On which scenario we should prefer spark RDD to write a solution and on which scenario we should choose to go for spark-sql. I know spark-sql gives better performance and it works best with structure and semistructure data. But what else factors are there that we need to take into consideration while choosing betweeen spark Rdd and spark-sql.
I don't see much reasons to still use RDDs.
Assuming you are using JVM based language, you can use DataSet that is the mix of SparkSQL+RDD (DataFrame == DataSet[Row]), according to spark documentation:
Dataset is a new interface added in Spark 1.6 that provides the benefits of RDDs (strong typing, ability to use powerful lambda functions) with the benefits of Spark SQL’s optimized execution engine.
The problem is python is not support DataSet so, you will use RDD and lose spark-sql optimization when you work with non-structed data.
I found using DFs easier to use than DSs - the latter are still subject to development imho. The comment on pyspark indeed still relevant.
RDDs still handy for zipWithIndex to put asc, contiguous sequence numbers on items.
DFs / DSs have a columnar store and have a better Catalyst (Optimizer) support.
Also, may things with RDDs are painful, like a JOIN requiring a key, value and multi-step join if needing to JOIN more than 2 tables. They are legacy. Problem is the internet is full of legacy and thus RDD jazz.
RDD
RDD is a collection of data across the clusters and it handles both unstructured and structured data. It's typically a function part of handling data.
DF
Data frames are basically two dimensional array of objects defining the data in a rows and columns. It's similar to relations tables in the database. Data frame handles only the structured data.
Related
It was my assumption that Spark Data Frames were built from RDDs. However, I recently learned that this is not the case, and Difference between DataFrame, Dataset, and RDD in Spark does a good job explaining that they are not.
So what is the overhead of converting an RDD to a DataFrame, and back again? Is it negligible or significant?
In my application, I create a DataFrame by reading a text file into an RDD and then custom-encoding every line with a map function that returns a Row() object. Should I not be doing this? Is there a more efficient way?
RDDs have a double role in Spark. First of all is the internal data structure for tracking changes between stages in order to manage failures and secondly until Spark 1.3 was the main interface for interaction with users. Therefore after after Spark 1.3 Dataframes constitute the main interface offering much richer functionality than RDDs.
There is no significant overhead when converting one Dataframe to RDD with df.rdd since the dataframes they already keep an instance of their RDDs initialized therefore returning a reference to this RDD should not have any additional cost. On the other side, generating a dataframe from an RDD requires some extra effort. There are two ways to convert an RDD to dataframe 1st by calling rdd.toDF() and 2nd with spark.createDataFrame(rdd, schema). Both methods will evaluate lazily although there will be an extra overhead regarding the schema validation and execution plan (you can check the toDF() code here for more details). Of course that would be identical to the overhead that you have just by initializing your data with spark.read.text(...) but with one less step, the conversion from RDD to dataframe.
This the first reason that I would go directly with Dataframes instead of working with two different Spark interfaces.
The second reason is that when using the RDD interface you are missing some significant performance features that dataframes and datasets offer related to Spark optimizer (catalyst) and memory management (tungsten).
Finally I would use the RDDs interface only if I need some features that are missing in dataframes such as key-value pairs, zipWithIndex function etc. But even then you can access those via df.rdd which is costless as already mentioned. As for your case , I believe that would be faster to use directly a dataframe and use the map function of that dataframe to ensure that Spark leverages the usage of tungsten ensuring efficient memory management.
I am a newbie in Spark SQL world. I am currently migrating my application's Ingestion code which includes ingesting data in stage,Raw and Application layer in HDFS and doing CDC(change data capture), this is currently written in Hive queries and is executed via Oozie. This needs to migrate into a Spark application(current version 1.6). The other section of code will migrate later on.
In spark-SQL, I can create dataframes directly from tables in Hive and simply execute queries as it is (like sqlContext.sql("my hive hql") ). The other way would be to use dataframe APIs and rewrite the hql in that way.
