Introduction to Spark

Spark and PySpark utilize a container called Resilient Distributed Dataset (RDD) for storing and operating on data. The most important characteristic of Spark’s RDD is that it is immutable — once created, the data it contains cannot be updated. New RDDs can be created by transforming the data in another RDD, which is how analysis is done with Spark.

Using Spark’s native language, Scala, requires more setup than using PySpark. Some example Scala jobs, including the same example job in the PySpark documentation, can be found on this website. That Spark code has some trivial set up required to run a Spark job, and all of the actual logic is in the ‘run’ function.