Working with data at scale and handling large data volumes significantly changes data analysis and processing. To get an intuition for the problems with data at scale, let's look at a simple problem of computing the median value of numbers. The median is the mid-point that splits the data into two parts. Use the following numbers as an example:
8 1 2 7 9 0 5
We will first sort the numbers in ascending order:
0 1 2 5 7 8 9
The median value is 5, because it splits the data into two halves, where half of the values are below five and the another half are above five.
Now, let's imagine that the count of these numbers was of the order of billions. Let's explore a solution to this problem in Scala REPL. Traditionally, we would need to do the following steps to compute the median value:
- Load the data into memory on a single computer's...