Scala read only certain parts of file - arrays

Question

I'm trying to read an input file in Scala that I know the structure of, however I only need every 9th entry. So far I have managed to read the whole thing using:
val lines = sc.textFile("hdfs://moonshot-ha-nameservice/" + args(0))
val fields = lines.map(line => line.split(","))
The issue, this leaves me with an array that is huge (we're talking 20GB of data). Not only have I seen myself forced to write some very ugly code in order to convert between RDD[Array[String]] and Array[String] but it's essentially made my code useless.
I've tried different approaches and mixes between using
.map()
.flatMap() and
.reduceByKey()
however nothing actually put my collected "cells" into the format that I need them to be.
Here's what is supposed to happen: Reading a folder of text files from our server, the code should read each "line" of text in the format:
*---------*
| NASDAQ: |
*---------*
exchange, stock_symbol, date, stock_price_open, stock_price_high, stock_price_low, stock_price_close, stock_volume, stock_price_adj_close
and only keep a hold of the stock_symbol as that is the identifier I'm counting. So far my attempts have been to turn the entire thing into an array only collect every 9th index from the first one into a collected_cells var. Issue is, based on my calculations and real life results, that code would take 335 days to run (no joke).
Here's my current code for reference:
import org.apache.spark.SparkContext
import org.apache.spark.SparkContext._
import org.apache.spark.SparkConf
object SparkNum {
def main(args: Array[String]) {
// Do some Scala voodoo
val sc = new SparkContext(new SparkConf().setAppName("Spark Numerical"))
// Set input file as per HDFS structure + input args
val lines = sc.textFile("hdfs://moonshot-ha-nameservice/" + args(0))
val fields = lines.map(line => line.split(","))
var collected_cells:Array[String] = new Array[String](0)
//println("[MESSAGE] Length of CC: " + collected_cells.length)
val divider:Long = 9
val array_length = fields.count / divider
val casted_length = array_length.toInt
val indexedFields = fields.zipWithIndex
val indexKey = indexedFields.map{case (k,v) => (v,k)}
println("[MESSAGE] Number of lines: " + array_length)
println("[MESSAGE] Casted lenght of: " + casted_length)
for( i <- 1 to casted_length ) {
println("[URGENT DEBUG] Processin line " + i + " of " + casted_length)
var index = 9 * i - 8
println("[URGENT DEBUG] Index defined to be " + index)
collected_cells :+ indexKey.lookup(index)
}
println("[MESSAGE] collected_cells size: " + collected_cells.length)
val single_cells = collected_cells.flatMap(collected_cells => collected_cells);
val counted_cells = single_cells.map(cell => (cell, 1).reduceByKey{case (x, y) => x + y})
// val result = counted_cells.reduceByKey((a,b) => (a+b))
// val inmem = counted_cells.persist()
//
// // Collect driver into file to be put into user archive
// inmem.saveAsTextFile("path to server location")
// ==> Not necessary to save the result as processing time is recorded, not output
}
}
The bottom part is currently commented out as I tried to debug it, but it acts as pseudo-code for me to know what I need done. I may want to point out that I am next to not at all familiar with Scala and hence things like the _ notation confuse the life out of me.
Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

There are some concepts that need clarification in the question:
When we execute this code:
val lines = sc.textFile("hdfs://moonshot-ha-nameservice/" + args(0))
val fields = lines.map(line => line.split(","))
That does not result in a huge array of the size of the data. That expression represents a transformation of the base data. It can be further transformed until we reduce the data to the information set we desire.
In this case, we want the stock_symbol field of a record encoded a csv:
exchange, stock_symbol, date, stock_price_open, stock_price_high, stock_price_low, stock_price_close, stock_volume, stock_price_adj_close
I'm also going to assume that the data file contains a banner like this:
*---------*
| NASDAQ: |
*---------*
The first thing we're going to do is to remove anything that looks like this banner. In fact, I'm going to assume that the first field is the name of a stock exchange that start with an alphanumeric character. We will do this before we do any splitting, resulting in:
val lines = sc.textFile("hdfs://moonshot-ha-nameservice/" + args(0))
val validLines = lines.filter(line => !line.isEmpty && line.head.isLetter)
val fields = validLines.map(line => line.split(","))
It helps to write the types of the variables, to have peace of mind that we have the data types that we expect. As we progress in our Scala skills that might become less important. Let's rewrite the expression above with types:
val lines: RDD[String] = sc.textFile("hdfs://moonshot-ha-nameservice/" + args(0))
val validLines: RDD[String] = lines.filter(line => !line.isEmpty && line.head.isLetter)
val fields: RDD[Array[String]] = validLines.map(line => line.split(","))
We are interested in the stock_symbol field, which positionally is the element #1 in a 0-based array:
val stockSymbols:RDD[String] = fields.map(record => record(1))
If we want to count the symbols, all that's left is to issue a count:
val totalSymbolCount = stockSymbols.count()
That's not very helpful because we have one entry for every record. Slightly more interesting questions would be:
How many different stock symbols we have?
val uniqueStockSymbols = stockSymbols.distinct.count()
How many records for each symbol do we have?
val countBySymbol = stockSymbols.map(s => (s,1)).reduceByKey(_+_)
In Spark 2.0, CSV support for Dataframes and Datasets is available out of the box
Given that our data does not have a header row with the field names (what's usual in large datasets), we will need to provide the column names:
val stockDF = sparkSession.read.csv("/tmp/quotes_clean.csv").toDF("exchange", "symbol", "date", "open", "close", "volume", "price")
We can answer our questions very easy now:
val uniqueSymbols = stockDF.select("symbol").distinct().count
val recordsPerSymbol = stockDF.groupBy($"symbol").agg(count($"symbol"))