Airline Flight Data Analysis – Part 1 – Data Preparation

UPDATE – I have a more modern version of this post with larger data sets available here. This data analysis project is to explore what insights can be derived from the Airline On-Time Performance data set collected by the United States Department of Transportation. The data can be downloaded in month chunks from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics website. The data gets downloaded as a raw CSV file, which is something that Spark can easily load. However, if you download 10+ years of data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (meaning you downloaded 120+ one month CSV files from the site), that would collectively represent 30+ GB of data. For commercial scale Spark clusters, 30 GB of text data is a trivial task. However, if you are running Spark on the ODROID XU4 cluster or in local mode on your Mac laptop, 30+ GB of text data is substantial. So, before we can do any analysis of the dataset, we need to Read More …

Coverting Apache Access Logs to Parquet Backed Data Frames on Spark

One of the analysis I am looking to do with my ODROID XU4 cluster is to take a look at various access patterns on my website by analyzing the Apache http access logs. Analyzing Apache access logs directly in Spark can be slow due to them being unstructured text logs. Converting to the logs to a data frame backed by partitioned parquet files can make subsequent analysis much faster. The first task is to create a mapper that can be used in Spark convert a row int eh access log to a Spark Row object. A Python 3 mapper would look like: # Parse an Apache access log. Assumes Python 3 import re from pyspark.sql import Row from datetime import datetime APACHE_ACCESS_LOG_PATTERN = ‘^(\S+) (\S+) (\S+) \[([\w:/]+\s[+\-]\d{4})\] “(\S+) (\S+) (\S+)” (\d{3}) (\d+) “((?:[^”]|”)+)” “((?:[^”]|”)+)”$’ DATETIME_PARSE_PATTERN = ‘%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S %z’ # Returns a Row containing the Apache Access Log info def parse_apache_log_line(logline): match = re.search(APACHE_ACCESS_LOG_PATTERN, logline) if match is None: return None Read More …