scala - Spark: what's the best strategy for joining a 2-tuple-key RDD with single-key RDD?

Question

I have two RDD's that I want to join and they look like this:

val rdd1:RDD[(T,U)]
val rdd2:RDD[((T,W), V)]

It happens to be the case that the key values of rdd1 are unique and also that the tuple-key values of rdd2 are unique. I'd like to join the two data sets so that I get the following rdd:

val rdd_joined:RDD[((T,W), (U,V))]

What's the most efficient way to achieve this? Here are a few ideas I've thought of.

Option 1:

val m = rdd1.collectAsMap
val rdd_joined = rdd2.map({case ((t,w), u) => ((t,w), u, m.get(t))})

Option 2:

val distinct_w = rdd2.map({case ((t,w), u) => w}).distinct
val rdd_joined = rdd1.cartesian(distinct_w).join(rdd2)

Option 1 will collect all of the data to master, right? So that doesn't seem like a good option if rdd1 is large (it's relatively large in my case, although an order of magnitude smaller than rdd2). Option 2 does an ugly distinct and cartesian product, which also seems very inefficient. Another possibility that crossed my mind (but haven't tried yet) is to do option 1 and broadcast the map, although it would be better to broadcast in a "smart" way so that the keys of the map are co-located with the keys of rdd2.

Has anyone come across this sort of situation before? I'd be happy to have your thoughts.

Thanks!

Answer 1

One option is to perform a broadcast join by collecting rdd1 to the driver and broadcasting it to all mappers; done correctly, this will let us avoid an expensive shuffle of the large rdd2 RDD:

val rdd1 = sc.parallelize(Seq((1, "A"), (2, "B"), (3, "C")))
val rdd2 = sc.parallelize(Seq(((1, "Z"), 111), ((1, "ZZ"), 111), ((2, "Y"), 222), ((3, "X"), 333)))

val rdd1Broadcast = sc.broadcast(rdd1.collectAsMap())
val joined = rdd2.mapPartitions({ iter =>
  val m = rdd1Broadcast.value
  for {
    ((t, w), u) <- iter
    if m.contains(t)
  } yield ((t, w), (u, m.get(t).get))
}, preservesPartitioning = true)

The preservesPartitioning = true tells Spark that this map function doesn't modify the keys of rdd2; this will allow Spark to avoid re-partitioning rdd2 for any subsequent operations that join based on the (t, w) key.

This broadcast could be inefficient since it involves a communications bottleneck at the driver. In principle, it's possible to broadcast one RDD to another without involving the driver; I have a prototype of this that I'd like to generalize and add to Spark.

Another option is to re-map the keys of rdd2 and use the Spark join method; this will involve a full shuffle of rdd2 (and possibly rdd1):

rdd1.join(rdd2.map {
  case ((t, w), u) => (t, (w, u))
}).map {
  case (t, (v, (w, u))) => ((t, w), (u, v))
}.collect()

On my sample input, both of these methods produce the same result:

res1: Array[((Int, java.lang.String), (Int, java.lang.String))] = Array(((1,Z),(111,A)), ((1,ZZ),(111,A)), ((2,Y),(222,B)), ((3,X),(333,C)))

A third option would be to restructure rdd2 so that t is its key, then perform the above join.