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Category: Spark

Using Sqoop’s Logic To Improve Spark JDBC Performance

Published 2018-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

Avi Yehuda analyzes how Sqoop works to make relational database access from Spark faster:

Sqoop performed so much better almost instantly, all you needed to do is to set the number of mappers according to the size of the data and it was working perfectly.
Since both Spark and Sqoop are based on the Hadoop map-reduce framework, it’s clear that Spark can work at least as good as Sqoop, I only needed to find out how to do it. I decided to look closer at what Sqoop does to see if I can imitate that with Spark.
By turning on the verbose flag of Sqoop, you can get a lot more details. What I found was that Sqoop is splitting the input to the different mappers which makes sense, this is map-reduce after all, Spark does the same thing. But before doing that, Sqoop does something smart that Spark doesn’t do.

Read on to see what in particular Sqoop does, and how you can use that in your Spark code.

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Summarizing Improvements In Spark 2.4

Published 2018-12-17 by Kevin Feasel

Anmol Sarna summarizes Apache Spark 2.4 and pushes his meme game at the same time:

The next major enhancement was the addition of a lot of new built-in functions, including higher-order functions, to deal with complex data types easier.
Spark 2.4 introduced 24 new built-in functions, such as  array_union, array_max/min, etc., and 5 higher-order functions, such as transform, filter, etc.
The entire list can be found here.
Earlier, for manipulating the complex types (e.g. array type) directly, there are two typical solutions:
1) exploding the nested structure into individual rows, and applying some functions, and then creating the structure again.
2) building a User Defined Function (UDF).
In contrast, the new built-in functions can directly manipulate complex types, and the higher-order functions can manipulate complex values with an anonymous lambda function similar to UDFs but with much better performance.

2.4 was a big release, so check this out for a great summary of the improvements it brings.

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Working With Images In Spark 2.4

Published 2018-12-11 by Kevin Feasel

Tomas Nykodym and Weichen Xu give us an update on working with images in the most recent version of Apache Spark:

An image data source addresses many of these problems by providing the standard representation you can code against and abstracts from the details of a particular image representation.
Apache Spark 2.3 provided the ImageSchema.readImages API (see Microsoft’s post Image Data Support in Apache Spark), which was originally developed in the MMLSpark library. In Apache Spark 2.4, it’s much easier to use because it is now a built-in data source. Using the image data source, you can load images from directories and get a DataFrame with a single image column.
This blog post describes what an image data source is and demonstrates its use in Deep Learning Pipelines on the Databricks Unified Analytics Platform.

If you’re interested in working with convolutional neural networks or otherwise need to analyze image data, check it out.

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Using Databricks Delta In Lieu Of Lambda Architecture

Published 2018-12-10 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Mendes contrasts the Lambda architecture with the Databricks Delta architecture and gives us a quick example of using Databricks Delta:

The major problem of the Lambda architecture is that we have to build two separate pipelines, which can be very complex, and, ultimately, difficult to combine the processing of batch and real-time data, however, it is now possible to overcome such limitation if we have the possibility to change our approach.
Databricks Delta delivers a powerful transactional storage layer by harnessing the power of Apache Spark and Databricks File System (DBFS). It is a single data management tool that combines the scale of a data lake, the reliability and performance of a data warehouse, and the low latency of streaming in a single system. The core abstraction of Databricks Delta is an optimized Spark table that stores data as parquet files in DBFS and maintains a transaction log that tracks changes to the table.

It’s an interesting contrast and I recommend reading the whole thing.

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Working With Key-Value Pairs In Spark

Published 2018-12-05 by Kevin Feasel

Teena Vashist shows us a few of the functions available with Spark for working with key-value pairs:

1. Creating Key/Value Pair RDD: 
The pair RDD arranges the data of a row into two parts. The first part is the Key and the second part is the Value. In the below example, I used a parallelize method to create a RDD, and then I used the length method to create a Pair RDD. The key is the length of the each word and the value is the word itself.

scala> val rdd = sc.parallelize(List("hello","world","good","morning"))
rdd: org.apache.spark.rdd.RDD[String] = ParallelCollectionRDD[0] at parallelize at <console>:24
scala> val pairRdd = rdd.map(a => (a.length,a))
pairRdd: org.apache.spark.rdd.RDD[(Int, String)] = MapPartitionsRDD[1] at map at <console>:26
scala> pairRdd.collect().foreach(println)
(5,hello)
(5,world)
(4,good)
(7,morning)

Click through for more operations.  Spark is a bit less KV-centric than classic MapReduce jobs, but there are still plenty of places where you want to use them.

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Load Testing Spark To MongoDB

Published 2018-12-04 by Kevin Feasel

Abdelghani Tassi has a quick load test to see how fast Spark can load data into MongoDB:

Recently, my company faced the serious challenge of loading a 10 million rows of CSV-formatted geographic data to MongoDB in real-time.

