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Spark SQL and Oracle Database Integration

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I’ve been meaning to write about Apache Spark for quite some time now – I’ve been working with a few of my customers and I find this framework powerful, practical, and useful for a lot of big data usages. For those of you who don’t know about Apache Spark, here is a short introduction.

Apache Spark is a framework for distributed calculation and handling of big data. Like Hadoop, it uses a clustered environment in order to partition and distribute the data to multiple nodes, dividing the work between them. Unlike Hadoop, Spark is based on the concepts of in-memory calculation. Its main advantages are the ability to pipeline operations (thus breaking the initial concept of a single map-single reduce in the MapReduce framework), making the code much easier to write and run, and doing it in an in-memory architecture so things run much faster.

Hadoop and Spark can co-exist, and by using YARN – we get many benefits from that kind of environment setup.

Of course, Spark is not bulletproof and you do need to know how to work with it to achieve the best performance. As a distributed application framework, Spark is awesome – and I suggest getting to know with it as soon as possible.

I will probably make a longer post introducing it in the near future (once I’m over with all of my prior commitments).
In the meantime, here is a short explanation about how to connect from Spark SQL to Oracle Database.

Update: here is the 200 long slides presentation I made for Oracle Week 2016: it should cover most of the information new comers need to know about spark.
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