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")
Related
Suppose I create a polars Lazyframe from a list of csv files using pl.concat():
df = pl.concat([pl.scan_csv(file) for file in ['file1.csv', 'file2.csv']])
Is the data in the resulting dataframe guaranteed to have the exact order of the input files, or could there be a scenario where the query optimizer would mix things up?
The order is maintained. The engine may execute them in a different order, but the final result will always have the same order as the lazy computations provided by the caller.
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.
Oversimplified Scenario:
A process which generates monthly data in a s3 file. The number of fields could be different in each monthly run. Based on this data in s3,we load the data to a table and we manually (as number of fields could change in each run with addition or deletion of few columns) run a SQL for few metrics.There are more calculations/transforms on this data,but to have starter Im presenting the simpler version of the usecase.
Approach:
Considering the schema-less nature, as the number of fields in the s3 file could differ in each run with addition/deletion of few fields,which requires manual changes every-time in the SQL, Im planning to explore Spark/Scala, so that we can directly read from s3 and dynamically generate SQL based on the fields.
Query:
How I can achieve this in scala/spark-SQL/dataframe? s3 file contains only the required fields from each run.Hence there is no issue reading the dynamic fields from s3 as it is taken care by dataframe.The issue is how can we generate SQL dataframe-API/spark-SQL code to handle.
I can read s3 file via dataframe and register the dataframe as createOrReplaceTempView to write SQL, but I dont think it helps manually changing the spark-SQL, during addition of a new field in s3 during next run. what is the best way to dynamically generate the sql/any better ways to handle the issue?
Usecase-1:
First-run
dataframe: customer,1st_month_count (here dataframe directly points to s3, which has only required attributes)
--sample code
SELECT customer,sum(month_1_count)
FROM dataframe
GROUP BY customer
--Dataframe API/SparkSQL
dataframe.groupBy("customer").sum("month_1_count").show()
Second-Run - One additional column was added
dataframe: customer,month_1_count,month_2_count) (here dataframe directly points to s3, which has only required attributes)
--Sample SQL
SELECT customer,sum(month_1_count),sum(month_2_count)
FROM dataframe
GROUP BY customer
--Dataframe API/SparkSQL
dataframe.groupBy("customer").sum("month_1_count","month_2_count").show()
Im new to Spark/Scala, would be helpful if you can provide the direction so that I can explore further.
It sounds like you want to perform the same operation over and over again on new columns as they appear in the dataframe schema? This works:
from pyspark.sql import functions
#search for column names you want to sum, I put in "month"
column_search = lambda col_names: 'month' in col_names
#get column names of temp dataframe w/ only the columns you want to sum
relevant_columns = original_df.select(*filter(column_search, original_df.columns)).columns
#create dictionary with relevant column names to be passed to the agg function
columns = {col_names: "sum" for col_names in relevant_columns}
#apply agg function with your groupBy, passing in columns dictionary
grouped_df = original_df.groupBy("customer").agg(columns)
#show result
grouped_df.show()
Some important concepts can help you to learn:
DataFrames have data attributes stored in a list: dataframe.columns
Functions can be applied to lists to create new lists as in "column_search"
Agg function accepts multiple expressions in a dictionary as explained here which is what I pass into "columns"
Spark is lazy so it doesn't change data state or perform operations until you perform an action like show(). This means writing out temporary dataframes to use one element of the dataframe like column as I do is not costly even though it may seem inefficient if you're used to SQL.
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?
I have a difficulty when working with data frames in spark with Scala. If I have a data frame that I want to extract a column of unique entries, when I use groupBy I don't get a data frame back.
For example, I have a DataFrame called logs that has the following form:
machine_id | event | other_stuff
34131231 | thing | stuff
83423984 | notathing | notstuff
34131231 | thing | morestuff
and I would like the unique machine ids where event is thing stored in a new DataFrame to allow me to do some filtering of some kind. Using
val machineId = logs
.where($"event" === "thing")
.select("machine_id")
.groupBy("machine_id")
I get a val of Grouped Data back which is a pain in the butt to use (or I don't know how to use this kind of object properly). Having got this list of unique machine id's, I then want to use this in filtering another DataFrame to extract all events for individual machine ids.
I can see I'll want to do this kind of thing fairly regularly and the basic workflow is:
Extract unique id's from a log table.
Use unique ids to extract all events for a particular id.
Use some kind of analysis on this data that has been extracted.
It's the first two steps I would appreciate some guidance with here.
I appreciate this example is kind of contrived but hopefully it explains what my issue is. It may be I don't know enough about GroupedData objects or (as I'm hoping) I'm missing something in data frames that makes this easy. I'm using spark 1.5 built on Scala 2.10.4.
Thanks
Just use distinct not groupBy:
val machineId = logs.where($"event"==="thing").select("machine_id").distinct
Which will be equivalent to SQL:
SELECT DISTINCT machine_id FROM logs WHERE event = 'thing'
GroupedData is not intended to be used directly. It provides a number of methods, where agg is the most general, which can be used to apply different aggregate functions and convert it back to DataFrame. In terms of SQL what you have after where and groupBy is equivalent to something like this
SELECT machine_id, ... FROM logs WHERE event = 'thing' GROUP BY machine_id
where ... has to be provided by agg or equivalent method.
A group by in spark followed by aggregation and then a select statement will return a data frame. For your example it should be something like:
val machineId = logs
.groupBy("machine_id", "event")
.agg(max("other_stuff") )
.select($"machine_id").where($"event" === "thing")