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)

Available partitioners on key/value data

We know that partitioning and partitioners are the key components of Apache Spark. They influence how our data is partitioned, which means they influence where the data actually resides on which executors. If we have a good partitioner, then we will have good data locality, which will reduce shuffle. We know that shuffle is not desirable for processing, so reducing shuffle is crucial, and, therefore, choosing a proper partitioner is also crucial for our systems.

In this section, we will cover the following topics:

  • Examining HashPartitioner
  • Examining RangePartitioner
  • Testing

We will first examine our HashPartitioner and RangePartitioner. We will then compare them and test the code using both the partitioners.

First we will create a UserTransaction array, as per the following example:

 val keysWithValuesList =
Array(
UserTransaction(&quot...