Spark SQL optimization internals articles

4-day workshop Β· In-person or online

What would it take for you to trust your Databricks pipelines in production?

A 3-day bug hunt on a 3-person team costs up to €7,200 in lost engineering time. This workshop teaches you to prevent that β€” unit tests, data tests, and integration tests for PySpark and Databricks Lakeflow, including Spark Declarative Pipelines.

Unit, data & integration tests
Medallion architecture & Lakeflow SDP
Max 10 participants Β· production-ready templates
See the full curriculum β†’ €7,000 flat fee Β· cohort of up to 10
Bartosz Konieczny
Bartosz
Konieczny

Catalyst Optimizer in Spark SQL

The use of Dataset abstraction is not a single difference between structured and unstructured data processing in Spark. Apart of that, Spark SQL uses a technique helping to get results faster.

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Spark Project Tungsten

Even if Project Tungsten was started in Spark 1.5 and Spark's current version is 2.1 at the time of writing, it's good to know what precious this Project brought to Spark.

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Generated code in Spark SQL

One of powerful features of Spark SQL is dynamic generation of code. Several different layers are generated and this post explains some of them.

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Predicate pushdown in Spark SQL

The optimizer in Spark SQL helps to improve the performance of processing pipelines. One of its techniques is predicate pushdown.

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Spark SQL operator optimizations - part 1

Pushdown predicate is one of the most popular optimizations in Spark SQL. But it's not the single one and their main list is defined in org.apache.spark.sql.catalyst.optimizer.Optimizer abstract class.

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Spark SQL Cost-Based Optimizer

Prior to Spark 2.2.0 release, the data processing was based on a set of heuristic rules ignoring the typology of the data. But the most recent release brought a tool well known from the RDBMS world that is a Cost-Based Optimizer.

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Reorder JOIN optimizer

One of the reasons why I like my blogging activity is that from time to time the exchange is bidirectional. It happens mostly on Github but also on the comments under the post and I appreciate the situation when I don't know the answer and must dig a little to explain it in a blog post :) I wrote this one thanks to bithw1 issue created on my Spark playground repository (thank you for another interesting question btw :)).

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Reorder JOIN optimizer - cost-based optimization

In my previous post I explained how Apache Spark can reorder JOINs based on the logical plan. Today I'll focus on another aspect of reordering which uses cost estimation for the proposed plans.

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Reorder JOIN optimizer - star schema

I didn't know that join reordering is quite interesting, though complex, topic in Apache Spark SQL. The queries not only can be transformed into the ones using JOIN ... ON clauses. They can also be reordered accordingly to the star schema which we'll try to see in this post.

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