.. Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at .. http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 .. Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License. === FAQ === Should I use PySpark's DataFrame API or pandas API on Spark? ------------------------------------------------------------ If you are already familiar with pandas and want to leverage Spark for big data, we recommend using pandas API on Spark. If you are learning Spark from the ground up, we recommend you start with PySpark's API. Does pandas API on Spark support Structured Streaming? ------------------------------------------------------ No, pandas API on Spark does not support Structured Streaming officially. As a workaround, you can use pandas-on-Spark APIs with `foreachBatch` in Structured Streaming which allows batch APIs: .. code-block:: python >>> def func(batch_df, batch_id): ... pandas_on_spark_df = ps.DataFrame(batch_df) ... pandas_on_spark_df['a'] = 1 ... print(pandas_on_spark_df) >>> spark.readStream.format("rate").load().writeStream.foreachBatch(func).start() timestamp value a 0 2020-02-21 09:49:37.574 4 1 timestamp value a 0 2020-02-21 09:49:38.574 5 1 ... How is pandas API on Spark different from Dask? ----------------------------------------------- Different projects have different focuses. Spark is already deployed in virtually every organization, and often is the primary interface to the massive amount of data stored in data lakes. pandas API on Spark was inspired by Dask, and aims to make the transition from pandas to Spark easy for data scientists.