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Introducing Apache Spark® 4.3 - Now available in Databricks Runtime 19

By · Published by Everything Blog

In short

The update introduces native concurrent stage scheduling and pipelined streaming shuffles, replacing blocking stages so producer and consumer processes can execute simultaneously. These low-latency optimizations delivered sub-150 millisecond P99 processing times across benchmark deduplication, window aggregation, and custom state tasks. Furthermore, the community is shifting its release schedule from a six-month cycle to quarterly deliveries to incorporate user feedback more rapidly.

Key points

  • Stateful streaming operations can now achieve sub-150 millisecond latency within the plat…: Stateful streaming operations can now achieve sub-150 millisecond latency within the platform's native Real-Time Mode execution engine.
  • Engineers can implement low-latency pipelines like personalization and fraud detection wi…: Engineers can implement low-latency pipelines like personalization and fraud detection without provisioning an entirely separate streaming engine.
  • Shortening the feature release cycle to every three months will provide the community mor…: Shortening the feature release cycle to every three months will provide the community more frequent opportunities to submit feedback.

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Stateful real-time processing, history-preserving pipelines, and faster small-data development

by Jungtaek Lim, Wenchen Fan, Andreas Neumann, Serge Rielau, Hyukjin Kwon, Jerry Peng, DB Tsai, Daniel Tenedorio, Xiao Li and Reynold Xin

Apache Spark 4.3 brings stateful processing to Real-Time Mode, achieving sub-150 ms P99 end-to-end latency across three representative stateful benchmarks. Streaming aggregations, deduplication, and custom stateful processing can now run in Structured Streaming's low-latency execution mode, extending it to applications that need to remember context across events.

The impact goes beyond faster pipelines. For supported workloads, you no longer need a separate streaming engine just to achieve millisecond-scale latency. From fraud detection to continuously updated user activity and device monitoring, developers can build stateful applications with familiar Structured Streaming APIs in the same open engine they use for batch processing, analytics, and AI.

Stateful real-time streaming is the headline of Spark 4.3, but the improvements extend across the engine. The release delivers five key benefits:

transformWithState

in Real-Time Mode to maintain context as events arrive.Together, these changes help developers use one open engine to explore data, maintain changing context,…

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