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

Working with the OPTIMIZE and ZORDER commands

Delta lake on Databricks lets you speed up queries by changing the layout of the data stored in the cloud storage. The algorithms that support this functionality are as follows:

  • Bin-packing: This uses the OPTIMIZE command and helps coalesce small files into larger ones.
  • Z-Ordering: This uses the ZORDER command and helps collocate data in the same set of files. This co-locality helps reduce the amount of data that's read by Spark while processing.

Let's learn more about these two layout algorithms with a worked-out example:

  1. Run the following code block:
    from pyspark.sql.types import *
    from pyspark.sql.functions import *
    manual_schema = StructType([
      StructField('Year',IntegerType(),True),
      StructField('Month',IntegerType(),True),
      StructField('DayofMonth',IntegerType(),True),
      StructField('DayOfWeek',IntegerType(),True...