolerance. This book will show you how to leverage the power of Python and put it to use in the Spark ecosystem. You will start by getting a firm understanding of the Spark 2.0 architecture and how to set up a Python environment for Spark. You will get familiar with the modules available in PySpark. You will learn how to abstract data with RDDs and DataFrames and understand the streaming capabilities of PySpark. Also, you will get a thorough overview of machine learning capabilities of PySpark using ML and MLlib, graph processing using GraphFrames, and polyglot persistence using Blaze. Finally, you will learn how to deploy your applications to the cloud using the spark-submit command. By the end of this book, you will have established a firm understanding of the Spark Python API and how it can be used to build data-intensive applications.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Learning PySpark
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Chapter 2. Resilient Distributed Datasets

Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs) are a distributed collection of immutable JVM objects that allow you to perform calculations very quickly, and they are the backbone of Apache Spark.

As the name suggests, the dataset is distributed; it is split into chunks based on some key and distributed to executor nodes. Doing so allows for running calculations against such datasets very quickly. Also, as already mentioned in Chapter 1, Understanding Spark, RDDs keep track (log) of all the transformations applied to each chunk to speed up the computations and provide a fallback if things go wrong and that portion of the data is lost; in such cases, RDDs can recompute the data. This data lineage is another line of defense against data loss, a complement to data replication.

The following topics are covered in this chapter:

  • Internal workings of an RDD

  • Creating RDDs

  • Global versus local scopes

  • Transformations

  • Actions