What are they, and how do you use them?
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This article is about User Defined Functions (UDFs) in Spark. I’ll go through what they are and how you use them, and show you how to implement them using examples written in PySpark.
Incidentally, when I talk about PySpark, I just mean that the underlying language being used when programming with Spark is Python. The OG language for development using Spark was Scala, but with Python’s meteoric rise in popularity, it’s now the main language people use when programming in Spark even though Spark itself is written in Scala.
What is Spark?
If you haven’t used or heard of Spark before, the TL;DR is that it is a powerful tool for processing and analysing large amounts of data quickly. It’s a distributed computing engine, designed to handle big data tasks by breaking them into smaller pieces and working on them in parallel. This makes it much faster and more efficient than many other methods, especially for complex tasks like data analysis, machine learning, and real-time data processing.
Now part of the Apache Software Federation, Spark has several key aspects that cater to different aspects of data processing and analysis, including components for Machine Learning, SQL operations and handling…