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

Learning partitioning strategies in Spark

In this section, we will discuss some of the useful strategies for Spark partitions and Apache Hive partitions. Whenever Spark processes data in memory, it breaks that data down into partitions, and these partitions are processed in the cores of the executors. These are the Spark partitions. On the other hand, Hive partitions help to organize persisted tables into parts based on columns.

Understanding Spark partitions

Before we learn about the strategies to manage Spark partitions, we need to know the number of partitions for any given DataFrame:

  1. To check the Spark partitions of a given DataFrame, we use the following syntax: dataframe.rdd.getNumPartitions(). Also, remember that the total number of tasks doing work on a Spark DataFrame is equal to the total number of partitions of that DataFrame.
  2. Next, we will learn how to check the number of records in each Spark partition. We will begin with re-creating the airlines DataFrame...