We first tried to make a simple Python script to load CSV files in memory and send data to MongoDB. Processing 10 million rows this way took 26 minutes!

26 minutes for processing a dataset in real-time is unacceptable so we decided to proceed differently.

I’m not sure the test was totally fair, but the results comport to my biases…  There is some good advice here:  storing data in optimized formats (Parquet in this instance) can make a big difference, Spark is useful for ETL style operations, and Scala is generally the fastest language in the Spark world.

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Hive And Spark Integrated Together

Published 2018-12-04 by Kevin Feasel

Bikas Saha and Saumitra Buragohain share some of the direction the Apache Hive team is going in version 3:

The latest release of Apache Hive 3 (part of HDP 3) provides significant new capabilities including ACID support for data ingest. This functionality has many applications, a crucial one being privacy support for data modifications and deletions for GDPR. In addition, ACID also significantly reduces the time to ingest for data, thereby improving data freshness for Hive queries. To provide these features, Hive needs to take full control of the files that store the table data and thus this data is no longer directly accessible by third party systems like Apache Spark. Thus Apache Spark’s built-in support for Hive table data is no longer supported for data managed by Hive 3.

At the same time, Apache Spark has become the de-facto standard for a wide variety complex processing use cases on Big Data. This includes data stored in Hive 3 tables and thus we need a way to provide efficient, high-performance, ACID compliant access to Hive 3 table data from Spark. Fortunately, Apache Spark supports a pluggable approach for various data sources and Apache Hive itself can also be considered as one data source. We have implemented the Hive Warehouse Connector (HWC) as library to provide first class support for Spark to read Hive 3 data for subsequent complex processing (like machine learning) in Spark.

Spark is also commonly used to ETL raw data into Hive tables and this scenario should continue to be supported in the Hive ACID world. To do that, HWC integrates with the latest Hive Streaming APIs to support ingest into Hive both from batch jobs as well as structured streaming jobs.

Overall the Hive Warehouse connector provide efficient read write access to Hive warehouse data from Spark jobs, while providing transparent user identity propagation and maintaining consistent security and access control.

Spark has had some dependencies on Hive (or at least expectations of certain Hive conventions like /tmp/hive existing), but the two systems have historically been more (friendly) competitors than tools integrated in the same chain.

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Apache Avro Now Supported In Spark 2.4

Published 2018-12-03 by Kevin Feasel

Gengliang Wang, et al, announce built-in support for Apache Avro in Spark 2.4:

Apache Avro is a popular data serialization format. It is widely used in the Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop ecosystem, especially for Kafka-based data pipelines. Starting from Apache Spark 2.4 release, Spark provides built-in support for reading and writing Avro data. The new built-in spark-avro module is originally from Databricks’ open source project Avro Data Source for Apache Spark (referred to as spark-avro from now on). In addition, it provides:

  • New functions from_avro() and to_avro() to read and write Avro data within a DataFrame instead of just files.
  • Avro logical types support, including Decimal, Timestamp, and Date types. See the related schema conversions for details.
  • 2X read throughput improvement and 10% write throughput improvement.

In this blog, we examine each of the above features through examples, giving you a flavor of its easy API usage, performance improvements, and merits.

Avro is one of the better rowstore data formats in the Hadoop world, so it’s good to see built-in support here.

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Spark MLflow 0.8.0 Released

Published 2018-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Davidson and Jules Damji announce MLflow 0.8.0 on the Spark platform:

Improved MLflow UI Experience

  1. Compact Display for Metrics and Parameters: To avoid clutter and an explosion of columns for each metric or parameter, now we group them together in a single tabular column by default. That way, each runs’ parameters and metrics are listed nearby. Users can still click each parameter or metric to display it in a separate column or sort by it and customize their view this way.

  2. Nesting Runs: For nested MLflow runs, which are common in hyperparameter search or multi-step workflows, the UI will display a collapsible tree underneath each parent run. This makes it much easier to organize and visualize multi-step workflows.

  3. Labeling Runs: While MLflow gives each run a UUID by default, you can also now assign each run a name through the API. These names can also be edited in the UI.

  4. UI Persistence: The MLflow UI now remembers your filters, sorting and column setup in browser local storage so you no longer need to reconfigure the view each time.

Looks like there are some nice additions here.

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Working With The Databricks API Via Powershell

Published 2018-11-16 by Kevin Feasel

Gerhard Brueckl has a Powershell module for interacting with Databricks, either Azure or AWS:

As most of our deployments use PowerShell I wrote some cmdlets to easily work with the Databricks API in my scripts. These included managing clusters (create, start, stop, …), deploying content/notebooks, adding secrets, executing jobs/notebooks, etc. After some time I ended up having 20+ single scripts which was not really maintainable any more. So I packed them into a PowerShell module and also published it to the PowerShell Gallery (https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/DatabricksPS) for everyone to use!

This looks like a pretty good module if you work with Databricks.

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