The last few months have been a non stop whirlwind of traveling and speaking. I’ve been very fortunate to have spoken at Strata New York, give a couple sessions at the Cassandra Summit, and even had a few minutes on stage for the Cassandra Summit keynote (I’m at minute 22 with Luke Tillman). When I have time, I end up hacking on random projects. For example, a couple months ago I was working on a recommendation engine for KillrVideo. I also end up playing with bleeding edge builds of Cassandra and Spark.
A little while back I wrote a post on working with DataFrames from PySpark, using Cassandra as a data source. DataFrames are, in my opinion, a fantastic, flexible api that makes Spark roughly 14 orders of magnitude nicer to work with as opposed to RDDs. When I wrote the original blog post, the only way to work with DataFrames from PySpark was to get an RDD and call toDF().
Last week I wrote about using PySpark with Cassandra, showing how we can take tables out of Cassandra and easily apply arbitrary filters using DataFrames. This is great if you want to do exploratory work or operate on large datasets. What if you’re interested in ingesting lots of data and getting near real time feedback into your application? Enter Spark Streaming.
Spark streaming is the process of ingesting and operating on data in microbatches, which are generated repeatedly on a fixed window of time. You can visualize it like this:
I’ve worked with Pandas for some small personal projects and found it very useful. The key feature is the data frame, which comes from R. Data Frames are new in Spark 1.3 and was covered in this blog post. Till now I’ve had to write Scala in order to use Spark. This has resulted in me spending a lot of time looking for libraries that would normally take me less than a second to recall the proper Python library (JSON being an example) since I don’t know Scala very well.