What's new in Apache Spark V2?

Since Apache Spark V2, many things have changed. This doesn't mean that the API has been broken. In contrast, most of the V1.6 Apache Spark applications will run on Apache Spark V2 with or without very little changes, but under the hood, there have been a lot of changes.

The first and most interesting thing to mention is the newest functionalities of the Catalyst Optimizer, which we will cover in detail in Chapter 3, The Catalyst Optimizer. Catalyst creates a Logical Execution Plan (LEP) from a SQL query and optimizes this LEP to create multiple Physical Execution Plans (PEPs). Based on statistics, Catalyst chooses the best PEP to execute. This is very similar to cost-based optimizers in Relational Data Base Management Systems (RDBMs). Catalyst makes heavy use of Project Tungsten, a component that we will cover in Chapter 4, Apache Spark Streaming.

Although the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is a masterpiece on its own, it is a general-purpose byte code execution engine. Therefore, there is a lot of JVM object management and garbage collection (GC) overhead. So, for example, to store a 4-byte string, 48 bytes on the JVM are needed. The GC optimizes on object lifetime estimation, but Apache Spark often knows this better than JVM. Therefore, Tungsten disables the JVM GC for a subset of privately managed data structures to make them L1/L2/L3 Cache-friendly.

In addition, code generation removed the boxing of primitive types polymorphic function dispatching. Finally, a new first-class citizen called Dataset unified the RDD and DataFrame APIs. Datasets are statically typed and avoid runtime type errors. Therefore, Datasets can be used only with Java and Scala. This means that Python and R users still have to stick to DataFrames, which are kept in Apache Spark V2 for backward compatibility reasons.