Databases & Data Storage
Apache Spark
Definition
Apache Spark is an open-source, distributed, general-purpose cluster-computing framework. Spark provides an interface for programming entire clusters with implicit data parallelism and fault tolerance.
Why It Matters
Spark is a leading platform for large-scale data processing and analytics. It is much faster than the older MapReduce paradigm and provides a unified engine for batch processing, streaming data, machine learning, and graph analytics.
Contextual Example
A data scientist uses Spark to analyze a terabyte of web log data stored in a data lake. Spark distributes the computation across a cluster of hundreds of machines, allowing the analysis to complete in minutes instead of days.
Common Misunderstandings
- Spark does not have its own storage system; it is a processing engine that can read data from many different sources, like Hadoop HDFS, Amazon S3, or Cassandra.
- It is a key tool in the Big Data ecosystem.