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

Interactive programming using InteractiveRunner

The Python SDK lets us develop pipelines in Read-Evaluate-Print-Loop (REPL) fashion. This is especially useful for various data science tools, such as Python notebooks. This book focuses on the data engineering part, so we will not install the complete notebook. Instead, will use a command-line utility. This should be able to demonstrate the benefits of interactive programming.

We will run IPython for a better user experience by using the following command:

$ kubectl exec -it packt-beam-5686785d65-2ww5m -- /bin/bash -c "python3 \'which ipython3\'"

This will create an IPython console whose prompt looks like this:

Python 3.7.12 (default, Sep  8 2021, 01:20:16) 
Type 'copyright', 'credits' or 'license' for more information
IPython 7.27.0 -- An enhanced Interactive Python. Type '?' for help.
 
In [1]:

Now, we can start REPL coding. We have included a sample...