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

Understanding bloom filter indexing

A bloom filter index is a data structure that provides data skipping on columns, especially on fields containing arbitrary text. The filter works by either stating that certain data is definitely not in a file or that it is probably in the file, which is defined by a false positive probability (FPP). The bloom filter index can help speed up needle in a haystack type of queries, which are not sped up by other techniques.

Let's go through a worked-out example that illustrates the performance benefits of using a bloom filter index:

  1. We will start by checking the Spark configuration for bloom filter indexes. Run the following line of code in a new cell:
    spark.conf.get('spark.databricks.io.skipping.bloomFilter.enabled')

    By default, it is true.

  2. Now, we can start creating our very first bloom filter index! To begin with, let's create a delta table using the following block of code:
    %sql
    CREATE OR REPLACE TABLE bloom_filter_test...