Spark RDD apend - apache-spark

In Spark, I loaded a data set as RDD and like to infrequently append streaming data to it. I know RDDs are immutable because it simplifies locking, etc. Are the other approaches to processing static and streaming data together as one?
Similar question has been asked before:
Spark : How to append to cached rdd?

Have a look at http://spark.apache.org/streaming/.
With spark streaming, you get a data structure representing a collection of RDDs you can iterate over. It can listen to a kafka queue, file system, etc to find new data to include in the next RDD.
Or if you only do these "appends" rarely, you can union two RDDs with the same schema to get a new combined RDD.

Related

Spark dataframe creation through already distributed in-memory data sets

I am new to the Spark community. Please ignore if this question doesn't make sense.
My PySpark Dataframe is just taking a fraction of time (in ms) in 'Sorting', but moving data is much expensive (> 14 sec).
Explanation:
I have a huge Arrow RecordBatches collection which is equally distributed on all of my worker node's memories (in plasma_store). Currently, I am collecting all those RecordBatches back in my master node, merging them, and converting them to a single Spark Dataframe. Then I apply sorting function on that dataframe.
Spark dataframe is a cluster distributed data collection.
So my question is:
Is it possible to create a Spark dataframe from all that already distributed Arrow RecordBatches data collections in the worker's nodes memories? So that the data should remain in the respective worker's nodes memories (instead of bringing it to master node, merging, and then creating distributed dataframe).
Thanks!
Yes you can store the data in a spark cache, whenever you try to get the data, it would get you from cache rather than the source.
Please utilize below kinks to understand more on cache,
https://sparkbyexamples.com/spark/spark-dataframe-cache-and-persist-explained/
where does df.cache() is stored
https://unraveldata.com/to-cache-or-not-to-cache/

How can I accumulate Dataframes in Spark Streaming?

I know Spark Streaming produces batches of RDDs, but I'd like to accumulate one big Dataframe that updates with each batch (by appending new dataframe to the end).
Is there a way to access all historical Stream data like this?
I've seen mapWithState() but I haven't seen it accumulate Dataframes specifically.
While Dataframes are implemented as batches of RDDs under the hood, a Dataframe is presented to the application as an non-discrete infinite stream of rows. There are no "batches of dataframes" as there are "batches of RDDs".
It's not clear what historical data you would like.

Misunderstanding of spark RDD fault tolerant

Many say:
Spark does not replicate data in hdfs.
Spark arranges the operations in DAG graph.Spark builds RDD lineage. If a RDD is lost they can be rebuilt with the help of lineage graph.
So there is no need of data replication as the RDDs can be recalculated from the lineage graph.
And my question is:
If a node fails, spark will only recompute the RDD partitions lost on this node, but where does the data source needed in the recompution process come from ? Do you mean its parent RDD is still there when the node fails?What if the RDD that lost some partitions didn't have parent RDD(like the RDD is from spark streaming receiver) ?
What if we lose something part way through computation?
Rely on the key insight from MR! Determinism provides safe recompute.
Track 'lineage' of each RDD. Can recompute from parents if needed.
Interesting: only need to record tiny state to do recompute.
Need parent pointer, function applied, and a few other bits.
Log 10 KB per transform rather than re-output 1 TB -> 2 TB
Source
The child RDD is metadata that describes how to calculate the RDD from the parent RDD. Read more in What is RDD dependency in Spark?
If a node fails, spark will only recompute the RDD partitions lost on this node, but where does the data source needed in the recompution process come from ? Do you mean its parent RDD is still there when the node fails?
The core idea is that you can use the lineage to recover lost RDDs because RDDs are
built from another RDD or
built from data in stable storage.
(source: RDD paper, beginning of section 2.1)
If some RDD is lost, you can just go back in the lineage until you reach some RDD or the initial data record that is still available.
The data in stable storage is replicated across multiple nodes, therefore unlikely to be lost.
As far from what I've read about Streaming Receivers, the received data seems to be saved in stable storage as well, so it behaves just like any other data source.

How to use RDD checkpointing to share datasets across Spark applications?

