Book Image

Scala and Spark for Big Data Analytics

By : Md. Rezaul Karim, Sridhar Alla
Book Image

Scala and Spark for Big Data Analytics

By: Md. Rezaul Karim, Sridhar Alla

Overview of this book

Scala has been observing wide adoption over the past few years, especially in the field of data science and analytics. Spark, built on Scala, has gained a lot of recognition and is being used widely in productions. Thus, if you want to leverage the power of Scala and Spark to make sense of big data, this book is for you. The first part introduces you to Scala, helping you understand the object-oriented and functional programming concepts needed for Spark application development. It then moves on to Spark to cover the basic abstractions using RDD and DataFrame. This will help you develop scalable and fault-tolerant streaming applications by analyzing structured and unstructured data using SparkSQL, GraphX, and Spark structured streaming. Finally, the book moves on to some advanced topics, such as monitoring, configuration, debugging, testing, and deployment. You will also learn how to develop Spark applications using SparkR and PySpark APIs, interactive data analytics using Zeppelin, and in-memory data processing with Alluxio. By the end of this book, you will have a thorough understanding of Spark, and you will be able to perform full-stack data analytics with a feel that no amount of data is too big.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Using the Spark shell

Spark shell provides a simple way to perform interactive analysis of data. It also enables you to learn the Spark APIs by quickly trying out various APIs. In addition, the similarity to Scala shell and support for Scala APIs also lets you also adapt quickly to Scala language constructs and make better use of Spark APIs.

Spark shell implements the concept of read-evaluate-print-loop (REPL), which allows you to interact with the shell by typing in code which is evaluated. The result is then printed on the console, without needing to be compiled, so building executable code.

Start it by running the following in the directory where you installed Spark:

./bin/spark-shell

Spark shell launches and the Spark shell automatically creates the SparkSession and SparkContext objects. The SparkSession is available as a Spark and the SparkContext is available as sc.

spark...