Is it possible to read pdf/audio/video files(unstructured data) using Apache Spark?

Question

Is it possible to read pdf/audio/video files(unstructured data) using Apache Spark? For example, I have thousands of pdf invoices and I want to read data from those and perform some analytics on that. What steps must I do to process unstructured data?

Answer 1

Yes, it is. Use sparkContext.binaryFiles to load files in binary format and then use map to map value to some other format - for example, parse binary with Apache Tika or Apache POI.

Pseudocode:

val rawFile = sparkContext.binaryFiles(...
val ready = rawFile.map ( here parsing with other framework

What is important, parsing must be done with other framework like mentioned previously in my answer. Map will get InputStream as an argument