Reynold Xin explains the evolution of Apache Spark™, outlining several historical challenges and how the Spark community worked to make improvements, including the addition of PySpark.

Speaker: Reynold Xin, Co-founder and Chief Architect at Databricks

Legacy data warehouses are costly to maintain, unscalable and cannot deliver on data science, ML and real-time analytics use cases. Migrating from your enterprise data warehouse to Databricks lets you scale as your business needs grow and accelerate innovation by running all your data, analytics and AI workloads on a single unified data platform.

In the first part of this session we will guide you through the well-designed process and tools that will help you from the assessment phase to the actual implementation of an EDW migration project. Also, we will address ways to convert PL/SQL proprietary code to an open standard python code and take advantage of PySpark for ETL workloads and Databricks SQL’s data analytics workload power.

The second part of this session will be based on an EDW migration project of SNCF (French national railways); one of the major enterprise customers of Databricks in France. Databricks partnered with SNCF to migrate its real estate entity from Oracle DW and IBM DataStage to Databricks on AWS. We will walk you through the customer context, urgency to migration, challenges, target architecture, nitty-gritty details of implementation, best practices, recommendations, and learnings in order to execute a successful migration project in a very accelerated time frame.

Talk by: Himanshu Arora and Amine Benhamza

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Apache Spark is a popular distributed framework for big data processing. It is commonly used for ETL (extract, transform and load) across large datasets. Today, the transform stage can often include the application of deep learning models on the data. For example, common models can be used for classification of images, sentiment analysis of text, language translation, anomaly detection, and many other use cases. Applying these models within Spark can be done today with the combination of PySpark, Pandas_UDF, and a lot of glue code. Often, that glue code can be difficult to get right, because it requires expertise across multiple domains - deep learning frameworks, PySpark APIs, pandas_UDF internal behavior, and performance optimization.

In this session, we introduce a new, simplified API for deep learning inferencing on Spark, introduced in SPARK-40264 as a collaboration between NVIDIA and Databricks, which seeks to standardize and open source this glue code to make deep learning inference integrations easier for everyone. We discuss its design and demonstrate its usage across multiple deep learning frameworks and models.

Talk by: Lee Yang

Here’s more to explore: LLM Compact Guide: https://dbricks.co/43WuQyb Big Book of MLOps: https://dbricks.co/3r0Pqiz

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PySpark has accomplished many milestones such as Project Zen, and been increasingly growing. We introduced pandas API on Spark, and hugely improved usability such as error messages, type hints, etc., and PySpark has become almost the very standard of distributed computing in Python. With this trend, the kind of PySpark use cases became also very complicated especially for modern data applications such as notebooks, IDEs, even devices such as smart home devices leveraging the power of data, that virtually need a lightweight separate client. However, today’s PySpark client is considerably heavy, and does not allow the separation from its scheduler, optimizer and analyzer as an example.

In Apache Spark 3.4, one of the key features we introduced in PySpark is the Python client for Spark Connect that decouples client-server architecture for Apache Spark that allows remote connectivity to Spark clusters using the DataFrame API and unresolved logical plans as the protocol. The separation between client and server allows Apache Spark and its open ecosystem to be leveraged from everywhere. It can be embedded in modern data applications. In this talk, we will introduce what Spark Connect is, the internals of Spark Connect with Python, how to use Spark Connect with Python in the end-user perspective, and what’s next beyond Apache Spark 3.4.

Talk by: Hyukjin Kwon and Ruifeng Zheng

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Since the release of Delta 2.0, the project has been growing at a breakneck speed. In this session, we will cover all the latest capabilities that makes Delta Lake the best format for the lakehouse. Based on lessons learned from this past year, we will introduce Project Aqueduct and how we will simplify building Delta Lake APIs from Rust and Go to Trino, Flink, and PySpark.

