ILT - DENG-256: Optimizing Apache Spark Applications - 4396845

Overview

This three-day hands-on training course delivers the key concepts and expertise developers need to optimize the performance of their Apache Spark applications. During the course, participants will learn how to identify common sources of poor performance in Spark applications, techniques for avoiding or solving them, and best practices for Spark application monitoring.

Optimizing Apache Spark Applications presents the architecture and concepts behind Apache Spark and underlying data platform, then builds on this foundational understanding by teaching students how to tune Spark application code. The course format emphasizes instructor-led demonstrations illustrate both performance issues and the techniques that address them, followed by hands-on exercises that give students an opportunity to practice what they've learned through an interactive notebook environment.

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What You'll Learn

Students who successfully complete this course will be able to:

• Understand Apache Spark's architecture, job execution, and how techniques such as lazy execution and pipelining can improve runtime performance
• Evaluate the performance characteristics of core data structures such as RDD and DataFrames
• Select the file formats that will provide the best performance for your application
• Identify and resolve performance problems caused by data skew
• Use partitioning, bucketing, and join optimizations to improve SparkSQL performance
• Understand the performance overhead of Python-based RDDs, DataFrames, and user-defined functions
• Take advantage of caching for better application performance
• Understand how the Catalyst and Tungsten optimizers work
• Understand how Observability can help troubleshoot and proactively monitor Spark applications performance
• Learn how the Adaptive Query Execution engine improves performance

What to Expect

This course is designed for software developers, engineers, and data scientists who have experience developing Spark applications and want to learn how to improve the performance of their code. This is not an introduction to Spark.

Spark examples and hands-on exercises are presented in Python and the ability to program in this language is required. Basic familiarity with the Linux command line is assumed. Basic knowledge of SQL is helpful.

DATE: December 8-10, 2025

Virtual Classroom, EMEA

9:00 - 17:00 (GMT+2 TIMEZONE)