Book Image

Modern Data Architectures with Python

By : Brian Lipp
3 (1)
Book Image

Modern Data Architectures with Python

3 (1)
By: Brian Lipp

Overview of this book

Modern Data Architectures with Python will teach you how to seamlessly incorporate your machine learning and data science work streams into your open data platforms. You’ll learn how to take your data and create open lakehouses that work with any technology using tried-and-true techniques, including the medallion architecture and Delta Lake. Starting with the fundamentals, this book will help you build pipelines on Databricks, an open data platform, using SQL and Python. You’ll gain an understanding of notebooks and applications written in Python using standard software engineering tools such as git, pre-commit, Jenkins, and Github. Next, you’ll delve into streaming and batch-based data processing using Apache Spark and Confluent Kafka. As you advance, you’ll learn how to deploy your resources using infrastructure as code and how to automate your workflows and code development. Since any data platform's ability to handle and work with AI and ML is a vital component, you’ll also explore the basics of ML and how to work with modern MLOps tooling. Finally, you’ll get hands-on experience with Apache Spark, one of the key data technologies in today’s market. By the end of this book, you’ll have amassed a wealth of practical and theoretical knowledge to build, manage, orchestrate, and architect your data ecosystems.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1:Fundamental Data Knowledge
4
Part 2: Data Engineering Toolset
8
Part 3:Modernizing the Data Platform
13
Part 4:Hands-on Project

The UDF

One very powerful tool to consider using with Spark is the UDF. UDFs are custom per-row transformations in native Python that run in parallel on your data. The obvious question is, why not only use UDFs? After all, they are also more flexible. There is a hierarchy of tools you should look to use for speed reasons. Speed is a significant consideration and should not be ignored. Ideally, you should get the most bang for your buck using Python DataFrame APIs and their native functions/methods. DataFrames go through many optimizations, so they are ideally suited for semi-structured and structured data. The methods and functions Spark provides are also heavily optimized and designed for the most common data processing tasks. Suppose you find a case where you just can’t do what is required with the native functions and methods and you are forced to write UDFs. UDFs are slower because Spark can’t optimize them. They take your native language code and serialize it into...