Book Image

Hands-On Big Data Analytics with PySpark

By : Rudy Lai, Bartłomiej Potaczek
Book Image

Hands-On Big Data Analytics with PySpark

By: Rudy Lai, Bartłomiej Potaczek

Overview of this book

Apache Spark is an open source parallel-processing framework that has been around for quite some time now. One of the many uses of Apache Spark is for data analytics applications across clustered computers. In this book, you will not only learn how to use Spark and the Python API to create high-performance analytics with big data, but also discover techniques for testing, immunizing, and parallelizing Spark jobs. You will learn how to source data from all popular data hosting platforms, including HDFS, Hive, JSON, and S3, and deal with large datasets with PySpark to gain practical big data experience. This book will help you work on prototypes on local machines and subsequently go on to handle messy data in production and at scale. This book covers installing and setting up PySpark, RDD operations, big data cleaning and wrangling, and aggregating and summarizing data into useful reports. You will also learn how to implement some practical and proven techniques to improve certain aspects of programming and administration in Apache Spark. By the end of the book, you will be able to build big data analytical solutions using the various PySpark offerings and also optimize them effectively.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Avoiding transformations

In this section, we will look at the transformations that should be avoided. Here, we will focus on one particular transformation.

We will start by understanding the groupBy API. Then, we will investigate data partitioning when using groupBy, and then we will look at what a skew partition is and why should we avoid skew partitions.

Here, we are creating a list of transactions. UserTransaction is another model class that includes userId and amount. The following code block shows a typical transaction where we are creating a list of five transactions:

test("should trigger computations using actions") {
//given
val input = spark.makeRDD(
List(
UserTransaction(userId = "A", amount = 1001),
UserTransaction(userId = "A", amount = 100),
UserTransaction(userId = "A", amount = 102),
UserTransaction...