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 know that rdd.groupByKey() shuffles everything and after that proceeds with consequent operations. So if you need to group rows and transform them, groupByKey will shuffle all the data and only then do a transformation. Which in a case of reductive transformations and large number of rows with the same grouping key is inefficient, because number of rows inside of each partition could be reduced greatly before a shuffle with local reduction. Does datset.groupBy() act the same?
I'm using Spark 1.6
Can anyone explain, what is the result of RDD transformations? Is it the new set of data (copy of data) or it is only new set of pointers, to filtered blocks of old data?
RDD transformations allow you to create dependencies between RDDs. Dependencies are only steps for producing results (a program). Each RDD in lineage chain (string of dependencies) has a function for calculating its data and has a pointer (dependency) to its parent RDD. Spark will divide RDD dependencies into stages and tasks and send those to workers for execution.
So if you do this:
val lines = sc.textFile("...")
val words = lines.flatMap(line => line.split(" "))
val localwords = words.collect()
words will be an RDD containing a reference to lines RDD. When the program is executed, first lines' function will be executed (load the data from a text file), then words' function will be executed on the resulting data (split lines into words). Spark is lazy, so nothing will get executed unless you call some transformation or action that will trigger job creation and execution (collect in this example).
So, an RDD (transformed RDD, too) is not 'a set of data', but a step in a program (might be the only step) telling Spark how to get the data and what to do with it.
Transformations create new RDD based on the existing RDD. Basically, RDD's are immutable.
All transformations in Spark are lazy.Data in RDD's is not processed until an acton is performed.
Example of RDD transformations:
map,filter,flatMap,groupByKey,reduceByKey
As others have mentioned, an RDD maintains a list of all the transformations which have been programmatically applied to it. These are lazily evaluated, so though (in the REPL, for example), you may get a result back of a different parameter type (after applying a map, for example), the 'new' RDD doensn't yet contain anything, because nothing has forced the original RDD to evaluate the transformations / filters which are in its lineage. Methods such as count, the various reduction methods, etc will cause the transportations to be applied. The checkpoint method applies all RDD actions as well, returning an RDD which is the result of the transportations but has no lineage (this can be a performance advantage, especially with iterative applications).
All answers are perfectly valid. I just want to add a quick picture :-)
Transformations are kind of operations which will transform your RDD data from one form to another. And when you apply this operation on any RDD, you will get a new RDD with transformed data (RDDs in Spark are immutable, Remember????). Operations like map, filter, flatMap are transformations.
Now there is a point to be noted here and that is when you apply the transformation on any RDD it will not perform the operation immediately. It will create a DAG(Directed Acyclic Graph) using the applied operation, source RDD and function used for transformation. And it will keep on building this graph using the references till you apply any action operation on the last lined up RDD. That is why the transformation in Spark are lazy.
The other answers give a good explanation already. Here are my some cents:
To know well what's inside that returned RDD, it'd better to check what's inside the RDD abstract class (quoted from source code):
Internally, each RDD is characterized by five main properties:
A list of partitions
A function for computing each split
A list of dependencies on other RDDs
Optionally, a Partitioner for key-value RDDs (e.g. to say that the RDD is hash-partitioned)
Optionally, a list of preferred locations to compute each split on (e.g. block locations for an HDFS file)
What operations and/or methods do I need to be careful about in Apache Spark? I've heard you should be careful about:
groupByKey
collectAsMap
Why?
Are there other methods?
There're what you could call 'expensive' operations in Spark: all those that require a shuffle (data reorganization) fall in this category. Checking for the presence of ShuffleRDD on the result of rdd.toDebugString give those away.
If you mean "careful" as "with the potential of causing problems", some operations in Spark will cause memory-related issues when used without care:
groupByKey requires that all values falling under one key to fit in memory in one executor. This means that large datasets grouped with low-cardinality keys have the potential to crash the execution of the job. (think allTweets.keyBy(_.date.dayOfTheWeek).groupByKey -> bumm)
favor the use of aggregateByKey or reduceByKey to apply map-side reduction before collecting values for a key.
collect materializes the RDD (forces computation) and sends the all the data to the driver. (think allTweets.collect -> bumm)
If you want to trigger the computation of an rdd, favor the use of rdd.count
To check the data of your rdd, use bounded operations like rdd.first (first element) or rdd.take(n) for n elements
If you really need to do collect, use rdd.filter or rdd.reduce to reduce its cardinality
collectAsMap is just collect behind the scenes
cartesian: creates the product of one RDD with another, potentially creating a very large RDD. oneKRdd.cartesian(onekRdd).count = 1000000
consider adding keys and join in order to combine 2 rdds.
others?
In general, having an idea of the volume of data flowing through the stages of a Spark job and what each operation will do with it will help you keep mentally sane.
So I am using groupByKey function in spark, but its not being parallelized, as I can see that during its execution, only 1 core is being used. It seems that the data I'm working with doesn't allow parallelization. Is there a way in spark to know if the input data is amicable to parallelization or if it's not a proper RDD?
The unit of parallelization in Spark is the 'partition'. That is, RDDs are split in partitions and transformations are applied to each partition in parallel. How RDD data is distributed across partitions is determined by the Partitioner. By default, the HashPartitioner is used which should work fine for most purposes.
You can check how many partitions your RDD is split into using:
rdd.partitions // Array of partitions