Spark 1.6: "Datasets" best of RDDs and Dataframes

If RDDs weren't killed by Dataframes in Spark 1.3 (as covered by my January, 2015 blog post Spark 1.3: Stop Using RDDs), surely they will be by Spark 1.6, which introduces Datasets.

As covered in Michael Armbrust's presentation today at Spark Summit Europe 2015, Spark Dataframes: Simple and Fast Analysis of Structured Data, specifically in his last slide, Datasets (as originally proposed in the umbrella Jira ticket SPARK-9999) combine the best of both worlds of RDDs and Dataframes.

Datasets provide an RDD-like API, but with all the performance advantages given by Catalyst and Tungsten. groupBy(), for example, which was always a performance no-no on RDDs, can be done efficiently with Datasets without worrying for example about some groups being too large for a single node because Catalyst can spill large groups. And it's all strongly typed and type-safe.

Datasets will be previewed in Spark 1.6, due out in December.

Minimal Scala pom.xml for Maven

You would think it would be easy to find an example pom.xml for Scala somewhere on the web. It's not. And the example one at http://www.scala-lang.org/old/node/345 doesn't work because its <sourcedir>src/main/java</sourcedir> excludes all your Scala files from src/main/scala!

Without further ado, below is a minimal pom.xml for Scala.

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0
http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    <groupId>com.technicaltidbit</groupId>
    <artifactId>scala-hello-world</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.scala-lang</groupId>
            <artifactId>scala-library</artifactId>
            <version>2.10.5</version>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.scala-tools</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-scala-plugin</artifactId>
                <executions>
                    <execution>
                        <goals>
                            <goal>compile</goal>
                        </goals>
                    </execution>
                </executions>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>
</project>