Shark is a new data analysis system that marries query processing with complex analytics on large clusters. It leverages a novel distributed memory abstraction to provide a unified engine that can run SQL queries and sophisticated analytics functions (e.g., iterative machine learning) at scale, and efficiently recovers from failures mid-query. This allows Shark to run SQL queries up to 100x faster than Apache Hive, and machine learning programs up to 100x faster than Hadoop. Unlike previous

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... ems, Shark shows that it is possible to achieve these speedups while retaining a MapReduce-like execution engine, and the fine-grained fault tolerance properties that such engines provide. It extends such an engine in several ways, including column-oriented in-memory storage and dynamic mid-query replanning, to effectively execute SQL. The result is a system that matches the speedups reported for MPP analytic databases over MapReduce, while offering fault tolerance properties and complex analytics capabilities that they lack.