Apache Spark
Apache Spark is an open-source, distributed computing system designed for large-scale data processing. It provides an interface for programming entire clusters with implicit data parallelism and fault tolerance, supporting in-memory processing for faster analytics. Spark includes libraries for SQL, streaming, machine learning, and graph processing, making it a unified analytics engine for big data workloads.
Developers should learn Apache Spark when working with big data applications that require fast, scalable processing of large datasets, such as real-time analytics, ETL pipelines, or machine learning tasks. It is particularly useful in scenarios where Hadoop MapReduce is too slow, as Spark's in-memory computing can be up to 100 times faster for iterative algorithms. Use cases include fraud detection, recommendation systems, and log analysis in industries like finance, e-commerce, and telecommunications.
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