Scala broadcast join with "one to many" relationship - scala

Question

I am fairly new to Scala and RDDs.
I have a very simple scenario yet it seems very hard to implement with RDDs.
Scenario:
I have two tables. One large and one small. I broadcast the smaller table.
I then want to join the table and finally aggregate the values after the join to a final total.
Here is an example of the code:
val bigRDD = sc.parallelize(List(("A",1,"1Jan2000"),("B",2,"1Jan2000"),("C",3,"1Jan2000"),("D",3,"1Jan2000"),("E",3,"1Jan2000")))
val smallRDD = sc.parallelize(List(("A","Fruit","Apples"),("A","ZipCode","1234"),("B","Fruit","Apples"),("B","ZipCode","456")))
val broadcastVar = sc.broadcast(smallRDD.keyBy{ a => (a._1,a._2) } // turn to pair RDD
.collectAsMap() // collect as Map
)
//first join
val joinedRDD = bigRDD.map( accs => {
//get list of groups
val groups = List("Fruit", "ZipCode")
val i = "Fruit"
//for each group
//for(i <- groups) {
if (broadcastVar.value.get(accs._1, i) != None) {
( broadcastVar.value.get(accs._1, i).get._1,
broadcastVar.value.get(accs._1, i).get._2,
accs._2, accs._3)
} else {
None
}
//}
}
)
//expected after this
//("A","Fruit","Apples",1, "1Jan2000"),("B","Fruit","Apples",2, "1Jan2000"),
//("A","ZipCode","1234", 1,"1Jan2000"),("B","ZipCode","456", 2,"1Jan2000")
//then group and sum
//cannot do anything with the joinedRDD!!!
//error == value copy is not a member of Product with Serializable
// Final Expected Result
//("Fruit","Apples",3, "1Jan2000"),("ZipCode","1234", 1,"1Jan2000"),("ZipCode","456", 2,"1Jan2000")
My questions:
Is this the best approach first of all with RDDs?
Disclaimer - I have done this whole task using dataframes successfully. The idea is to create another version using only RDDs to compare performance.
Why is the type of my joinedRDD not recognised after it was created so that I can continue to use functions like copy on it?
How can I get away with not doing a .collectAsMap() when broadcasting the variable. I currently have to include the first to items to enforce uniqueness and not dropping any values.
Thanks for the help in advance!
Final solution for anyone interested
case class dt (group:String, group_key:String, count:Long, date:String)
val bigRDD = sc.parallelize(List(("A",1,"1Jan2000"),("B",2,"1Jan2000"),("C",3,"1Jan2000"),("D",3,"1Jan2000"),("E",3,"1Jan2000")))
val smallRDD = sc.parallelize(List(("A","Fruit","Apples"),("A","ZipCode","1234"),("B","Fruit","Apples"),("B","ZipCode","456")))
val broadcastVar = sc.broadcast(smallRDD.keyBy{ a => (a._1) } // turn to pair RDD
.groupByKey() //to not loose any data
.collectAsMap() // collect as Map
)
//first join
val joinedRDD = bigRDD.flatMap( accs => {
if (broadcastVar.value.get(accs._1) != None) {
val bc = broadcastVar.value.get(accs._1).get
bc.map(p => {
dt(p._2, p._3,accs._2, accs._3)
})
} else {
None
}
}
)
//expected after this
//("Fruit","Apples",1, "1Jan2000"),("Fruit","Apples",2, "1Jan2000"),
//("ZipCode","1234", 1,"1Jan2000"),("ZipCode","456", 2,"1Jan2000")
//then group and sum
var finalRDD = joinedRDD.map(s => {
(s.copy(count=0),s.count) //trick to keep code to minimum (count = 0)
})
.reduceByKey(_ + _)
.map(pair => {
pair._1.copy(count=pair._2)
})

Answer 1

In your map statement you return either a tuple or None based on the if condition. These types do not match so you fall back the a common supertype so joinedRDD is an RDD[Product with Serializable] Which is not what you want at all (it's basically RDD[Any]). You need to make sure all paths return the same type. In this case, you probably want an Option[(String, String, Int, String)]. All you need to do is wrap the tuple result into a Some
if (broadcastVar.value.get(accs._1, i) != None) {
Some(( broadcastVar.value.get(accs._1, i).get.group_key,
broadcastVar.value.get(accs._1, i).get.group,
accs._2, accs._3))
} else {
None
}
And now your types will match up. This will make joinedRDD and RDD[Option(String, String, Int, String)]. Now that the type is correct the data is usable, however, it means that you will need to map the Option to work with the tuples. If you don't need the None values in the final result, you can use flatmap instead of map to create joinedRDD which will unwrap the Options for you, filtering out all the Nones.
CollectAsMap is the correct way to turnan RDD into a Hashmap, but you need multiple values for a single key. Before using collectAsMap but after mapping the smallRDD into a Key,Value pair, use groupByKey to group all of the values for a single key together. When when you look up a key from your HashMap, you can map over the values, creating a new record for each one.