Spark : How to use mapPartition and create/close connection per partition - scala

Question

So, I want to do certain operations on my spark DataFrame, write them to DB and create another DataFrame at the end. It looks like this :
import sqlContext.implicits._
val newDF = myDF.mapPartitions(
iterator => {
val conn = new DbConnection
iterator.map(
row => {
addRowToBatch(row)
convertRowToObject(row)
})
conn.writeTheBatchToDB()
conn.close()
})
.toDF()
This gives me an error as mapPartitions expects return type of Iterator[NotInferedR], but here it is Unit. I know this is possible with forEachPartition, but I'd like to do the mapping also. Doing it separate would be an overhead (extra spark job). What to do?
Thanks!

Answer 1

On most cases, eager consuming the iterator will result to execution failure if not slow down of jobs. Thus what I've done was to check if iterator is already empty then do the cleanup routines.
rdd.mapPartitions(itr => {
val conn = new DbConnection
itr.map(data => {
val yourActualResult = // do something with your data and conn here
if(itr.isEmpty) conn.close // close the connection
yourActualResult
})
})
Thought this as a spark problem at first but was a scala one actually. http://www.scala-lang.org/api/2.12.0/scala/collection/Iterator.html#isEmpty:Boolean

Answer 2

The last expression in the anonymous function implementation must be the return value:
import sqlContext.implicits._
val newDF = myDF.mapPartitions(
iterator => {
val conn = new DbConnection
// using toList to force eager computation - make it happen now when connection is open
val result = iterator.map(/* the same... */).toList
conn.writeTheBatchToDB()
conn.close()
result.iterator
}
).toDF()