Remove all records which are duplicate in spark dataframe - scala

Question

I have a spark dataframe with multiple columns in it. I want to find out and remove rows which have duplicated values in a column (the other columns can be different).
I tried using dropDuplicates(col_name) but it will only drop duplicate entries but still keep one record in the dataframe. What I need is to remove all entries which were initially containing duplicate entries.
I am using Spark 1.6 and Scala 2.10.

Answer 1

I would use window-functions for this. Lets say you want to remove duplicate id rows :
import org.apache.spark.sql.expressions.Window
df
.withColumn("cnt", count("*").over(Window.partitionBy($"id")))
.where($"cnt"===1).drop($"cnt")
.show()

Answer 2

This can be done by grouping by the column (or columns) to look for duplicates in and then aggregate and filter the results.
Example dataframe df:
+---+---+
| id|num|
+---+---+
| 1| 1|
| 2| 2|
| 3| 3|
| 4| 4|
| 4| 5|
+---+---+
Grouping by the id column to remove its duplicates (the last two rows):
val df2 = df.groupBy("id")
.agg(first($"num").as("num"), count($"id").as("count"))
.filter($"count" === 1)
.select("id", "num")
This will give you:
+---+---+
| id|num|
+---+---+
| 1| 1|
| 2| 2|
| 3| 3|
+---+---+
Alternativly, it can be done by using a join. It will be slower, but if there is a lot of columns there is no need to use first($"num").as("num") for each one to keep them.
val df2 = df.groupBy("id").agg(count($"id").as("count")).filter($"count" === 1).select("id")
val df3 = df.join(df2, Seq("id"), "inner")

Answer 3

I added a killDuplicates() method to the open source spark-daria library that uses #Raphael Roth's solution. Here's how to use the code:
import com.github.mrpowers.spark.daria.sql.DataFrameExt._
df.killDuplicates(col("id"))
// you can also supply multiple Column arguments
df.killDuplicates(col("id"), col("another_column"))
Here's the code implementation:
object DataFrameExt {
implicit class DataFrameMethods(df: DataFrame) {
def killDuplicates(cols: Column*): DataFrame = {
df
.withColumn(
"my_super_secret_count",
count("*").over(Window.partitionBy(cols: _*))
)
.where(col("my_super_secret_count") === 1)
.drop(col("my_super_secret_count"))
}
}
}
You might want to leverage the spark-daria library to keep this logic out of your codebase.