As part of the Tungsten project, Spark has started an ongoing effort to dramatically improve performance to bring the execution closer to bare metal. In this talk, we’ll go over the progress that has been made so far and the areas we’re looking to invest in next. This talk will discuss the architectural changes that are being made as well as some discussion into how Spark users can expect their application to benefit from this effort. The focus of the talk will be on Spark SQL but the improvements are general and applicable to multiple Spark technologies.