Spark Interview Question 1: Difference Between RDD vs DataFrame?

Date: March 5th, 2024

Hi everyone! I am a Data Engineer, and I started posting contents about Spark interview questions for SWE/Data Engineers, mainly for Spark Optimization related questions. I aim to continuously write about ten posts about Spark optimization. After the series of these posts, you will ace technical interviews related to Spark! Although this post aims for helping technical interview rounds, any Spark users will find this series insightful and help your learning!

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Question: Tell me the difference between RDD and DataFrame.

Let’s start with a basics first before we dive deep each performance optimization topics. In Apache Spark, both RDDs (Resilient Distributed Datasets) and DataFrames are fundamental data structures used for handling and processing distributed data. However, they…