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Write a Spark job to count word occurrences from an S3 dataset.

Spark/Big Datahard0.6 min readPremium
Frequency
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Asked at 1 company
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questions in Spark/Big Data
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Daniel Wellington
Key Concepts Tested
optimizationpartitionspark
Expert AnswerPremium
122 wordsInterview-ready
**Why It Matters (Architectural Logic)**: Word count is the canonical distributed computing example—map (split) and reduce (count). Demonstrates shuffle, partitioning, and skew handling. Read text from S3: `text_rdd = spark.sparkContext.textFile("s3://bucket/path/*.txt")`. Or from DataFrame: `df = spark.read.text("s3://bucket/path/")`. Word count: `words = df.select(F.explode(F.split(F.col("value"), "\s+")).alias("word")); word_counts = words.groupBy("word").count().orderBy(F.desc("count"))`....
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