What is the difference in these two approaches?
Is there any performance gain with using Dataframe APIs?
Some people suggested, there is an extra layer of SQL that spark core engine has to go through when using "SQL" queries directly which may impact performance to some extent but I didn't find any material substantiating that statement. I know the code would be much more compact with Datafrmae APIs but when I have my hql queries all handy would it really worth to write complete code into Dataframe API?
Thank You.
Question : What is the difference in these two approaches?
Is there any performance gain with using Dataframe APIs?
Answer :
There is comparative study done by horton works. source...
Gist is based on situation/scenario each one is right. there is no
hard and fast rule to decide this. pls go through below..
RDDs, DataFrames, and SparkSQL (infact 3 approaches not just 2):
At its core, Spark operates on the concept of Resilient Distributed Datasets, or RDD’s:
Resilient - if data in memory is lost, it can be recreated
Distributed - immutable distributed collection of objects in memory partitioned across many data nodes in a cluster
Dataset - initial data can from from files, be created programmatically, from data in memory, or from another RDD
DataFrames API is a data abstraction framework that organizes your data into named columns:
Create a schema for the data
Conceptually equivalent to a table in a relational database
Can be constructed from many sources including structured data files, tables in Hive, external databases, or existing RDDs
Provides a relational view of the data for easy SQL like data manipulations and aggregations
Under the hood, it is an RDD of Row’s
SparkSQL is a Spark module for structured data processing. You can interact with SparkSQL through:
SQL
DataFrames API
Datasets API
Test results:
RDD’s outperformed DataFrames and SparkSQL for certain types of data processing
DataFrames and SparkSQL performed almost about the same, although with analysis involving aggregation and sorting SparkSQL had a slight advantage
Syntactically speaking, DataFrames and SparkSQL are much more intuitive than using RDD’s
Took the best out of 3 for each test
Times were consistent and not much variation between tests
Jobs were run individually with no other jobs running
Random lookup against 1 order ID from 9 Million unique order ID's
GROUP all the different products with their total COUNTS and SORT DESCENDING by product name
In your Spark SQL string queries, you won't know a syntax error until runtime (which could be costly), whereas in DataFrames syntax errors can be caught at compile time.
Couple more additions. Dataframe uses tungsten memory representation , catalyst optimizer used by sql as well as dataframe. With Dataset API, you have more control on the actual execution plan than with SparkSQL
If query is lengthy, then efficient writing & running query, shall not be possible.
On the other hand, DataFrame, along with Column API helps developer to write compact code, which is ideal for ETL applications.
Also, all operations (e.g. greater than, less than, select, where etc.).... ran using "DataFrame" builds an "Abstract Syntax Tree(AST)", which is then passed to "Catalyst" for further optimizations. (Source: Spark SQL Whitepaper, Section#3.3)
For the purposes of comparison, suppose we have a table "T" with two columns "A","B". We also have a hiveContext operating in some HDFS database. We make a data frame:
In theory, which of the following is faster:
sqlContext.sql("SELECT A,SUM(B) FROM T GROUP BY A")
or
df.groupBy("A").sum("B")
where "df" is a dataframe referring to T. For these simple kinds of aggregate operations, is there any reason why one should prefer one method over the other?
No, these should boil down to the same execution plan. Underneath the Spark SQL engine is using the same optimization engine, the catalyst optimizer. You can always check this yourself by looking at the spark UI, or even calling explain on the resultant DataFrame.
Spark developers have made great effort to optimise. The performance between DataFrame Scala and DataFrame SQL is undistinguishable. Even for DataFrame Python, the differ is when collect data to driver.
It opens a new world
It doesn't have to be one vs. another
We can just choose what ever way we comfortable with
The performance comparison published by databricks
While fetching and manipulating data from HBASE using spark, *Spark sql join* vs *spark dataframe join* - which one is faster?
