PySpark Data Skew in 5 Minutes

Exactly what you need, and no more

There are lots of overly-complex posts about data skew, a deceptively simple topic. In this post, we will cover the necessary basics in 5minutes.

The primary source for this post was Spark: The Definitive Guide and here’s the code.

Let’s dive in…

What is Data Skew?

In spark, data are split into chunk of rows, then stored on worker nodes as shown in figure 1.

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