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

Using Auto Optimize

Auto Optimize is a feature that helps us automatically compact small files while an individual writes to a delta table. Unlike bin-packing, we do not need to run a command every time Auto Optimize is executed. It consists of two components:

  • Optimized Writes: Databricks dynamically optimizes Spark partition sizes to write 128 MB chunks of table partitions.
  • Auto Compaction: Here, Databricks runs an optimized job when the data writing process has been completed and compacts small files. It tries to coalesce small files into 128 MB files. This works on data that has the greatest number of small files.

Next, we will learn about the Spark configurations for Auto Optimize and go through a worked-out example to understand how it works:

  1. To enable Auto Optimize for all new tables, we need to run the following Spark configuration code:
    %sql
    set spark.databricks.delta.properties.defaults.autoOptimize.optimizeWrite = true;
    set spark.databricks.delta...