Preface

Welcome to this first edition of Spark: The Definitive Guide! We are excited to bring you the most complete resource on Apache Spark today, focusing especially on the new generation of Spark APIs introduced in Spark 2.0.

Apache Spark is currently one of the most popular systems for large-scale data processing, with APIs in multiple programming languages and a wealth of built-in and third-party libraries. Although the project has existed for multiple years—first as a research project started at UC Berkeley in 2009, then at the Apache Software Foundation since 2013—the open source community is continuing to build more powerful APIs and high-level libraries over Spark, so there is still a lot to write about the project. We decided to write this book for two reasons. First, we wanted to present the most comprehensive book on Apache Spark, covering all of the fundamental use cases with easy-to-run examples. Second, we especially wanted to explore the higher-level “structured” APIs that were finalized in Apache Spark 2.0—namely DataFrames, Datasets, Spark SQL, and Structured Streaming—which older books on Spark don’t always include. We hope this book gives you a solid foundation to write modern Apache Spark applications using all the available tools in the project.

In this preface, we’ll tell you a little bit about our background, and explain who this book is for and how we have organized the material. We also want to thank the numerous people who helped edit and review this book, without whom it would not have been possible.

About the Authors

Both of the book’s authors have been involved in Apache Spark for a long time, so we are very excited to be able to bring you this book.

Bill Chambers started using Spark in 2014 on several research projects. Currently, Bill is a Product Manager at Databricks where he focuses on enabling users to write various types of Apache Spark applications. Bill also regularly blogs about Spark and presents at conferences and meetups on the topic. Bill holds a Master’s in Information Management and Systems from the UC Berkeley School of Information.

Matei Zaharia started the Spark project in 2009, during his time as a PhD student at UC Berkeley. Matei worked with other Berkeley researchers and external collaborators to design the core Spark APIs and grow the Spark community, and has continued to be involved in new initiatives such as the structured APIs and Structured Streaming. In 2013, Matei and other members of the Berkeley Spark team co-founded Databricks to further grow the open source project and provide commercial offerings around it. Today, Matei continues to work as Chief Technologist at Databricks, and also holds a position as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he does research on large-scale systems and AI. Matei received his PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2013.

Who This Book Is For

We designed this book mainly for data scientists and data engineers looking to use Apache Spark. The two roles have slightly different needs, but in reality, most application development covers a bit of both, so we think the material will be useful in both cases. Specifically, in our minds, the data scientist workload focuses more on interactively querying data to answer questions and build statistical models, while the data engineer job focuses on writing maintainable, repeatable production applications—either to use the data scientist’s models in practice, or just to prepare data for further analysis (e.g., building a data ingest pipeline). However, we often see with Spark that these roles blur. For instance, data scientists are able to package production applications without too much hassle and data engineers use interactive analysis to understand and inspect their data to build and maintain pipelines.

While we tried to provide everything data scientists and engineers need to get started, there are some things we didn’t have space to focus on in this book. First, this book does not include in-depth introductions to some of the analytics techniques you can use in Apache Spark, such as machine learning. Instead, we show you how to invoke these techniques using libraries in Spark, assuming you already have a basic background in machine learning. Many full, standalone books exist to cover these techniques in formal detail, so we recommend starting with those if you want to learn about these areas. Second, this book focuses more on application development than on operations and administration (e.g., how to manage an Apache Spark cluster with dozens of users). Nonetheless, we have tried to include comprehensive material on monitoring, debugging, and configuration in Parts V and VI of the book to help engineers get their application running efficiently and tackle day-to-day maintenance. Finally, this book places less emphasis on the older, lower-level APIs in Spark—specifically RDDs and DStreams—to introduce most of the concepts using the newer, higher-level structured APIs. Thus, the book may not be the best fit if you need to maintain an old RDD or DStream application, but should be a great introduction to writing new applications.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Italic

Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.

Constant width

Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable or function names, databases, data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords.

Constant width bold

Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user.

Constant width italic

Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values or by values determined by context.

Tip

This element signifies a tip or suggestion.

Note

This element signifies a general note.

Warning

This element indicates a warning or caution.

Using Code Examples

We’re very excited to have designed this book so that all of the code content is runnable on real data. We wrote the whole book using Databricks notebooks and have posted the data and related material on GitHub. This means that you can run and edit all the code as you follow along, or copy it into working code in your own applications.

We tried to use real data wherever possible to illustrate the challenges you’ll run into while building large-scale data applications. Finally, we also include several larger standalone applications in the book’s GitHub repository for examples that it does not make sense to show inline in the text.

The GitHub repository will remain a living document as we update based on Spark’s progress. Be sure to follow updates there.

This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, if example code is offered with this book, you may use it in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code from this book into your product’s documentation does require permission.

We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For example: “Spark: The Definitive Guide by Bill Chambers and Matei Zaharia (O’Reilly). Copyright 2018 Databricks, Inc., 978-1-491-91221-8.”

If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the permission given above, feel free to contact us at .

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Acknowledgments

There were a huge number of people that made this book possible.

First, we would like to thank our employer, Databricks, for allocating time for us to work on this book. Without the support of the company, this book would not have been possible. In particular, we would like to thank Ali Ghodsi, Ion Stoica, and Patrick Wendell for their support.

Additionally, there are numerous people that read drafts of the book and individual chapters. Our reviewers were best-in-class, and provided invaluable feedback.

These reviewers, in alphabetical order by last name, are:

  • Lynn Armstrong

  • Mikio Braun

  • Jules Damji

  • Denny Lee

  • Alex Thomas

In addition to the formal book reviewers, there were numerous other Spark users, contributors, and committers who read over specific chapters or helped formulate how topics should be discussed. In alphabetical order by last name, the people who helped are:

  • Sameer Agarwal

  • Bagrat Amirbekian

  • Michael Armbrust

  • Joseph Bradley

  • Tathagata Das

  • Hossein Falaki

  • Wenchen Fan

  • Sue Ann Hong

  • Yin Huai

  • Tim Hunter

  • Xiao Li

  • Cheng Lian

  • Xiangrui Meng

  • Kris Mok

  • Josh Rosen

  • Srinath Shankar

  • Takuya Ueshin

  • Herman van Hövell

  • Reynold Xin

  • Philip Yang

  • Burak Yavuz

  • Shixiong Zhu

Lastly, we would like to thank friends, family, and loved ones. Without their support, patience, and encouragement, we would not have been able to write the definitive guide to Spark.

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