Chapter 13: Integrating External Tools with Spark SQL

Business intelligence (BI) refers to the capabilities that enable organizations to make informed, data-driven decisions. BI is a combination of data processing capabilities, data visualizations, business analytics, and a set of best practices that enable, refine, and streamline organizations' business processes by helping them in both strategic and tactical decision making. Organizations typically rely on specialist software called BI tools for their BI needs. BI tools combine strategy and technology to gather, analyze, and interpret data from various sources and provide business analytics about the past and present state of a business.

BI tools have traditionally relied on data warehouses as data sources and data processing engines. However, with the advent of big data and real-time data, BI tools have branched out to using data lakes and other new data storage and processing technologies as data sources. In this chapter...