Book Image

Learning PySpark

By : Tomasz Drabas, Denny Lee
Book Image

Learning PySpark

By: Tomasz Drabas, Denny Lee

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. This book will show you how to leverage the power of Python and put it to use in the Spark ecosystem. You will start by getting a firm understanding of the Spark 2.0 architecture and how to set up a Python environment for Spark. You will get familiar with the modules available in PySpark. You will learn how to abstract data with RDDs and DataFrames and understand the streaming capabilities of PySpark. Also, you will get a thorough overview of machine learning capabilities of PySpark using ML and MLlib, graph processing using GraphFrames, and polyglot persistence using Blaze. Finally, you will learn how to deploy your applications to the cloud using the spark-submit command. By the end of this book, you will have established a firm understanding of the Spark Python API and how it can be used to build data-intensive applications.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Learning PySpark
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Introducing GraphFrames


GraphFrames utilizes the power of Apache Spark DataFrames to support general graph processing. Specifically, the vertices and edges are represented by DataFrames allowing us to store arbitrary data with each vertex and edge. While GraphFrames is similar to Spark's GraphX library, there are some key differences, including:

  • GraphFrames leverage the performance optimizations and simplicity of the DataFrame API.

  • By using the DataFrame API, GraphFrames now have Python, Java, and Scala APIs. GraphX is only accessible through Scala; now all its algorithms are available in Python and Java.

  • Note, at the time of writing, there was a bug preventing GraphFrames from working with Python3.x, hence we will be using Python2.x.

At the time of writing, GraphFrames is on version 0.3 and available as a Spark package (http://spark-packages.org) at https://spark-packages.org/package/graphframes/graphframes.

Tip

For more information about GraphFrames, please refer to Introducing GraphFra mes...