Databricks Connect

Nuvolos now offers a VSCode application with Python 3.9 and R 4.2 and Databricks Connect (databrics-connect) pre-installed. From this application, you can submit Spark jobs to Databrics-hosted Spark clusters.

PySpark and sparklyR are both installed in the application.

Prerequisites

Databricks Connect only supports Databricks clusters with versions up to 10.4 LTS.

To configure the connection to Databricks, you will need a personal access token, which is not available in the Databricks Community Edition.

First, create a "Databricks 10.4 LTS + Py39 + R 4.2" application in Nuvolos:

Start the new application and open a terminal and configure your Databricks connection with the databricks-connect configure command. You will need the URL of your Databricks cluster and your personal access token.

You can test your connection with the command databricks-connect test

Python example

To run the example, please install the slugify Python package with the following command:

conda install -y -c conda-forge python-slugify

Once you have configured the Databricks connection, you can try the following simple example to create a Databricks table and run a SQL query on the table:

import pandas as pd
from pyspark.sql import SparkSession
from slugify import slugify

spark = SparkSession.builder.getOrCreate()
spark.conf.set("spark.sql.execution.arrow.pyspark.enabled","true")

# Use NYC Squirrel Census data
df = pd.read_csv("https://data.wa.gov/api/views/f6w7-q2d2/rows.csv?accessType=DOWNLOAD")
df.columns = [slugify(c, separator="_") for c in df.columns]
df = df.drop(columns=["vehicle_location", "electric_utility"])

df = spark.createDataFrame(df)
df.write.mode('overwrite').saveAsTable('ev_data')

spark.sql('select make, model, count(*) as registered from ev_data group by make, model order by registered desc').show(10)

You will see a result like:

R example

The sparklyr package is pre-installed in the application which allows you to connect to Databricks Spark clusters, configured with databricks-connect.

You can run the following R script example to run a simple job on your Databricks cluster:

library(sparklyr)
library(dplyr)

databricks_connect_spark_home <- system("databricks-connect get-spark-home", intern = TRUE)
sc <- spark_connect(method = "databricks", spark_home = databricks_connect_spark_home)

cars_tbl <- copy_to(sc, mtcars, overwrite = TRUE)

cars_tbl %>% 
  group_by(cyl) %>% 
  summarise(
    mean_mpg = mean(mpg, na.rm = TRUE),
    mean_hp  = mean(hp, na.rm = TRUE)
    )

print(as_tibble(cars_tbl), n = 10)

spark_disconnect(sc)

You should see an output like: