Learning about RDDs in Spark

Tomaz Kastrun continues a series on Spark. Part 7 ties in R and gives us sample plotting in R and Python:

Let’s look into the local use of Spark. For R language, sparklyr package is availble and for Python pyspark is availble.

Part 8 gets us into the key data structure behind Spark’s success, the Resilient Distributed Dataset:

Spark is created around the concept of resilient distributed datasets (RDD). RDD is a fault-tolerant collection of files that can be used in parallel. RDDs can be created in two ways:
– parallelising an existing data collection in driver program
– referencing a datasets in external storage (HDFS, blob storage, shared filesystem, Hadoop InputFormat,…)

In a simple way, Spark RDD has two opeartions:
– transformations – creating a new RDD dataset on top of already existing one with the last transformation
– actions – to the action, and return a value to the driver program after running a computation on the dataset.

Part 9 looks a bit more at transformations and actions:

Two types of operations are available with RDD; transformations and actions. Transformations are lazy operations, meaning that they prepare the new RDD with every new operation but now show or return anything. We can say, that transformations are lazy because of updating existing RDD, these operations create another RDD. Actions on the other hand trigger the computations on RDD and show (return) the result of transformations.

Most modern work in Spark won’t directly use RDDs, though everything is built on top of them and it’s good to understand the foundation even if you don’t need to write all of those map(), fold(), and reduceByKey() operations yourself.