I have a scala dataframe with two columns:
id: String
updated: Timestamp
From this dataframe I just want to get out the latest date, for which I use the following code at the moment:
df.agg(max("updated")).head()
// returns a row
I've just read about the collect() function, which I'm told to be
safer to use for such a problem - when it runs as a job, it appears it is not aggregating the max on the whole dataset, it looks perfectly fine when it is running in a notebook -, but I don't understand how it should
be used.
I found an implementation like the following, but I could not figure how it should be used...
df1.agg({"x": "max"}).collect()[0]
I tried it like the following:
df.agg(max("updated")).collect()(0)
Without (0) it returns an Array, which actually looks good. So idea is, we should apply the aggregation on the whole dataset loaded in the drive, not just the partitioned version, otherwise it seems to not retrieve all the timestamps. My question now is, how is collect() actually supposed to work in such a situation?
Thanks a lot in advance!
I'm assuming that you are talking about a spark dataframe (not scala).
If you just want the latest date (only that column) you can do:
df.select(max("updated"))
You can see what's inside the dataframe with df.show(). Since df are immutable you need to assign the result of the select to another variable or add the show after the select().
This will return a dataframe with just one row with the max value in "updated" column.
To answer to your question:
So idea is, we should apply the aggregation on the whole dataset loaded in the drive, not just the partitioned version, otherwise it seems to not retrieve all the timestamp
When you select on a dataframe, spark will select data from the whole dataset, there is not a partitioned version and a driver version. Spark will shard your data across your cluster and all the operations that you define will be done on the entire dataset.
My question now is, how is collect() actually supposed to work in such a situation?
The collect operation is converting from a spark dataframe into an array (which is not distributed) and the array will be in the driver node, bear in mind that if your dataframe size exceed the memory available in the driver you will have an outOfMemoryError.
In this case if you do:
df.select(max("Timestamp")).collect().head
You DF (that contains only one row with one column which is your date), will be converted to a scala array. In this case is safe because the select(max()) will return just one row.
Take some time to read more about spark dataframe/rdd and the difference between transformation and action.
It sounds weird. First of all you don´t need to collect the dataframe to get the last element of a sorted dataframe. There are many answers to this topics:
How to get the last row from DataFrame?
Related
I am creating a process in spark scala within an ETL that checks for some events occurred during the ETL process. I start with an empty dataframe and if events occur this dataframe is filled with information ( a dataframe can't be filled it can only be joined with other dataframes with the same structure ). The thing is that at the end of the process, the dataframe that has been generated is loaded into a table but it can happen that the dataframe ends up being empty because no event has occured and I don't want to load a dataframe that is empty because it has no sense. So, I'm wondering if there is an elegant way to load the dataframe into the table only if it is not empty without using the if condition. Thanks!!
I recommend to create the dataframe anyway; If you don't create a table with the same schema, even if it's empty, your operations/transformations on DF could fail as it could refer to columns that may not be present.
To handle this, you should always create a DataFrame with the same schema, which means the same column names and datatypes regardless if the data exists or not. You might want to populate it with data later.
If you still want to do it your way, I can point a few ideas for Spark 2.1.0 and above:
df.head(1).isEmpty
df.take(1).isEmpty
df.limit(1).collect().isEmpty
These are equivalent.
I don't recommend using df.count > 0 because it is linear in time complexity and you would still have to do a check like df != null before.
A much better solution would be:
df.rdd.isEmpty
Or since Spark 2.4.0 there is also Dataset.isEmpty.
As you can see, whatever you decide to do, there is a check somewhere that you need to do, so you can't really get rid of the if condition - as the sentence implies: if you want to avoid creating an empty dataframe.
I have spark dataframe
Here it is
I would like to fetch the values of a column one by one and need to assign it to some variable?How can it be done in pyspark.Sorry I am a newbie to spark as well as stackoverflow.Please forgive the lack of clarity in question
col1=df.select(df.column_of_df).collect()
list1=[str(i[0]) for i in col1]
#after this we can iterate through list (list1 in this case)
I don't understand exactly what you are asking, but if you want to store them in a variable outside of the dataframes that spark offers, the best option is to select the column you want and store it as a panda series (if they are not a lot, because your memory is limited).
from pyspark.sql import functions as F
var = df.select(F.col('column_you_want')).toPandas()
Then you can iterate on it like a normal pandas series.
I am trying to retrieve the value of a DataFrame column and store it in a variable. I tried this :
val name=df.select("name")
val name1=name.collect()
But none of the above is returning the value of column "name".
Spark version :2.2.0
Scala version :2.11.11
There are couple of things here. If you want see all the data collect is the way to go. However in case your data is too huge it will cause drive to fail.
So the alternate is to check few items from the dataframe. What I generally do is
df.limit(10).select("name").as[String].collect()
This will provide output of 10 element. But now the output doesn't look good
So, 2nd alternative is
df.select("name").show(10)
This will print first 10 element, Sometime if the column values are big it generally put "..." instead of actual value which is annoying.
Hence there is third option
df.select("name").take(10).foreach(println)
Takes 10 element and print them.
Now in all the cases you won't get a fair sample of the data, as the first 10 data will be picked. So to truely pickup randomly from the dataframe you can use
df.select("name").sample(.2, true).show(10)
or
df.select("name").sample(.2, true).take(10).foreach(println)
You can check the "sample" function on dataframe
The first will do :)
val name = df.select("name") will return another DataFrame. You can do for example name.show() to show content of the DataFrame. You can also do collect or collectAsMap to materialize results on driver, but be aware, that data amount should not be too big for driver
You can also do:
val names = df.select("name").as[String].collect()
This will return array of names in this DataFrame
I am using Apache spark in Scala to run aggregations on multiple columns in a dataframe for example
select column1, sum(1) as count from df group by column1
select column2, sum(1) as count from df group by column2
The actual aggregation is more complicated than just the sum(1) but it's besides the point.
Query strings such as the examples above are compiled for each variable that I would like to aggregate, and I execute each string through a Spark sql context to create a corresponding dataframe that represents the aggregation in question
The nature of my problem is that I would have to do this for thousands of variables.
My understanding is that Spark will have to "read" the main dataframe each time it executes an aggregation.
Is there maybe an alternative way to do this more efficiently?
Thanks for reading my question, and thanks in advance for any help.
Go ahead and cache the data frame after you build the DataFrame with your source data. Also, to avoid writing all the queries in the code, go ahead and put them in a file and pass the file at run time. Have something in your code that can read your file and then you can run your queries. The best part about this approach is you can change your queries by updating the file and not the applications. Just make sure you find a way to give the output unique names.
In PySpark, it would look something like this.
dataframe = sqlContext.read.parquet("/path/to/file.parquet")
// do your manipulations/filters
dataframe.cache()
queries = //how ever you want to read/parse the query file
for query in queries:
output = dataframe.sql(query)
output.write.parquet("/path/to/output.parquet")
In Spark with scala, is there any easy way to automatically turn the variable or column into an object from imported data and therefore we can use column_a.contains("something") per se inside .map( )?
It looks like you are coming from R. Spark is row oriented and not column oriented. If you want to do a contains for example you would first filter the rows and than apply a map to it, or use collect and do both operations at once but this is a bit harder to get right.