Book Image

Building Big Data Pipelines with Apache Beam

By : Jan Lukavský
Book Image

Building Big Data Pipelines with Apache Beam

By: Jan Lukavský

Overview of this book

Apache Beam is an open source unified programming model for implementing and executing data processing pipelines, including Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL), batch, and stream processing. This book will help you to confidently build data processing pipelines with Apache Beam. You’ll start with an overview of Apache Beam and understand how to use it to implement basic pipelines. You’ll also learn how to test and run the pipelines efficiently. As you progress, you’ll explore how to structure your code for reusability and also use various Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). Later chapters will show you how to use schemas and query your data using (streaming) SQL. Finally, you’ll understand advanced Apache Beam concepts, such as implementing your own I/O connectors. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a deep understanding of the Apache Beam model and be able to apply it to solve problems.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
1
Section 1 Apache Beam: Essentials
5
Section 2 Apache Beam: Toward Improving Usability
9
Section 3 Apache Beam: Advanced Concepts

Task 1 – Calculating the K most frequent words in a stream of lines of text

In the previous chapter, we wrote a very basic pipeline that computed a simple (but surprisingly frequently used) functionality. The pipeline computed the number of occurrences of a word in a text document. We then transformed this to a data stream of lines, which was generated by a TestStream utility.

In the first task of this chapter, we want to extend this simple pipeline to be able to calculate and output only the K most frequent words in a stream of lines. So, let's first define the problem.

Defining the problem

Given an input data stream of lines of text, calculate the K most frequent words within a fixed time window of T seconds.

There are many practical applications for solving this problem. For example, if we had a store, we might want to compute daily statistics to find the products with the maximum profit. However, we have chosen the example of counting words in a text stream...