Introducing Spark SQL applications

Machine learning, predictive analytics, and related data science topics are becoming increasingly popular for solving real-world problems across business domains. These applications are driving mission-critical business decision making in many organizations. Examples of such applications recommendation engines, targeted advertising, speech recognition, fraud detection, image recognition and categorization, and so on. Spark (and Spark SQL) is increasingly becoming the platform of choice for these large-scale distributed applications.

With the availability of online data sources for financial news, earning conference calls, regulatory filings, social media, and so on, interest in the automated and intelligent analysis of textual and other unstructured data available in various formats, including text, audio, and video, has proliferated. These applications include sentiment analysis from regulatory filings, large-scale automated analysis of news articles and...