Book Image

Big Data Analysis with Python

By : Ivan Marin, Ankit Shukla, Sarang VK
Book Image

Big Data Analysis with Python

By: Ivan Marin, Ankit Shukla, Sarang VK

Overview of this book

Processing big data in real time is challenging due to scalability, information inconsistency, and fault tolerance. Big Data Analysis with Python teaches you how to use tools that can control this data avalanche for you. With this book, you'll learn practical techniques to aggregate data into useful dimensions for posterior analysis, extract statistical measurements, and transform datasets into features for other systems. The book begins with an introduction to data manipulation in Python using pandas. You'll then get familiar with statistical analysis and plotting techniques. With multiple hands-on activities in store, you'll be able to analyze data that is distributed on several computers by using Dask. As you progress, you'll study how to aggregate data for plots when the entire data cannot be accommodated in memory. You'll also explore Hadoop (HDFS and YARN), which will help you tackle larger datasets. The book also covers Spark and explains how it interacts with other tools. By the end of this book, you'll be able to bootstrap your own Python environment, process large files, and manipulate data to generate statistics, metrics, and graphs.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
Big Data Analysis with Python
Preface

Hadoop


Apache Hadoop is a set of software components created for the parallel storage and computation of large volumes of data. The main idea at the time of its inception was to use commonly available computers in a distributed fashion, with high resiliency against failure and distributed computation. With its success, more high-end computers started to be used on Hadoop clusters, although commodity hardware is still a common use case.

By parallel storage, we mean any system that stores and retrieves stored data in a parallel fashion, using several nodes interconnected by a network.

Hadoop is composed of the following:

  • Hadoop Common: the basic common Hadoop items

  • Hadoop YARN: a resource and job manager

  • Hadoop MapReduce: a large-scale parallel processing engine

  • Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS): as the name suggests, HDFS is a file system that can be distributed over several machines, using local disks, to create a large storage pool:

    Figure 3.1: Architecture of HDFS

Another important component...