Part 1 - Introducing an R interface for Apache Spark

sparklyr facilitates a connection between R and Spark using a full-fledged dplyr backend with support for the entirety of Spark’s MLlib library.

Part 1 - Introducing an R interface for Apache Spark

August 9, 2017

RStudio recently announced a new open-source package called sparklyr that facilitates a connection between R and Spark using a full-fledged dplyr backend with support for the entirety of Spark’s MLlib library. Due to Spark’s ability to interact with distributed data with little latency, it is becoming an attractive tool for interfacing with large datasets in an interactive environment. In addition to handling the storage of data, Spark also incorporates a variety of other tools including stream processing, computing on graphs, and a distributed machine learning framework. Some of these tools are available to R programmers via the sparklyr package.

In this four-part series, we’ll discuss how to leverage Spark’s capabilities in a modern R environment. The sparklyr Series:

  1. Introducing an R interface for Apache Spark
  2. Extending Spark using sparklyr and R
  3. Advanced Features of sparklyr
  4. Understanding Spark and sparklyr deployment modes
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About the speaker

Edgar Ruiz is a solutions engineer at RStudio with a background in deploying enterprise reporting and business intelligence solutions. He is the author of multiple articles and blog posts sharing analytics insights and server infrastructure for data science. Edgar is the author and administrator of the https://db.rstudio.com web site, and current administrator of the sparklyr web site: https://spark.rstudio.com. Co-author of the dbplyr package, and creator of the dbplot, tidypredict and modeldb package.