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 17 – Implementing MaxWordLength in the Python SDK

We will use the well-known examples, which have mostly been implemented using the Java SDK, from Chapter 2, Implementing, Testing, and Deploying Basic Pipelines, and Chapter 3, Implementing Pipelines Using Stateful Processing. We will also build on our knowledge from Chapter 4, Structuring Code for Reusability, regarding using user-defined PTransforms for better reusability and testing.

Our first complete task will be the task we implemented as Task 2 in Chapter 2, Implementing, Testing, and Deploying Basic Pipelines, but as always, for clarity, we will restate the problem here.

Problem definition

Given an input data stream of lines of text, calculate the longest word found in this stream. Start with an empty word; once a longer word is seen, output the newly found candidate.

Problem decomposition discussion

From a logical perspective, this problem is the same as in the case of Task 2. So, let's focus...