RDD always Outperform Dataframe and SparkSQL, but from my experience Dataframe perform well compared to SparkSQL. Dataframe function perform well compare to spark sql.Below link will give some insights on this.
Spark RDDs vs DataFrames vs SparkSQL
As far as I can tell， they should behave the same regarding to performance. SQL internally will work as DataFrame
I don't have access to a cluster to properly test but I imagine that the Spark SQL just compiles down to the native data frame code.
The rule of thumb I've heard is that the SQL code should be used for exploration and dataframe operations for production code.
Spark SQL brings a powerful new optimization framework called Catalyst. Using Catalyst, Spark can automatically transform SQL queries so that they execute more efficiently.
A DataFrame is a Dataset organized into named columns. It is conceptually equivalent to a table in a relational database or a data frame in R/Python, but with richer optimizations, that provides the benefits of RDDs (strong typing, ability to use powerful lambda functions) with the benefits of Spark SQL’s optimized execution engine.
The execution speed will be the same, because they use same optimization algorithms.
If the join might be shared across queries carefully implemented join with RDDs might be a good option. However if this is not the case let spark/catalyst do it's job and join within spark sql. It will do all the optimization. So you wouldn't have to maintain your join logic etc.
Spark SQL join and Spark Dataframe join are almost same thing. The join is actually delegated to RDD operations under the hood. On top of RDD operation we have convenience methods like spark sql, data frame or data set. In case of spark sql it needs to spend a tiny amount of extra time to parse the SQL.
It should be evaluated more in terms of good programming practice. I like dataset because you can catch syntax errors while compiling. And the encodes behind the scene takes care of compacting the data and executing the query.
I did some performance analysis for sql vs dataframe on Cassandra using spark, I think it will be the same for HBASE also.
According to me sql works faster than dataframe approach. The reason behind this might be that in the dataframe approach there are lot of java object's involved. In sql approach everything is done in-memory.
Attaching results.
I am newbie to Apache Spark.
My job is read two CSV files, select some specific columns from it, merge it, aggregate it and write the result into a single CSV file.
For example,
CSV1
name,age,deparment_id
CSV2
department_id,deparment_name,location
I want to get a third CSV file with
name,age,deparment_name
I am loading both the CSV into dataframes.
And then able to get the third dataframe using several methods join,select,filter,drop present in dataframe
I am also able to do the same using several RDD.map()
And I am also able to do the same using executing hiveql using HiveContext
I want to know which is the efficient way if my CSV files are huge and why?
This blog contains the benchmarks. Dataframes is much more efficient than RDD
https://databricks.com/blog/2015/02/17/introducing-dataframes-in-spark-for-large-scale-data-science.html
Here is the snippet from blog
At a high level, there are two kinds of optimizations. First, Catalyst applies logical optimizations such as predicate pushdown. The optimizer can push filter predicates down into the data source, enabling the physical execution to skip irrelevant data. In the case of Parquet files, entire blocks can be skipped and comparisons on strings can be turned into cheaper integer comparisons via dictionary encoding. In the case of relational databases, predicates are pushed down into the external databases to reduce the amount of data traffic.
Second, Catalyst compiles operations into physical plans for execution and generates JVM bytecode for those plans that is often more optimized than hand-written code. For example, it can choose intelligently between broadcast joins and shuffle joins to reduce network traffic. It can also perform lower level optimizations such as eliminating expensive object allocations and reducing virtual function calls. As a result, we expect performance improvements for existing Spark programs when they migrate to DataFrames.
Here is the performance benchmark https://databricks.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-16-at-9.46.39-AM.png
Both DataFrames and spark sql queries are optimized using the catalyst engine, so I would guess they will produce similar performance
(assuming you are using version >= 1.3)
And both should be better than simple RDD operations, because for RDDs, spark don't have any knowledge about the types of your data, so it can't do any special optimizations
Overall direction for Spark is to go with dataframes, so that query is optimized through catalyst