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Spark is possibly the most popular engine for big data processing these days and the 2.x release has several new features which make Spark more powerful and easy to work with. In this course, Getting Started with Spark 2, you will get up and running with Spark 2 and understand the similarities and differences between version 2.x and older versions. First, you will get to see the basic Spark architecture and the details of Project Tungsten which brought great performance improvements to Spark 2. You will go over the new developer APIs using DataFrames and see how they inter-operate with RDDs from Spark 1.x. Next, you will move on to big data processing where you will load and clean datasets, remove invalid rows, execute transformations to extract insights and perform grouping, sorting, and aggregations using the new DataFrame APIs. You will also study how and where to use broadcast variables and accummulators. Finally, you will work with Spark SQL which allows you to use SQL commands for big data processing. The course also covers advanced SQL support in the form of windowing operations. At the end of this course, you should be very comfortable working with Spark DataFrames and Spark SQL. You will be better equipped to make technical choices based on the performance trade-offs of older versions of Spark vs. Spark 2. Software required: Apache Spark 2.2, Python 2.7.
