Scalding

Scalding is a Scala library that makes it easy to write MapReduce jobs in Hadoop. Instead of forcing you to write raw map and reduce functions, Scalding allows you to write code that looks like natural Scala. It's similar to other MapReduce platforms like Pig, but offers a more powerful level of abstraction due to its built-in integration with Scala and the JVM.

Scalding is built on top of Cascading, a Java library that abstracts away much of the complexity of Hadoop.

Current version: 0.6.0

Word Count

Hadoop is a distributed system for counting words. Here is how it's done in Scalding.

package com.twitter.scalding.examples

import com.twitter.scalding._

class WordCountJob(args : Args) extends Job(args) {
  TextLine( args("input") )
    .flatMap('line -> 'word) { line : String => tokenize(line) }
    .groupBy('word) { _.size }
    .write( Tsv( args("output") ) )

  // Split a piece of text into individual words.
  def tokenize(text : String) : Array[String] = {
    // Lowercase each word and remove punctuation.
    text.toLowerCase.replaceAll("[^a-zA-Z0-9\\s]", "").split("\\s+")
  }
}

Notice that the tokenize function, which is standard Scala, integrates naturally with the rest of the MapReduce job. This is a very powerful feature of Scalding. (Compare it to the use of UDFs in Pig.)

You can find more example code under examples/. If you're interested in comparing Scalding to other languages, see the Rosetta Code page, which contains several MapReduce tasks translated from other frameworks (e.g., Pig and Hadoop Streaming) into Scalding.

Getting Started

Check out the Getting Started page on the wiki.
Next, go through the runnable tutorials provided in the source.
The API Reference contains general documentation, as well as many example Scalding snippets.
The Scalding Wiki contains more useful information.

Building

Install sbt 0.11.3 (sorry, but the assembly plugin is sbt version dependent).
sbt update (takes 2 minutes or more)
sbt test
sbt assembly (needed to make the jar used by the scald.rb script)

We use Travis CI to verify the build:

The current version is 0.6.0 and is available from maven central: org="com.twitter", artifact="scalding_2.8.1" or artifact="scalding_2.9.1".

Contact

Currently we are using the cascading-user mailing list for discussions: http://groups.google.com/group/cascading-user

In the remote possibility that there exist bugs in this code, please report them to: https://github.com/twitter/scalding/issues

Follow @Scalding on Twitter for updates.

Authors:

Avi Bryant http://twitter.com/avibryant
Oscar Boykin http://twitter.com/posco
Argyris Zymnis http://twitter.com/argyris

Thanks for assistance and contributions:

Chris Wensel http://twitter.com/cwensel
Ning Liang http://twitter.com/ningliang
Dmitriy Ryaboy http://twitter.com/squarecog
Dong Wang http://twitter.com/dongwang218
Edwin Chen http://twitter.com/edchedch
Sam Ritchie http://twitter.com/sritchie09

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0