What is Spark

Apache Spark is a cluster computing framework, similar to Apache Hadoop. Wikipedia has a great description of it:

Apache Spark is an open source cluster computing framework originally developed in the AMPLab at University of California, Berkeley but was later donated to the Apache Software Foundation where it remains today. In contrast to Hadoop’s two-stage disk-based MapReduce paradigm, Spark’s multi-stage in-memory primitives provides performance up to 100 times faster for certain applications. By allowing user programs to load data into a cluster’s memory and query it repeatedly, Spark is well-suited to machine learning algorithms.

In contrast to popular belief, Spark does not require all data to fit into memory but will use caching to speed up the operations …

Apache Hadoop is commonly used for data analysis. It is fast for data loads and scalable. In a previous post I showed how to integrate MySQL with Hadoop. In this post I will show how to export a table from  MySQL to Hadoop, load the data to Cloudera Impala (columnar format) and run a reporting on top of that. For the examples below I will use the “ontime flight performance” data from my previous post (Increasing MySQL performance with parallel query execution). I’ve used the Cloudera Manager v.4 to install Apache Hadoop and Impala. For this test …

Dolphin and Elephant: an Introduction

This post is intended for MySQL DBAs or Sysadmins who need to start using Apache Hadoop and want to integrate those 2 solutions. In this post I will cover some basic information about the Hadoop, focusing on Hive as well as MySQL and Hadoop/Hive integration.

First of all, if you were dealing with MySQL or any other relational database most of your professional life (like I was), Hadoop may look different. Very different. Apparently, Hadoop is the opposite to any relational database. Unlike the database where we have a set of tables and indexes, Hadoop works with a set of text files. And… there are no indexes at all. And yes, this may be shocking, but all scans are sequential (full “table” scans in MySQL terms).

So, when does Hadoop makes sense?

First, Hadoop is great if you need to …

As this topic came up a few times this week for discussion at various places, I thought of composing a post on “Data Scientist vs. Data Analytics Engineer”; even though[...]

Here is the typical “Big” data architecture, that covers most components involved in the data pipeline. More or less, we have the same architecture in production in number of places[...]