Some time ago I got 3 interesting questions about the implementation of Apache Kafka connector in Apache Spark Structured Streaming. I will answer them in this post.
Some time ago I was asked by Sunil whether it was possible to load the initial state in Apache Spark Structured Streaming like in DStream-based API. Since the response was not obvious, I decided to investigate and share the findings through this post.
When I first heard about the foreachBatch feature, I thought that it was the implementation of foreachPartition in the Structured Streaming module. However, after some analysis I saw how I was wrong because this new feature addresses other but also important problems. You will find more .
The series about Apache Spark 2.4.0 features continues. After last week's discovery of bucket pruning, it's time to switch to Structured Streaming module and see its major evolution.
In 3 recent posts about Apache Spark Structured Streaming we discovered streaming joins: inner joins, outer joins and state management strategies. Discovering what happens under-the-hood of all of these operations is a good point to sum up the series.
Last weeks we've discovered 2 stream-to-stream join types in Apache Spark Structured Streaming. As told in these posts, state management logic may be sometimes omitted (for inner joins) but generally it's advised to reduce the memory pressure. Apache Spark proposes 3 different state management strategies that will be detailed in the following sections.
Previously we discovered inner stream-to-stream joins in Apache Spark but they aren't the single supported type. Another one are outer joins that let us to combine streams without matching rows.
Apache Kafka Streams supports joins between streams and the community expected the same for Apache Spark. This feature was implemented and released with recent 2.3.0 version and after some months after that, it's a good moment to talk a little about it.
One of important points for long-living queries is the tracking. It's always important to know how the query performs. In Structured Streaming we can follow this execution thanks to special object called ProgressReporter.
The Structured Streaming guarantees end-to-end exactly-once delivery (in micro-batch mode) through the semantics applied to state management, data source and data sink. The state was more covered in the post about the state store but 2 other parts still remain to discover.
During the years Apache Spark's streaming was perceived as working with micro-batches. However, the release 2.3.0 tries to change this and proposes a new execution model called continuous. Even though it's still in experimental status, it's worthy to learn more about it.
Streaming stateful processing in Apache Spark evolved a lot from the first versions of the framework. At the beginning was updateStateByKey but some time after, judged inefficient, it was replaced by mapWithState. With the arrival of Structured Streaming the last method was replaced in its turn by mapGroupsWithState.
Recently we discovered the concept of state stores used to deal with stateful aggregations in Structured Streaming. But at that moment we didn't spend the time on these aggregations. As promised, they'll be described now.
Structured Streaming introduced a lot of new concepts regarding to the DStream-based streaming. One of them is the output mode.
During my last Spark exploration of the RPC implementation one class caught my attention. It was StateStoreCoordinator used by the state store that is an important place in Structured Streaming pipelines.
Some last weeks I was focused on Apache Beam project. After some readings, I discovered a lot of similar concepts between Beam and Spark Structured Streaming (or inversely?). One of this similarities are triggers.
The idea of watermark was firstly presented in the occasion of discovering the Apache Beam project. However it's also implemented in Apache Spark to respond to the same problem - the problem of late data.
The error quoted in the title of this post is quite common when you want to copy conception logic from Spark DStream/RDD to Spark structured streaming. This post makes some insight on it.
Spark 2.2.0 brought the change of structured streaming state. Between 2.0 and 2.2.0 it was marked as "alpha". But the last version changed this status to General Availability. It's so a good moment to start to play with this new feature - even if some basics have already been covered in the post about structured streaming. This time we'll go deeper and analyze the integration with Apache Kafka that will be helpful to
Project Tungsten, explained in one of previous posts, brought a lot of optimizations - especially in terms of memory use. Until now it was essentially used by Spark SQL and Spark MLib projects. However, since 2.0.0, some work was done to integrate DataFrame/Dataset in streaming processing (Spark Streaming).
