Book Image

Hands-On Big Data Analytics with PySpark

By : Rudy Lai, Bartłomiej Potaczek
Book Image

Hands-On Big Data Analytics with PySpark

By: Rudy Lai, Bartłomiej Potaczek

Overview of this book

Apache Spark is an open source parallel-processing framework that has been around for quite some time now. One of the many uses of Apache Spark is for data analytics applications across clustered computers. In this book, you will not only learn how to use Spark and the Python API to create high-performance analytics with big data, but also discover techniques for testing, immunizing, and parallelizing Spark jobs. You will learn how to source data from all popular data hosting platforms, including HDFS, Hive, JSON, and S3, and deal with large datasets with PySpark to gain practical big data experience. This book will help you work on prototypes on local machines and subsequently go on to handle messy data in production and at scale. This book covers installing and setting up PySpark, RDD operations, big data cleaning and wrangling, and aggregating and summarizing data into useful reports. You will also learn how to implement some practical and proven techniques to improve certain aspects of programming and administration in Apache Spark. By the end of the book, you will be able to build big data analytical solutions using the various PySpark offerings and also optimize them effectively.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Columnar formats – Parquet

In this section, we'll be looking at the second schema-based format, Parquet. The following topics will be covered:

  • Saving data in Parquet format
  • Loading Parquet data
  • Testing

This is a columnar format, as the data is stored column-wise and not row-wise, as we saw in the JSON, CSV, plain text, and Avro files.

This is a very interesting and important format for big data processing and for making the process faster. In this section, we will focus on adding Parquet support to Spark, saving the data into the filesystem, reloading it again, and then testing. Parquet is similar to Avro as it gives you a parquet method but this time, it is a slightly different implementation.

In the build.sbt file, for the Avro format, we need to add an external dependency, but for Parquet, we already have that dependency within Spark. So, Parquet is the way to...