Book Image

Optimizing Databricks Workloads

By : Anirudh Kala, Anshul Bhatnagar, Sarthak Sarbahi
Book Image

Optimizing Databricks Workloads

By: Anirudh Kala, Anshul Bhatnagar, Sarthak Sarbahi

Overview of this book

Databricks is an industry-leading, cloud-based platform for data analytics, data science, and data engineering supporting thousands of organizations across the world in their data journey. It is a fast, easy, and collaborative Apache Spark-based big data analytics platform for data science and data engineering in the cloud. In Optimizing Databricks Workloads, you will get started with a brief introduction to Azure Databricks and quickly begin to understand the important optimization techniques. The book covers how to select the optimal Spark cluster configuration for running big data processing and workloads in Databricks, some very useful optimization techniques for Spark DataFrames, best practices for optimizing Delta Lake, and techniques to optimize Spark jobs through Spark core. It contains an opportunity to learn about some of the real-world scenarios where optimizing workloads in Databricks has helped organizations increase performance and save costs across various domains. By the end of this book, you will be prepared with the necessary toolkit to speed up your Spark jobs and process your data more efficiently.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Azure Databricks
5
Section 2: Optimization Techniques
10
Section 3: Real-World Scenarios

Chapter 5: Big Data Analytics

Optimizations in Apache Spark play a crucial role while building big data solutions. Knowledge and experience in tuning Spark-based workloads help organizations save costs and time while running these workloads on the cloud. In this chapter, we will learn about various optimization techniques concerning Spark DataFrames and big data analytics in general. We will learn about the limitations of the collect() method and inferSchema when reading data. This will be followed by an overview of the best practices for working with CSV files, Parquet files, Pandas projects, and Koalas projects. Also, we will learn about some powerful optimization techniques, such as column predicate pushdown, column pruning, and partitioning strategies.

The topics covered in this chapter are as follows:

  • Understanding the collect() method
  • Understanding the use of inferSchema
  • Learning to differentiate between CSV and Parquet
  • Learning to differentiate between...