Learning Spark

Chapter 4. Working with Key/Value Pairs

This chapter covers how to work with RDDs of key/value pairs, which are a common data type required for many operations in Spark. Key/value RDDs are commonly used to perform aggregations, and often we will do some initial ETL (extract, transform, and load) to get our data into a key/value format. Key/value RDDs expose new operations (e.g., counting up reviews for each product, grouping together data with the same key, and grouping together two different RDDs).

We also discuss an advanced feature that lets users control the layout of pair RDDs across nodes: partitioning. Using controllable partitioning, applications can sometimes greatly reduce communication costs by ensuring that data will be accessed together and will be on the same node. This can provide significant speedups. We illustrate partitioning using the PageRank algorithm as an example. Choosing the right partitioning for a distributed dataset is similar to choosing the right data structure for a local one—in both cases, data layout can greatly affect performance.

Motivation

Spark provides special operations on RDDs containing key/value pairs. These RDDs are called pair RDDs. Pair RDDs are a useful building block in many programs, as they expose operations that allow you to act on each key in parallel or regroup data across the network. For example, pair RDDs have a reduceByKey() method that can aggregate data separately for each key, and a join() method that can merge two RDDs ...