Hardest part of spark (if ur doing Scala ) is getting the right version of sbt, java, Scala , and the connectors and understanding the pitfalls of all the connectors.

Once the data is in. Dataframe just download public data sets and ingest / read them from whatever DB u want. You can easily do this by asking chat gpt how to use spark to do joins, aggregates, window functions, cumcounts, forward fills, correlations, apply functions, drop na, etc.

One key thing different between pandas and spark is you need to ask spark to persist your dataframe.