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 2 – Calculating the maximal length of a word in a stream

This is a similar example. In the previous task, we wanted to calculate the K most frequent words in a stream for a fixed time window. How would our solution change if our task was to calculate this from the beginning of the stream? Let's define the problem.

Defining the problem

Given an input data stream of lines of text, calculate the longest word ever seen in this stream. Start with an empty word value; once a longer word is seen, immediately output the new longest word.

Discussing the problem decomposition

Although the logic seems to be similar to the previous task, it can be simplified as follows:

Figure 2.3 – The problem decomposition

Note, there are two main differences from the previous task:

  • We must compute the word with the longest length; although this could be viewed as a Top transform, with K equal to one, Beam has a specific transform for that...