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 the evolution of schema awareness


Spark can process data from various data sources, such as HDFS, Cassandra, and relational databases. Big data frameworks (unlike relational database systems) do not enforce a schema while writing data into it. HDFS is a perfect example of where any arbitrary file is welcome during the write phase. The same is true with Amazon S3. Reading data is a different story, however. You need to give some structure to even completely unstructured data to make sense out of it. With this structured data, SQL comes in very handy, when it comes to making sense out of some data.

Getting ready

Spark SQL is a component of the Spark ecosystem, introduced in Spark 1.0 for the first time. It incorporates a project named Shark, which was an attempt to make Hive run on Spark.

Hive is essentially a relational abstraction; it converts SQL queries into MapReduce jobs. See the following figure:

Shark replaced the MapReduce part with Spark while retaining most of the code...