Talk by: Tathagata Das and Denny Lee

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Join us for this Technical Deep Dive session. In 2022, Apache Spark™ was awarded the prestigious SIGMOD Systems Award, because Spark is the de facto standard for data processing.

In this session, we will share the latest progress in Apache Spark community. With tremendous contribution from the open source community, Spark 3.4 managed to resolve in excess of 2,400 Jira tickets. We will talk about the major features and improvements in Spark 3.4. The major updates are Spark Connect, numerous PySpark and SQL language features, engine performance enhancements, as well as operational improvements in Spark UX and error handling.

Talk by: Xiao Li and Daniel Tenedorio

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Can we take Data Engineering on Spark 10x beyond where it is today?

Yes, we can enable 10x more users on Spark, and make them 10x more productive from day 1. Data engineering can run at scale, and it can still be 10x simpler and faster to develop, deploy, and manage pipelines.

Low code is the key. A modern data engineering platform built on low code will enable all data users, from new graduates to experts, to visually develop high-quality pipelines. With Visual = Code, the visual elements will be stored as PySpark code on Git and deployed using the best software practices taken from DevOps. Search and lineage help data engineers and their customers in analytics understand how each column value was produced, when it was updated, and the associated quality metric.

See how a complete, low-code data engineering platform can reduce complexity and effort, enabling you to rapidly deploy, scale, and use Spark, making data and analytics a strategic asset in your company.

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Learn how Wipro helped a world leader in medical technology to modernize its data used the PySpark interface on Azure Databricks to create reusable generic frameworks, including slowly changing dimensions (SCDs), data validation/reconciliation tools, and delta lake tables created from metadata.

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This talk is a story, using examples in Python and pySpark, about testing ETL pipelines efficiently. I won’t try to convince you that you need unit tests or automated tests – that’s up to you. If you do have unit tests for your ETL pipelines, or if you want them, it can be useful to make sure you aren’t testing more than you need.

I’ll be describing how a practical (non-pyramid shaped) heuristic helps me efficiently cover edge cases and unexpected bugs in my code by ensuring I test only the code needed for the feature I’m building.

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In this session we’ll present Mosaic, a new Databricks Labs project with a geospatial flavour.

Mosaic provides users of Spark and Databricks with a unified framework for distributing geospatial analytics. Users can choose to employ existing Java-based tools such as JTS or Esri's Geometry API for Java and Mosaic will handle the task of parallelizing these tools' operations: e.g. efficiently reading and writing geospatial data and performing spatial functions on geometries. Mosaic helps users scale these operations by providing spatial indexing capabilities (using, for example, Uber's H3 library) and advanced techniques for optimising common point-in-polygon and polygon-polygon intersection operations.

The development of Mosaic builds upon techniques developed with Ordnance Survey (the central hub for geospatial data across UK Government) and described in this blog post: https://databricks.com/blog/2021/10/11/efficient-point-in-polygon-joins-via-pyspark-and-bng-geospatial-indexing.html

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PySpark has rapidly evolved with the momentum of Project Zen introduced in Apache Spark 3.0. We improved error messages, added type hints for autocompletion, implemented visualization, etc. Most importantly, Pandas API on Spark was introduced from Apache Spark 3.2 which exposes the pandas API that runs on Apache Spark, and the Pandas API on Spark has gained a lot of popularity.

In Apache Spark 3.3, the effort of Project Zen continued and PySpark has many cool changes such as more API coverage & faster default index in Pandas API on Spark, datetime.timedelta support, new PyArrow batch interface, better autocompletion, Python & Pandas UDF profiler and new error classification.

In this talk, we will introduce what is new in PySpark at Apache Spark 3.3, and what is next beyond Apache Spark 3.3 with the current effort and roadmap in PySpark.

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Many enterprises have built their own machine learning platforms in the cloud using Databricks, e.g. Humana FlorenceAI. In order to effectively drive the adoption of predictive models in daily business operations, data scientists and business teams need to work closely to make sure they serve the consumer needs in compliance with regulatory rules. Model interpretability is key. In this talk, we would like to share an explainable AI algorithm developed at Humana, X-FIPE, eXtended Feature Impact for Prediction Explanation.

