Powerful Data Prep & ETL with Sparkflows
- Sparkflows
- Jan 24, 2018
- 2 min read
Sparkflows allows you to quickly do very complex data preparation and ETL on Big Data.
Sparkflows has a number of features for enabling it including:
Data Cleaning
Joins, GroupBy, Cube, SQL etc.
Reading data from multiple sources and writing results to various sinks.
Sparkflows also give you detailed control over your Spark jobs with Repartition, Coalesce, Cache etc.
Overview
In this blog we start with 5 datasets, read them in, understand their schema in the process, perform data cleaning and then certain aggregations and joins.
The final results are written to HDFS as CSV files. They can as well we written as Parquet, Avro, JSON, XML files or to HIVE/Relational tables.
Datasets
There are 5 datasets:
facts.dat : Contains fixed length records of products sold to customers
geo.csv : Contains mapping of geo ids to geo names
product.csv : Contains mapping of product ids to product names
customer.csv : Contains mapping of customer ids to customer names
time.csv : Contains mapping of various time interval ids to corresponding names
Workflow
The workflow achieves the following tasks:
Parses the facts data and performs various cleanup operations on it
Performs groupby with aggregations operations and saves it to a file
Joins the fact data with various dimensions to create a large table and saves it to a CSV file.
The workflow is shown below:

Data Parsing and Cleaning
While the various dimension data is available as csv files, the fact data is in fixed field size format.
Each record has a fixed number of characters. In each record each field consists of fixed number of characters. The steps for data parsing and cleaning are as follows:
Read in the fixed length record
Filter out invalid records
Cast some columns to numeric values
Group By and Aggregates
The data is then aggregated and counts and averages calculated. It is then saved as CSV file
Joins with various Dimension Data
The fact data is then joined with various dimension data. These include:
Geo
Product
Customer
Time
The final dataset is saved as CSV file.
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