Apache Spark has been a great driver of not only Scala adoption, but introducing a new generation of developers to functional programming concepts. As Spark places more emphasis on its newer DataFrame & Dataset APIs, it’s important to ask ourselves how we can benefit from this while still keeping our fun functional roots. We will explore the cases where the Dataset APIs empower us to do cool things we couldn’t before, what the different approaches to serialization mean, and how to figure out when the shiny new API is actually just trying to steal your lunch money (aka CPU cycles).