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 8. Spark SQL

Spark SQL provides an important feature in the Spark ecosystem, that is, integration with different data sources as well as the capability to interact with other subsystems, such as visualization. As we know, in modern data stacks, no stack is an island by itself, and in many ways, the versatility of integration with other components is an important capability. Obviously, the role of Spark SQL is not to replace SQL databases. We see it more as a versatile query interface for Spark data that complements the data wrangling and input capabilities of Spark. The ability to scale complex data operations makes sense only when one can utilize the results in flexible ways, and Spark SQL achieves that. We'll cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • The Spark SQL architecture

  • Datasets/DataFrames

  • SQL programming