pandas-on-spark

pandas-on-spark is a skill for Claude Code from Galius5136/databricks-spark-3.5-cert-prep. It costs 119 tokens per session (2,367 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A reference guide to the Pandas API on Spark, a pandas-like way to process data across a Spark cluster. Apache Spark is a system for processing large datasets on multiple machines.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to migrate pandas workflows to Spark, explain the API's benefits, and configure indexes, cross-data-frame operations, or checkpointing.
Why use it?
It helps pandas users understand what changes when their code runs in a distributed environment and how to configure the API.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Good fit Use it to migrate pandas workflows to Spark, explain the API's benefits, and configure indexes, cross-data-frame operations, or checkpointing.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/galius5136/databricks-spark-3.5-cert-prep/pandas-on-spark
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add Galius5136/databricks-spark-3.5-cert-prep --skill pandas-on-spark
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Galius5136/databricks-spark-3.5-cert-prep

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for pandas-on-spark

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/galius5136/databricks-spark-3.5-cert-prep/pandas-on-spark/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/galius5136/databricks-spark-3.5-cert-prep/pandas-on-spark)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/galius5136/databricks-spark-3.5-cert-prep/pandas-on-spark"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/galius5136/databricks-spark-3.5-cert-prep/pandas-on-spark/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for pandas-on-spark

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/galius5136/databricks-spark-3.5-cert-prep/pandas-on-spark"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/galius5136/databricks-spark-3.5-cert-prep/pandas-on-spark.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 119 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,367 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00119 $0.02367
Opus 5 $0.00060 $0.01184
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.00473
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00237

Measured 11d ago against content hash 02401f211147, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pandas-on-spark scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/pandas-on-spark/SKILL.md · 179 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 179 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Pandas API on Spark — Exam-Prep Knowledge Base

Source Spark version: 3.5.7 + 2021 Databricks Koalas-merger context | Chapters: 1 (single deep-dive) | Generated: 2026-05-24

Scope rule: All content is in scope for Sec 7 of the Databricks Certified Associate Developer for Apache Spark exam, anchored to Spark 3.5. Anything Spark 4.x is flagged ⚠️.

Out of scope for this skill (cross-links only, no expansion):

  • Pandas UDF (@pandas_udf) — same exam section but a different API; covered by a separate skill.
  • Spark Connect — see skill spark-connect.

How to Use This Skill

  • Without arguments — loads the Core Frameworks below.
  • By topic — ask about default index type, to_pandas, ops_on_diff_frames, checkpoint, Koalas, etc.
  • By chapter — only ch01; the topic is single-chapter sized.

Core Frameworks & Mental Models

Pandas API on Spark in one paragraph

pyspark.pandas is a pandas-compatible DataFrame API that executes distributed on Spark. It started as the standalone Koalas project (Databricks) and was merged into PySpark with Spark 3.2 (Sept-Oct 2021, via the SPIP under Project Zen). Goal: let pandas users scale from single-machine to multi-TB cluster workloads with a single import change (import pandas as pdimport pyspark.pandas as pd), while keeping the entire downstream code identical.

Why use it (advantages — exam objective 1)

  1. Familiar pandas syntax at Spark scale — minimal code change to scale.
  2. No extra install since Spark 3.2 — ships with PySpark.
  3. Single-machine speedup via Catalyst optimizer + whole-stage codegen (Databricks 2021 benchmark: ~4× faster join on 130 GB CSV vs native pandas; survives chain operations where pandas OOMs).
  4. Linear scalability — same job runs on 60 GB single-machine or 15 TB on 256-node cluster (Databricks benchmark: ~10s std-dev compute in both cases).
  5. Unified analytics — same DataFrames feed ps.sql(...), Spark Structured Streaming, and MLlib.
  6. Lazy execution — Catalyst plans and optimizes; jobs trigger only when needed.
  7. All Spark features work — web UI, history server, AQE, dynamic allocation, deployment modes.

Read the full file on GitHub · 179 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 179 lines · 119 tokens per session scan A 02401f211147

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pandas-on-spark is a skill published in the GitHub repository Galius5136/databricks-spark-3.5-cert-prep (12 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 119 tokens to every session and 2,367 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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