I use Spark at work and there just isn't anything super exciting about this release. They did a bunch of work under the hood to make it go faster, and added som

I use Spark at work and there just isn't anything super exciting about this release. They did a bunch of work under the hood to make it go faster, and added some more SQL, but there's no big change in capabilities here. Spark is great if you really do need to parallelize your code across a pile of machines, but besides wanting to play with shiny toys, there isn't any reason to use this unless you have to. Personally I'm looking forward to see what h2o does with their Deep Learning integration (they're going to wrap Caffeine,T ensorFlow & money somehow) in Sparkling Water, since being able to easily train modern neural net models from Spark would be great, and if they can continue their deployment story into the DL space, that would be amazing for me.