Book Image

Distributed Data Systems with Azure Databricks

By : Alan Bernardo Palacio
Book Image

Distributed Data Systems with Azure Databricks

By: Alan Bernardo Palacio

Overview of this book

Microsoft Azure Databricks helps you to harness the power of distributed computing and apply it to create robust data pipelines, along with training and deploying machine learning and deep learning models. Databricks' advanced features enable developers to process, transform, and explore data. Distributed Data Systems with Azure Databricks will help you to put your knowledge of Databricks to work to create big data pipelines. The book provides a hands-on approach to implementing Azure Databricks and its associated methodologies that will make you productive in no time. Complete with detailed explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, you’ll begin with a quick introduction to Databricks core functionalities, before performing distributed model training and inference using TensorFlow and Spark MLlib. As you advance, you’ll explore MLflow Model Serving on Azure Databricks and implement distributed training pipelines using HorovodRunner in Databricks. Finally, you’ll discover how to transform, use, and obtain insights from massive amounts of data to train predictive models and create entire fully working data pipelines. By the end of this MS Azure book, you’ll have gained a solid understanding of how to work with Databricks to create and manage an entire big data pipeline.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introducing Databricks
4
Section 2: Data Pipelines with Databricks
9
Section 3: Machine and Deep Learning with Databricks

pandas DataFrame API (Koalas)

Data scientists and data engineers that are Python users are very familiar with working with pandas DataFrames when manipulating data. pandas is a Python library for data manipulation and analysis but that lacks the capability to work with big data, therefore it is only suitable when working with small datasets. When we need to work with more data, the most common option is PySpark, as we have demonstrated in the previous section, which is a library with a very different syntax than pandas.

Koalas is a library that eases the learning curve from transitioning from pandas to working with big data in Azure Databricks. Koalas has a syntax that is very similar to the pandas API but with the functionality of PySpark.

Not all the pandas methods have been implemented and there are many small differences or subtleties that must be considered and might not be obvious. We cannot understand Koalas without understanding PySpark.

Koalas, functionality is built...