Book Image

Apache Spark 2.x Cookbook

By : Rishi Yadav
Book Image

Apache Spark 2.x Cookbook

By: Rishi Yadav

Overview of this book

While Apache Spark 1.x gained a lot of traction and adoption in the early years, Spark 2.x delivers notable improvements in the areas of API, schema awareness, Performance, Structured Streaming, and simplifying building blocks to build better, faster, smarter, and more accessible big data applications. This book uncovers all these features in the form of structured recipes to analyze and mature large and complex sets of data. Starting with installing and configuring Apache Spark with various cluster managers, you will learn to set up development environments. Further on, you will be introduced to working with RDDs, DataFrames and Datasets to operate on schema aware data, and real-time streaming with various sources such as Twitter Stream and Apache Kafka. You will also work through recipes on machine learning, including supervised learning, unsupervised learning & recommendation engines in Spark. Last but not least, the final few chapters delve deeper into the concepts of graph processing using GraphX, securing your implementations, cluster optimization, and troubleshooting.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Understanding SparkContext and SparkSession


SparkContext and SparkSession are the entry points into the world of Spark, so it is important you understand both well. 

SparkContext

SparkContext is the first object that a Spark program must create to access the cluster. In spark-shell, it is directly accessible via spark.sparkContext. Here's how you can programmatically create SparkContext in your Scala code:

import org.apache.spark.SparkContext
import org.apache.spark.SparkConf
val conf = new SparkConf().setAppName("my app").setMaster("master url")
new SparkContext(conf)

SparkSession

SparkContext, though still supported, was more relevant in the case of RDD (covered in the next recipe). As you will see in the rest of the book, different libraries have different wrappers around SparkContext, for example, HiveContext/SQLContext for Spark SQL, StreamingContext for Streaming, and so on. As all the libraries are moving toward DataSet/DataFrame, it makes sense to have a unified entry point for all these libraries as well, and that is SparkSession. SparkSession is available as spark in the spark-shell. Here's how you do it:

import org.apache.spark.SparkContext
import org.apache.spark.SparkConf
val sparkSession = SparkSession.builder.master("master url").appName("my app").getOrCreate()