Book Image

Fast Data Processing with Spark 2 - Third Edition

By : Holden Karau
Book Image

Fast Data Processing with Spark 2 - Third Edition

By: Holden Karau

Overview of this book

When people want a way to process big data at speed, Spark is invariably the solution. With its ease of development (in comparison to the relative complexity of Hadoop), it’s unsurprising that it’s becoming popular with data analysts and engineers everywhere. Beginning with the fundamentals, we’ll show you how to get set up with Spark with minimum fuss. You’ll then get to grips with some simple APIs before investigating machine learning and graph processing – throughout we’ll make sure you know exactly how to apply your knowledge. You will also learn how to use the Spark shell, how to load data before finding out how to build and run your own Spark applications. Discover how to manipulate your RDD and get stuck into a range of DataFrame APIs. As if that’s not enough, you’ll also learn some useful Machine Learning algorithms with the help of Spark MLlib and integrating Spark with R. We’ll also make sure you’re confident and prepared for graph processing, as you learn more about the GraphX API.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Fast Data Processing with Spark 2 Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 4. Creating a SparkSession Object

This chapter will cover how to create a SparkSession object in your cluster. A SparkSession object represents the connection to a Spark cluster (local or remote) and provides the entry point to interact with Spark. We need to create SparkSession so that we can interact with Spark and distribute our jobs. In Chapter 2, Using the Spark Shell, we interacted with Spark through the Spark shell which helped us create a SparkSession object and a SparkContext object. Now you can create RDDs, broadcast variables, and counters, and actually do fun things with your data. The Spark shell serves as an example of how to interact with the Spark cluster through the SparkSession and SparkContext object.

For a client to establish a connection to the Spark cluster, the SparkSession object needs some basic information, which is given here:

  • Master URL: This URL can be local[n] for local mode, Spark://[sparkip] for the Spark server, or mesos://path for a Mesos cluster

  • ...