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Category: Spark

Spark Performance in Azure Synapse Analytics

Published 2021-03-31 by Kevin Feasel

Euan Garden shares some numbers around Apache Spark performance in Azure Synapse Analytics:

To compare the performance, we derived queries from TPC-DS with 1TB scale and ran them on 8 nodes Azure E8V3 cluster (15 executors – 28g memory, 4 cores). Even though our version running inside Azure Synapse today is a derivative of Apache Spark™ 2.4.4, we compared it with the latest open-source release of Apache Spark™ 3.0.1 and saw Azure Synapse was 2x faster in total runtime for the Test-DS comparison.

Click through for several techniques the Azure Synapse Analytics team has implemented to make some significant performance improvements. It’s still slower than Databricks, but considerably faster than the open-source Apache Spark baseline.

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Spark on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

Published 2021-03-19 by Kevin Feasel

Gavin Campbell tries out Spark on Linux on Windows:

I’m not a frequent user of Windows, but I understand getting dependencies installed for local development can sometimes be a bit of a pain. I’m using an Azure VM, but these instructions should work on a regular Windows 10 installation. Since I’m not a “Windows Insider”, I followed the manual steps here to get WSL installed, then upgrade to WSL2. The steps are reproduced here for convenience:

Click through for the installation steps and the process.

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Apache Spark 3.1 Released

Published 2021-03-04 by Kevin Feasel

Hyukjin Kwon, et al, announce Apache Spark 3.1:

Various new SQL features are added in this release. The widely used standard CHAR/VARCHAR data types are added as variants of the supported String types. More built-in functions (e.g., width_bucket (SPARK-21117) and regexp_extract_all (SPARK-24884) were added. The current number of built-in operators/functions has now reached 350. More DDL/DML/utility commands have been enhanced, including INSERT (SPARK-32976), MERGE (SPARK-32030) and EXPLAIN (SPARK-32337). Starting from this release, in Spark WebUI, the SQL plans are presented in a simpler and structured format (i.e. using EXPLAIN FORMATTED)

There have been quite a few advancements around the SQL side.

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Installing Spark on Windows Subsystem for Linux

Published 2021-03-02 by Kevin Feasel

David Alcock wants Spark, but not Windows Spark:

The post won’t cover any instructions for installing Ubuntu and instead I’ll assume you’ve installed already and downloaded the tgz file from the Apache Spark download page (Step 3 in the above link).

Let’s go straight into the terminal window and get going! I’ve put the commands in bold text (don’t include the $) just so anyone can see a bit easier and who also prefers to ignore my jibberish! 

Click through for the instructions.

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Power BI Connector for Databricks

Published 2021-03-01 by Kevin Feasel

Stefania Leone, et al, announce general availability of the Power BI connector for Databricks:

We are excited to announce General Availability (GA) of the Microsoft Power BI connector for Databricks for Power BI Service and Power BI Desktop 2.85.681.0. Following the public preview, we have already seen strong customer adoption, so we are pleased to extend these capabilities to our entire customer base. The native Power BI connector for Databricks in combination with the recently launched SQL Analytics service provides Databricks customers with a first-class experience for performing BI workloads directly on their Delta Lake. SQL Analytics allows customers to operate a multi-cloud lakehouse architecture that provides data warehousing performance at data lake economics for up to 4x better price/performance than traditional cloud data warehouses.

This is easier to work with than the Apache Spark connector and it looks like it should be faster than that connector as well.

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Survival Analysis Notebooks

Published 2021-02-25 by Kevin Feasel

Dan Morris, et al, walk us through a survival analysis scenario:

In contrast to other methods that may seem similar on the surface, such as linear regression, survival analysis takes censoring into account. Censoring occurs when the start and/or end of a measured value is unknown. For example, suppose our historical data includes records for the two customers below. In the case of customer A, we know the precise duration of the subscription because the customer churned in December 2020. For customer B, we know that the contract started four months ago and is still active, but we do not know how much longer they will be a customer. This is an example of right censoring because we do not yet know the end date for the measured value. Right censoring is what we most commonly see with this form of analysis.

Click through for an intro as well as a half-dozen notebooks.

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Join Algorithm Selection in Spark

Published 2021-02-17 by Kevin Feasel

The Hadoop in Real World team takes us through the selection criteria for join types:

There are several factors Spark takes into account before deciding on the type of join algorithm to use to join datasets at runtime.

Spark has the following 5 algorithms to choose from –

1. Broadcast Hash Join
2. Shuffle Hash Join
3. Shuffle Sort Merge Join
4. Broadcast Nested Loop Join
5. Cartesian Product Join (a.k.a Shuffle-and-Replicate Nested Loop Join)

Read on to learn which join types are supported in which circumstances, as well as rules of precedence.

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Synchronizing Metadata between Spark Tables and Serverless Pool

Published 2021-02-16 by Kevin Feasel

Charl Roux takes us through one back-end integration mechanism between tables in Azure Synapse Analytics Spark pools and serverless SQL pool:

Synapse provides an exciting feature which allows you to sync Spark database objects to Serverless pools and to query these objects without the Spark pool being active or running.  Synapse workspaces are accessed exclusively through an Azure AD Account and objects are created within this context in the Spark pool. In some scenarios I would like to share the data which I’ve created in my Spark database with other users for reporting or analysis purposes. This is possible with Serverless and in this article I will show you how to complete the required steps from creation of the object to successful execution. 

Click through for the demonstration.

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