Shuffle is a permanent point in the What's new in Apache Spark series. Why? It's often one the most time consuming part of the jobs and knowing the improvement simply helps writing better pipelines.
The asynchronous progress tracking and correctness issue fixes presented in the previous blog posts are not the single new feature in Apache Spark Structured Streaming 3.4.0. There are many others but to keep the blog post readable, I'll focus here only on 3 of them.
Apache Spark is infamous for its correctness issue for chained stateful operations. Fortunately things get improved in each release. The most recent one, the 3.4.0, also got some important changes on that field!
Finally, the time has come to start the analysis of the new features in Apache Spark. The first of them that grabbed my attention was the Async progress tracking from Structured Streaming.
