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 9. Polyglot Persistence with Blaze

Our world is complex and no single approach exists that solves all problems. Likewise, in the data world one cannot solve all problems with one piece of technology.

Nowadays, any big technology company uses (in one form or another) a MapReduce paradigm to sift through terabytes (or even petabytes) of data collected daily. On the other hand, it is much easier to store, retrieve, extend, and update information about products in a document-type database (such as MongoDB) than it is in a relational database. Yet, persisting transaction records in a relational database aids later data summarizing and reporting.

Even these simple examples show that solving a vast array of business problems requires adapting to different technologies. This means that you, as a database manager, data scientist, or data engineer, would have to learn all of these separately if you were to solve your problems with the tools that are designed to solve them easily. This, however...