X-FIPE is a top-driver algorithm to calculate feature importance for any machine learning predictive models, whether it is Python or PySpark, at a local level. Instead of showing the feature importance on a population level, it can find the top drivers for each observation or member. These top drivers could differ widely from one member to another member in the population. it not only helps explain the predictive model, but also offer users actionable insights.

Compared with widely used algorithms, e.g. LIME, SHAP, and FIPE, X-FIPE improves the time complexity from linear O(n) to logarithmic O(log(n)), where n is the number of used model features. Also, we discovered the connection between X-FIPE value and Shapley value -- X-FIPE a first order approximation of Shapley value. Our observation shows that the most contribution of Shapley value of a feature comes from the marginal contribution when it is first added and when it is last removed from the full features. This is why the X-FIPE keeps enough accuracy and also reduces the computation.

Hopefully this talk will provide you a path forward to include explainable AI into your machine learning workflows, you are encouraged to try out and contribute to our open source Python package xfipe soon to come.

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Find out how Gousto is developing its data pipelines at scale in a repeatable manner. At Gousto, we’ve developed Goustospark - a wrapper around pyspark that allows us to quickly and easily build data pipelines that are deployed into our Databricks environment.

This wrapper abstracts repetitive components of all data pipelines such as spark configurations and metastore interactions. This allows a developer to simply specify the blueprints of the pipeline before turning their attention to more pressing issues, such as data quality and data governance, whilst enjoying a high level of performance and reliability.

In this session we will deep dive into the design patterns we followed, some unique approaches we’ve taken on how we structure pipelines and show a live demo of implementing a new spark streaming pipeline in Databricks from scratch. We will even share some example python code and snippets to help you build your own.

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The logic in your data is the heartbeat of your organization’s reports, analytics, dashboards and applications. But that logic is often trapped in antiquated technologies that can’t take advantage of the massive scalability in the Databricks Lakehouse.

In this session BladeBridge will show how to automate the conversion of this metadata and code into Databricks PySpark and DBSQL. BladeBridge will demonstrate the flexibility of configuring for N legacy technologies to facilitate an automated path for not just a single modernization project but a factory approach for corporate wide modernization.

BladeBridge will also present how you can empirically size your migration project to determine the level of effort required.

In this session you will learn: What BladeBridge Converter is What BladeBridge Analyzer is How BladeBridge configures Readers and Writers How to size a conversion effort How to accelerate adoption of Databricks

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In CKDelta, we ingest and process a massive amount of geospatial data. Using Apache Sedona together with Databricks have accelerated our data pipelines many times.

In this talk, we'll talk about migrating the existing pipelines to Sedona + PySpark and the pitfalls we encountered along the way.

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In recent years, latest privacy laws & regulations bring a fundamental shift in the protection of data and privacy, placing new challenges to data applications. To resolve these privacy & security challenges in big data ecosystem without impacting existing applications, several hardware TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) solutions have been proposed for Apache Spark, e.g., PySpark with Scone and Opaque etc. However, to the best of our knowledge, none of them provide full protection to data pipelines in Spark applications. An adversary may still get sensitive information from unprotected components and stages. Furthermore, some of them greatly narrowed supported applications, e.g., only support SparkSQL. In this presentation, we will present a new PPMLA (privacy preserving machine learning and analytics) solution built on top of Apache Spark, BigDL, Occlum and Intel SGX. It ensures all spark components and pipelines are fully protected by Intel SGX, and existing Spark applications written in Scala, Java or Python can be migrated into our platform without any code change. We will demonstrate how to build distributed end-to-end SparkML/SparkSQL workloads with our solution on untrusted cloud environment and share real-world use cases for PPMLA.

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