In the previous section, we stated out that Datasets (at the time of writing this book) are only available in Scala or Java. However, we are providing the following context to better understand the direction of Spark 2.0.

Datasets were introduced in 2015 as part of the Apache Spark 1.6 release. The goal for datasets was to provide a type-safe, programming interface. This allowed developers to work with semi-structured data (like JSON or key-value pairs) with compile time type safety (that is, production applications can be checked for errors before they run). Part of the reason why Python does not implement a Dataset API is because Python is not a type-safe language.

Just as important, the Datasets API contain high-level domain specific language operations such as sum(), avg(), join(), and group(). This latter trait means that you have the flexibility of traditional Spark RDDs but the code is also easier to express, read, and write. Similar to DataFrames, Datasets can take advantage of Spark's catalyst optimizer by exposing expressions and data fields to a query planner and making use of Tungsten's fast in-memory encoding.

The history of the Spark APIs is denoted in the following diagram noting the progression from RDD to DataFrame to Dataset:

Source: From Webinar Apache Spark 1.5: What is the difference between a DataFrame and a RDD? http://bit.ly/29JPJSA

The unification of the DataFrame and Dataset APIs has the potential of creating breaking changes to backwards compatibility. This was one of the main reasons Apache Spark 2.0 was a major release (as opposed to a 1.x minor release which would have minimized any breaking changes). As you can see from the following diagram, DataFrame and Dataset both belong to the new Dataset API introduced as part of Apache Spark 2.0:

Source: A Tale of Three Apache Spark APIs: RDDs, DataFrames, and Datasets http://bit.ly/2accSNA

As noted previously, the Dataset API provides a type-safe, object-oriented programming interface. Datasets can take advantage of the Catalyst optimizer by exposing expressions and data fields to the query planner and Project Tungsten's Fast In-memory encoding. But with DataFrame and Dataset now unified as part of Apache Spark 2.0, DataFrame is now an alias for the Dataset Untyped API. More specifically:

DataFrame = Dataset[Row]

In the past, you would potentially work with SparkConf, SparkContext, SQLContext, and HiveContext to execute your various Spark queries for configuration, Spark context, SQL context, and Hive context respectively. The SparkSession is essentially the combination of these contexts including StreamingContext.

For example, instead of writing:

df = sqlContext.read \
    .format('json').load('py/test/sql/people.json')

now you can write:

df = spark.read.format('json').load('py/test/sql/people.json')

or:

df = spark.read.json('py/test/sql/people.json')

The SparkSession is now the entry point for reading data, working with metadata, configuring the session, and managing the cluster resources.

The fundamental observation of the computer hardware landscape when the project started was that, while there were improvements in price per performance in RAM memory, disk, and (to an extent) network interfaces, the price per performance advancements for CPUs were not the same. Though hardware manufacturers could put more cores in each socket (i.e. improve performance through parallelization), there were no significant improvements in the actual core speed.

Project Tungsten was introduced in 2015 to make significant changes to the Spark engine with the focus on improving performance. The first phase of these improvements focused on the following facets:

The following diagram is the updated Catalyst engine to denote the inclusion of Datasets. As you see at the right of the diagram (right of the Cost Model), Code Generation is used against the selected physical plans to generate the underlying RDDs:

Source: Structuring Spark: DataFrames, Datasets, and Streaming http://bit.ly/2cJ508x

As part of Tungsten Phase 2, there is the push into whole-stage code generation. That is, the Spark engine will now generate the byte code at compile time for the entire Spark stage instead of just for specific jobs or tasks. The primary facets surrounding these improvements include:

For a more in-depth review of Project Tungsten, please refer to:

As quoted by Reynold Xin during Spark Summit East 2016:

This is the underlying foundation for building Structured Streaming. While streaming is powerful, one of the key issues is that streaming can be difficult to build and maintain. While companies such as Uber, Netflix, and Pinterest have Spark Streaming applications running in production, they also have dedicated teams to ensure the systems are highly available.

As implied previously, there are many things that can go wrong when operating Spark Streaming (and any streaming system for that matter) including (but not limited to) late events, partial outputs to the final data source, state recovery on failure, and/or distributed reads/writes:

Source: A Deep Dive into Structured Streaming http://bit.ly/2aHt1w0

Therefore, to simplify Spark Streaming, there is now a single API that addresses both batch and streaming within the Apache Spark 2.0 release. More succinctly, the high-level streaming API is now built on top of the Apache Spark SQL Engine. It runs the same queries as you would with Datasets/DataFrames providing you with all the performance and optimization benefits as well as benefits such as event time, windowing, sessions, sources, and sinks.

Altogether, Apache Spark 2.0 not only unified DataFrames and Datasets but also unified streaming, interactive, and batch queries. This opens a whole new set of use cases including the ability to aggregate data into a stream and then serving it using traditional JDBC/ODBC, to change queries at run time, and/or to build and apply ML models in for many scenario in a variety of latency use cases:

Source: Apache Spark Key Terms, Explained https://databricks.com/blog/2016/06/22/apache-spark-key-terms-explained.html.

Together, you can now build end-to-end continuous applications, in which you can issue the same queries to batch processing as to real-time data, perform ETL, generate reports, update or track specific data in the stream.