
High Performance Spark: Best Practices for Scaling and Optimizing Apache Spark 2nd Edition
Author(s): Holden Karau (Author), Adi Polak (Author), Rachel Warren (Author)
- Publisher: O’Reilly Media
- Publication Date: July 7, 2026
- Edition: 2nd
- Language: English
- Print length: 409 pages
- ISBN-10: 1098145852
- ISBN-13: 9781098145859
Book Description
Apache Spark is amazing when everything clicks. But if you haven’t seen the performance improvements you expected or still don’t feel confident enough to use Spark in production, this practical book is for you. Authors Holden Karau, Adi Polak, and Rachel Warren walk you through the secrets of the Spark code base and demonstrate performance optimizations that will help your data pipelines run faster, scale to larger datasets, and avoid costly antipatterns.
Ideal for data engineers, software engineers, data scientists, and system administrators, the second edition of High Performance Spark presents new use cases, code examples, and best practices for Spark 4.x and beyond. This book gives you a fresh perspective on this continually evolving framework and shows you how to work around bumps on your Spark and PySpark journey.
With this book, you’ll learn how to:
- Accelerate your ML workflows with integrations including PyTorch
- Handle key skew and take advantage of Spark’s new dynamic partitioning
- Make your code reliable with scalable testing and validation techniques
- Make Spark high performance
- Deploy Spark on Kubernetes and similar environments
- Take advantage of GPU acceleration with RAPIDS and resource profiles
- Get your Spark jobs to run faster
- Use Spark to productionize exploratory data science projects
- Handle even larger datasets with Spark
- Gain faster insights by reducing pipeline running times
Editorial Reviews
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
For most of Adi’s professional life, she dealt with data and machine learning. As a data practitioner, she developed algorithms to solve real-world problems using machine-learning techniques. As an engineer, she led the direction that brought the value of her hands-on machine learning experience into various Fortune 500 companies’ products and services by building upon cutting-edge and emerging technologies. Adi has been working and contributing to the Apache Spark community since 2013 and taught Spark to thousands of students throughout the year. Adi is an official Databricks ambassador, the author of the successful book – Scaling Machine Learning with Spark, and a respected worldwide presenter.
Rachel Warren is a data scientist and software engineer at Alpine Data Labs, where she uses Spark to address real world data processing challenges. She has experience working as an analyst both in industry and academia. She graduated with a degree in Computer Science from Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
Wow! eBook


