Week 7: Introduction to Spark

DSAN 6000: Big Data and Cloud Computing
Fall 2026

Jeff Jacobs

jj1088@georgetown.edu

Monday, October 19, 2026

Big Midterm \(\rightarrow\) Final Project Updates

Pre-Approved Final Project Datasets!

 

See here

Practice Midterm

• Pick one of the pre-approved datasets
• Read the corresponding vignette on the website
• Answer each practice question based on this vignette

Vignettes will also be provided on the paper midterm!

Entering Our Spark Era

PySpark

Written in

Compiles to

Java Virtual Machine (JVM)

Roadmap

(Logistical point: Form for new AWS Canvas accounts)

• Week 3: Map-Reduce \(\leadsto\) Last Week: Athena with AWS Glue under the hood for “automated” ETL!
• This Week: Hitting a wall with Athena… It doesn’t know in advance what [types of] queries you’re going to make!
• If you’re going to group by (e.g.) state, then rent 50 computers to process one state each, Athena doesn’t know to place the Ohio data on the Ohio computer!
• Hadoop MapReduce: Allows “steering” of Map-Reduced data-computation pairing

Your Goal: Narrow Dependencies!

Damji et al. (2020), Figure 2-7 (p. 31)

References

Damji, Jules S., Brooke Wenig, Tathagata Das, and Denny Lee. 2020. Learning Spark. O’Reilly Media, Inc.