Apache Avro as a Built-in Data Source in Apache 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...
Introducing Apache Spark 2.4
UPDATED: 11/19/2018 We are excited to announce the availability of Apache Spark 2.4 on Databricks as part of the Databricks Runtime 5.0. We want to thank the Apache Spark community for all their valuable contributions to the Spark 2.4 release. Continuing with the objectives to make Spark faster, easier, and smarter, Spark 2.4 extends its...
Learn about Apache Spark’s Memory Model and Spark’s State in the Cloud
Since Apache Spark 1.6, as part of the Project Tungsten, we started an ongoing effort to substantially improve the memory and CPU efficiency of Apache Spark’s backend execution and push performance closer to the limits of the modern hardware. This effort culminated in Apache Spark 2.0 with Catalyst optimizer and whole-stage code generation. Because Spark...
Cost Based Optimizer in Apache Spark 2.2
This is a joint engineering effort between Databricks’ Apache Spark engineering team (Sameer Agarwal and Wenchen Fan) and Huawei’s engineering team (Ron Hu and Zhenhua Wang) Apache Spark 2.2 recently shipped with a state-of-art cost-based optimization framework that collects and leverages a variety of per-column data statistics (e.g., cardinality, number of distinct values, NULL values,...
Scalable Partition Handling for Cloud-Native Architecture in Apache Spark 2.1
Apache Spark 2.1 is just around the corner: the community is going through voting process for the release candidates. This blog post discusses one of the most important features in the upcoming release: scalable partition handling. Spark SQL lets you query terabytes of data with a single job. Often times though, users only want to...
Introducing Apache Spark Datasets
To learn more about Apache Spark, attend Spark Summit East in New York in Feb 2016. Developers have always loved Apache Spark for providing APIs that are simple yet powerful, a combination of traits that makes complex analysis possible with minimal programmer effort. At Databricks, we have continued to push Spark’s usability and performance envelope...