I have a spark application, and checkpoint the rdd in the code, a simple code snippet is as follows(It is very simple, just for illustrating my question.):
#Test
def testCheckpoint1(): Unit = {
val data = List("Hello", "World", "Hello", "One", "Two")
val rdd = sc.parallelize(data)
//sc is initialized in the setup
sc.setCheckpointDir(Utils.getOutputDir())
rdd.checkpoint()
rdd.collect()
}
When the rdd is checkpointed on the file system.I write another Spark application and would pick up the data checkpointed in the above code,
and make it as an RDD as a starting point in this second application
The ReliableCheckpointRDD is exactly the RDD that does the work, but this RDD is private to Spark.
So,since ReliableCheckpointRDD is private, it looks spark doesn't recommend to use ReliableCheckpointRDD outside spark.
I would ask if there is a way to do it.
Quoting the scaladoc of RDD.checkpoint (highlighting mine):
checkpoint(): Unit Mark this RDD for checkpointing. It will be saved to a file inside the checkpoint directory set with SparkContext#setCheckpointDir and all references to its parent RDDs will be removed. This function must be called before any job has been executed on this RDD. It is strongly recommended that this RDD is persisted in memory, otherwise saving it on a file will require recomputation.
So, RDD.checkpoint will cut the RDD lineage and trigger partial computation so you've got something already pre-computed in case your Spark application may fail and stop.
Note that RDD checkpointing is very similar to RDD caching but caching would make the partial datasets private to some Spark application.
Let's read Spark Streaming's Checkpointing (that in some way extends the concept of RDD checkpointing making it closer to your needs to share the results of computations between Spark applications):
Data checkpointing Saving of the generated RDDs to reliable storage. This is necessary in some stateful transformations that combine data across multiple batches. In such transformations, the generated RDDs depend on RDDs of previous batches, which causes the length of the dependency chain to keep increasing with time. To avoid such unbounded increases in recovery time (proportional to dependency chain), intermediate RDDs of stateful transformations are periodically checkpointed to reliable storage (e.g. HDFS) to cut off the dependency chains.
So, yes, in a sense you could share the partial results of computations in a form of RDD checkpointing, but why would you even want to do it if you could save the partial results using the "official" interface using JSON, parquet, CSV, etc.
I doubt using this internal persistence interface could give you more features and flexibility than using the aforementioned formats. Yes, it is indeed technically possible to use RDD checkpointing to share datasets between Spark applications, but it's too much effort for not much gain.

How to update an RDD?

We are developing Spark framework wherein we are moving historical data into RDD sets.
Basically, RDD is immutable, read only dataset on which we do operations.
Based on that we have moved historical data into RDD and we do computations like filtering/mapping, etc on such RDDs.
Now there is a use case where a subset of the data in the RDD gets updated and we have to recompute the values.
HistoricalData is in the form of RDD.
I create another RDD based on request scope and save the reference of that RDD in a ScopeCollection
So far I have been able to think of below approaches -
Approach1: broadcast the change:
For each change request, my server fetches the scope specific RDD and spawns a job
In a job, apply a map phase on that RDD -
2.a. for each node in the RDD do a lookup on the broadcast and create a new Value which is now updated, thereby creating a new RDD
2.b. now I do all the computations again on this new RDD at step2.a. like multiplication, reduction etc
2.c. I Save this RDDs reference back in my ScopeCollection
Approach2: create an RDD for the updates
For each change request, my server fetches the scope specific RDD and spawns a job
On each RDD, do a join with the new RDD having changes
now I do all the computations again on this new RDD at step2 like multiplication, reduction etc
Approach 3:
I had thought of creating streaming RDD where I keep updating the same RDD and do re-computation. But as far as I understand it can take streams from Flume or Kafka. Whereas in my case the values are generated in the application itself based on user interaction.
Hence I cannot see any integration points of streaming RDD in my context.
Any suggestion on which approach is better or any other approach suitable for this scenario.
TIA!
The usecase presented here is a good match for Spark Streaming. The two other options bear the question: "How do you submit a re-computation of the RDD?"
Spark Streaming offers a framework to continuously submit work to Spark based on some stream of incoming data and preserve that data in RDD form. Kafka and Flume are only two possible Stream sources.
You could use Socket communication with the SocketInputDStream, reading files in a directory using FileInputDStream or even using shared Queue with the QueueInputDStream. If none of those options fit your application, you could write your own InputDStream.
In this usecase, using Spark Streaming, you will read your base RDD and use the incoming dstream to incrementally transform the existing data and maintain an evolving in-memory state. dstream.transform will allow you to combine the base RDD with the data collected during a given batch interval, while the updateStateByKey operation could help you build an in-memory state addressed by keys. See the documentation for further information.
Without more details on the application is hard to go up to the code level on what's possible using Spark Streaming. I'd suggest you to explore this path and make new questions for any specific topics.
I suggest to take a look at IndexedRDD implementation, which provides updatable RDD of key value pairs. That might give you some insights.
The idea is based on the knowledge of the key and that allows you to zip your updated chunk of data with the same keys of already created RDD. During update it's possible to filter out previous version of the data.
Having historical data, I'd say you have to have sort of identity of an event.
Regarding streaming and consumption, it's possible to use TCP port. This way the driver might open a TCP connection spark expects to read from and sends updates there.

Resources