Spark Declarative Pipelines: A Paradigm Shift for Data Engineering

Apache Spark 4.1 introduces Spark Declarative Pipelines (SDP) — a declarative framework that lets you define what your data should look like, not how to compute it. As a Spark PMC Member, here’s my take on what this means for data engineering.

March 28, 2026 · 3 min · Kent Yao