Introduction
In previous chapters, we saw how to import data from a CSV file to Breeze and Spark DataFrames. However, almost all the time, the source data that is to be analyzed is available in a variety of source formats. Spark, with its DataFrame API, provides a uniform API that can be used to represent any source (or multiple sources). In this chapter, we'll focus on the various input formats that we can load from in Spark. Towards the end of this chapter, we'll also briefly see some data preparation recipes.