Repartition vs Coaleasce in Apache spark

 

What is shuffling in spark ??

 As we know spark is shuffling the data when we are using wide transformation or any action. and result to this data needs to be traversed through the network from different machines which requires data serialization and de-serialization. To control the partition spark has two transformations Repartition and Coaleasce.

By default, when we perform a shuffle Spark will output two hundred shuffle partitions. This can be controlled using below config parameter.

spark.conf.set("spark.sql.shuffle.partitions", "100") 

Repartition:   Repartition returns a new RDD that has exactly numPartitions partitions passed on this transformation. It can increase or decrease the level of parallelism in the RDD. 

Internally, this uses a shuffle to redistribute data. If you are decreasing the number of partitions in the RDD, consider using `coalesce`,which can avoid performing a shuffle. TODO Fix the Shuffle+Repartition data loss issue described in SPARK-23207.

Coaleasce:  Coaleasce returns a new RDD that is reduced into `numPartitions` partitions passed on this transformation. This results in a narrow dependency, e.g. if you go from 1000 partitions to 100 partitions, there will not be a shuffle, instead each of the 100 new partitions will claim 10 of the current partitions. If a larger number of partitions is requested, it will stay at the current number of partitions.

However, if you're doing a drastic coalesce, e.g. to numPartitions = 1, this may result in your computation taking place on fewer nodes than you like (e.g. one node in the case of numPartitions = 1). 

To avoid this, you can pass shuffle = true. This will add a shuffle step, but means the current upstream partitions will be executed in parallel (per whatever the current partitioning is). With shuffle = true, you can actually coalesce to a larger number of partitions. This is useful if you have a small number of partitions, say 100, potentially with a few partitions being abnormally large. Calling coalesce(1000, shuffle = true) will result in 1000 partitions with the data distributed using a hash partitioner. The optional partition coalesce passed in must be serializable.

Coaleasce creates unequal partition, however Repartition create equal number of partition which help to process data further and avoid data skew problem.

So it's purely on the use case you are looking for, test it before deploying in production.

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