How to store data from a dataframe in a variable to use as a parameter in a select in cassandra? - apache-spark

Question

I have a Spark Structured Streaming application. The application receives data from kafka, and should use these values ​​as a parameter to process data from a cassandra database. My question is how do I use the data that is in the input dataframe (kafka), as "where" parameters in cassandra "select" without taking the error below:
Exception in thread "main" org.apache.spark.sql.AnalysisException: Queries with streaming sources must be executed with writeStream.start();
This is my df input:
val df = spark
.readStream
.format("kafka")
.options(
Map("kafka.bootstrap.servers"-> kafka_bootstrap,
"subscribe" -> kafka_topic,
"startingOffsets"-> "latest",
"fetchOffset.numRetries"-> "5",
"kafka.group.id"-> groupId
))
.load()
I get this error whenever I try to store the dataframe values ​​in a variable to use as a parameter.
This is the method I created to try to convert the data into variables. With that the spark give the error that I mentioned earlier:
def processData(messageToProcess: DataFrame): DataFrame = {
val messageDS: Dataset[Message] = messageToProcess.as[Message]
val listData: Array[Message] = messageDS.collect()
listData.foreach(x => println(x.country))
val mensagem = messageToProcess
mensagem
}

Answer 1

When you need to use data in Kafka to query data in Cassandra, then such operation is a typical join between two datasets - you don't need to call .collect to find entries, you just do the join. And it's quite typical thing - to enrich data in Kafka with data from the external dataset, and Cassandra provides low-latency operations.
Your code could look as following (you'll need to configure so-called DirectJoin, see link below):
import spark.implicits._
import org.apache.spark.sql.cassandra._
val df = spark.readStream.format("kafka")
.options(Map(...)).load()
... decode data in Kafka into columns
val cassdata = spark.read.cassandraFormat("table", "keyspace").load
val joined = df.join(cassdata, cassdata("pk") === df("some_column"))
val processed = ... process joined data
val query = processed.writeStream.....output data somewhere...start()
query.awaitTermination()
I have detailed blog post on how to perform efficient joins with data in Cassandra.

Answer 2

As the error message suggest, you have to use writeStream.start() in order to execute a Structured Streaming query.
You can't use the same actions you use for batch dataframes (like .collect(), .show() or .count()) on streaming dataframes, see the Unsupported Operations section of the Spark Structured Streaming documentation.
In your case, you are trying to use messageDS.collect() on a streaming dataset, which is not allowed. To achieve this goal you can use a foreachBatch output sink to collect the rows you need at each microbatch:
streamingDF.writeStream.foreachBatch { (microBatchDf: DataFrame, batchId: Long) =>
// Now microBatchDf is no longer a streaming dataframe
// you can check with microBatchDf.isStreaming
val messageDS: Dataset[Message] = microBatchDf.as[Message]
val listData: Array[Message] = messageDS.collect()
listData.foreach(x => println(x.country))
// ...
}