Fine-Grained Time Series Forecasting at Scale With Facebook Prophet and Apache Spark: Updated for Spark 3
Advances in time series forecasting are enabling retailers to generate more reliable demand forecasts. The challenge now is to produce these forecasts in a timely manner and at a level of granularity that allows the business to make precise adjustments to product inventories. Leveraging Apache Spark™ and Facebook Prophet, more and more enterprises facing these...
Analyzing Algorand Blockchain Data With Databricks Delta (Part 2)
This post was written in collaboration betweeen Eric Gieseke, principal software engineer at Algorand, and Anindita Mahapatra, solutions architect, Databricks. Algorand is a public, decentralized blockchain system that uses a proof of stake consensus protocol. It is fast and energy efficient, with a transaction commit time under five seconds and a throughput of one...
Introducing Apache Spark™ 3.1
We are excited to announce the availability of Apache Spark 3.1 on Databricks as part of Databricks Runtime 8.0. We want to thank the Apache Spark™ community for all their valuable contributions to the Spark 3.1 release. Continuing with the objectives to make Spark faster, easier and smarter, Spark 3.1 extends its scope with the...
Amplify Insights into Your Industry With Geospatial Analytics
Data science is becoming commonplace and most companies are leveraging analytics and business intelligence to help make data-driven business decisions. But are you supercharging your analytics and decision-making with geospatial data? Location intelligence, and specifically geospatial analytics, can help uncover important regional trends and behavior that impact your business. This goes beyond looking at location...
Strategies for Modernizing Investment Data Platforms
The appetite for investment was at a historic high in 2020 for both individual and institutional investors. One study showed that “retail traders make up nearly 25% of the stock market following COVID-driven volatility”. Moreover, institutional investors have piled on investments in cryptocurrency, with 36% invested in cryptocurrency, as outlined in Business Insider . As...
Burning Through Electronic Health Records in Real Time With Smolder
In previous blogs, we looked at two separate workflows for working with patient data coming out of an electronic health record (EHR). In those workflows, we focused on a historical batch extract of EHR data. However, in the real world, data is continuously inputted into an EHR. For many of the important predictive healthcare analytics...
How to Manage Python Dependencies in PySpark
Controlling the environment of an application is often challenging in a distributed computing environment - it is difficult to ensure all nodes have the desired environment to execute, it may be tricky to know where the user’s code is actually running, and so on. Apache Spark™ provides several standard ways to manage dependencies across the...
Natively Query Your Delta Lake With Scala, Java, and Python
Today, we’re happy to announce that you can natively query your Delta Lake with Scala and Java (via the Delta Standalone Reader) and Python (via the Delta Rust API). Delta Lake is an open-source storage layer that brings reliability to data lakes. Delta Lake provides ACID transactions, scalable metadata handling, and unifies streaming and batch...
How to Train XGBoost With Spark
XGBoost is currently one of the most popular machine learning libraries and distributed training is becoming more frequently required to accommodate the rapidly increasing size of datasets. To utilize distributed training on a Spark cluster, the XGBoost4J-Spark package can be used in Scala pipelines but presents issues with Python pipelines. This article will go over...
Improving the Spark Exclusion Mechanism in Databricks
Ed Note: This article contains references to the term blacklist, a term that the Spark community is actively working to remove from Spark. The feature name will be changed in the upcoming Spark 3.1 release to be more inclusive, and we look forward to this new release. Why Exclusion? The exclusion mechanism was introduced for...
