Book Image

Learning Apache Spark 2

Book Image

Learning Apache Spark 2

Overview of this book

Apache Spark has seen an unprecedented growth in terms of its adoption over the last few years, mainly because of its speed, diversity and real-time data processing capabilities. It has quickly become the preferred choice of tool for many Big Data professionals looking to find quick insights from large chunks of data. This book introduces you to the Apache Spark framework, and familiarizes you with all the latest features and capabilities introduced in Spark 2. Starting with a detailed introduction to Spark’s architecture and the installation procedure, this book covers everything you need to know about the Spark framework in the most practical manner. You will learn how to perform the basic ETL activities using Spark, and work with different components of Spark such as Spark SQL, as well as the Dataset and DataFrame APIs for manipulating your data. Then, you will perform machine learning using Spark MLlib, as well as perform streaming analytics and graph processing using the Spark Streaming and GraphX modules respectively. The book also gives special emphasis on deploying your Spark models, and how they can be operated in a clustered mode. During the course of the book, you will come across implementations of different real-world use-cases and examples, giving you the hands-on knowledge you need to use Apache Spark in the best possible manner.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Why are Graphs elegant?


Graphs are elegant and provide a simpler way to frame complex problems within the computer sciences domain. Graph problems are typically NP-Complete and are therefore useful for study in computational complexity. Graphs are used to model different scenarios from routing algorithms to finite state machines, and if you go into a bit more detail, you will see that graph algorithms can be parallelized in a much better way.

Google realized the importance of graphs, visualized the web as a series of connected web pages via hyperlinks, and created a competitive advantage by building the fastest search engine around.

The simplicity of Graph computation can be gauged from the fact that all the algorithms operate in the same pattern, that is, access the directly connected neighbors of a particular vertex. The beauty of this approach is that you can easily parallelize this over an MPP environment.

Consider the following graph:

You can have any particular algorithm that...