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

Writing Parquet Files


The Parquet data format (https://parquet.apache.org/) is binary, columnar storage that can be used by different tools, including Hadoop and Spark. It was built to support compression, to enable higher performance and storage use. Its column-oriented design helps with data selection for performance, as only the data in the required columns are retrieved, instead of searching for the data and discarding values in rows that are not required, reducing the retrieval time for big data scenarios, where the data is distributed and on disk. Parquet files can also be read and written by external applications, with a C++ library, and even directly from pandas.

The Parquet library is currently being developed with the Arrow project (https://arrow.apache.org/).

When considering more complex queries in Spark, storing the data in Parquet format can increase performance, especially when the queries need to search a massive dataset. Compression helps to decrease the data volume that needs...