Book Image

PySpark Cookbook

By : Denny Lee, Tomasz Drabas
Book Image

PySpark Cookbook

By: Denny Lee, Tomasz Drabas

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. The PySpark Cookbook presents effective and time-saving recipes for leveraging the power of Python and putting it to use in the Spark ecosystem. You’ll start by learning the Apache Spark architecture and how to set up a Python environment for Spark. You’ll then get familiar with the modules available in PySpark and start using them effortlessly. In addition to this, you’ll discover how to abstract data with RDDs and DataFrames, and understand the streaming capabilities of PySpark. You’ll then move on to using ML and MLlib in order to solve any problems related to the machine learning capabilities of PySpark and use GraphFrames to solve graph-processing problems. Finally, you will explore how to deploy your applications to the cloud using the spark-submit command. By the end of this book, you will be able to use the Python API for Apache Spark to solve any problems associated with building data-intensive applications.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Installing GraphFrames


Under the hood of GraphFrames are two Spark DataFrames: one for the vertices and other one for the edges. GraphFrames might be thought of as the next generation of Spark's GraphX library, with some major improvements over the latter:

  • GraphFrames leverages the performance optimizations and simplicity of the DataFrame API.
  • By using the DataFrame API, GraphFrames can be interacted with through Python, Java, and Scala APIs. In contrast, GraphX was only available through the Scala interface.

You can find the latest information on GraphFrames within the GraphFrames overview at https://graphframes.github.io/

Getting ready

We require a working installation of Spark. This means that you would have followed the steps outlined in Chapter 1, Installing and Configuring Spark. As a reminder, to start the PySpark shell for your local Spark cluster, you can run the following command:

./bin/pyspark --master local[n]

Where n is the number of cores. 

How to do it...

If you are running your...