Apache Spark Study Guide 2026
Everything you need to pass the Apache Spark exam in one place: the exam format, every topic to study, real practice questions with explanations, flashcards, and full-length practice tests. Free, no sign-up needed.
📋 Apache Spark Exam Format at a Glance
📚 Apache Spark Topics to Study (23)
✍️ Sample Apache Spark Questions & Answers
1. Which language is used to create Spark?
Apache Spark was originally written in Scala, a powerful functional and object-oriented programming language. While it offers APIs in other languages, Scala remains its native and often most performant language for development. This foundational choice contributes to Spark's efficiency.
2. What is a sliding window in Spark Structured Streaming?
A sliding window has a duration and a slide interval; if the slide is smaller than the window duration, windows overlap.
3. How does Spark handle executor failures during a job?
When an executor fails, Spark reschedules its tasks on other executors and recomputes any lost RDD partitions using lineage.
4. Which source reads data from Apache Kafka in Spark Structured Streaming?
spark.readStream.format('kafka') reads streaming data from Kafka topics using the Kafka connector for Structured Streaming.
5. What is the purpose of spark.default.parallelism?
spark.default.parallelism sets the default number of partitions for RDD operations like reduceByKey and join when no explicit partition count is given.
6. What is the purpose of the IndexToString transformer in Spark ML?
IndexToString reverses the effect of StringIndexer, converting numeric label predictions back to the original string labels.