By providing high-level concurrency abstractions, Scala makes writing parallel code intuitive and straightforward. Parallel collections and futures form an invaluable part of a data scientist's toolbox, allowing them to parallelize their code with minimal effort. However, while these high-level abstractions obviate the need to deal directly with threads, an understanding of the internals of Scala's concurrency model is necessary to avoid race conditions.

In the next chapter, we will put concurrency on hold and study how to interact with SQL databases. However, this is only temporary: futures will play an important role in many of the remaining chapters in this book.