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)

Parallelization with Spark RDDs

Now that we know how to create RDDs within the text file that we received from the internet, we can look at a different way to create this RDD. Let's discuss parallelization with our Spark RDDs.

In this section, we will cover the following topics:

  • What is parallelization?
  • How do we parallelize Spark RDDs?

Let's start with parallelization.

What is parallelization?

The best way to understand Spark, or any language, is to look at the documentation. If we look at Spark's documentation, it clearly states that, for the textFile function that we used last time, it reads the text file from HDFS.

On the other hand, if we look at the definition of parallelize, we can see that this is...