If am using df.write.partitionby(col1).parquet(path) .
the data will remove the partition column on the data.
how to avoid it ?
You can duplicate col1 before writing:
df.withColumn("partition_col", col("col1")).write.partitionBy("partition_col").parquet(path)
Note that this step is not really necessary, because whenever you read a Parquet file in a partitioned directory structure, Spark will automatically add that as a new column to the dataframe.
Actually spark does not remove the column but it uses that column in a way to organize the files so that when you read the files it adds that as a column and display that to you in a table format. If you check the schema of the table or the schema of the dataframe you would still see that as a column in the table.
Also you are partitioning your data so you know how that data from table is queried frequently and based on that information you might have decided to partition the data so that your reads becomes faster and more efficient.
Related
I have a fact table which is 10Tb (Parquet) which contains 100+ columns. When I have created another table with just 10 columns from the fact table and size is 2TB.
I was expecting the size should be in some GBs because I am storing just few (10) columns?
My question is when we have more columns does Parquet format stores in more efficient manner?
Parquet is a column based storage. Say if I have a table with fields userId, name, address, state, phone no.
In non-parquet storage If I do a select * where state = "TN" it will go through every record in my table (i.e all the columns of each row) and output the records that match my where condition. However in parquet format all the columns are stored together so I don't need to go through all the other columns. The same select query will directly go to column 'state' and output records that match the where condition. Parquet is good for faster retrieval (to get results faster). It doesn't matter how many columns are present in total.
Parquet uses snappy compression. Since all the columns are stored together it makes compression very effective.
I am new to databricks notebooks and dataframes. I have a requirement to load few columns(out of many) in a table of around 14million records into a dataframe. once the table is loaded, I need to create a new column based on values present in two columns.
I want to write the logic for the new column along with the select command while loading the table into dataframe.
Ex:
df = spark.read.table(tableName)
.select(columnsList)
.withColumn('newColumnName', 'logic')
will it have any performance impact? is it better to first load the table for the few columns into the df and then perform the column manipulation on the loaded df?
does the table data gets loaded all at once or row by row into the df? if row by row, then by including column manipulation logic while reading the table, am I causing any performance degradation?
Thanks in advance!!
This really depends on the underlying format of the table - is it backed by Parquet or Delta, or it's an interface to the actual database, etc. In general, Spark is trying to read only necessary data, and if, for example, Parquet is used (or Delta), then it's easier because it's column-oriented file format, so data for each column is placed together.
Regarding the question on the reading - Spark is lazy by default, so even if you put df = spark.read.table(....) as separate variable, then add .select, and then add .withColumn, it won't do anything until you call some action, for example .count, or write your results. Until that time, Spark will just check that table exists, your operations are correct, etc. You can always call .explain on the resulting dataframe to see how Spark will perform operations.
P.S. I recommend to grab a free copy of the Learning Spark, 2ed that is provided by Databricks - it will provide you a foundation for development of the code for Spark/Databricks
I wanted to know, whether is it possible to update the "values" of column on which the delta table is partitioned?
The table is partitioned on a particular column, now I want to update the value of that particular column. Can I do that?
(found on slack)
Use replaceWhere option.
Quoting the official documentation at Replace table schema:
By default, overwriting the data in a table does not overwrite the schema. When overwriting a table using mode("overwrite") without replaceWhere, you may still want to overwrite the schema of the data being written. You replace the schema and partitioning of the table by setting the overwriteSchema option to true.
Quoting the article Selectively updating Delta partitions with replaceWhere:
Delta makes it easy to update certain disk partitions with the replaceWhere option.
replaceWhere is particularly useful when you have to run a computationally expensive algorithm, but only on certain partitions.
I have a table in Databricks delta which is partitioned by transaction_date. I want to change the partition column to view_date. I tried to drop the table and then create it with a new partition column using PARTITIONED BY (view_date).
However my attempt failed since the actual files reside in S3 and even if I drop a hive table the partitions remain the same.
Is there any way to change the partition of an existing Delta table? Or the only solution will be to drop the actual data and reload it with a newly indicated partition column?
There's actually no need to drop tables or remove files. All you need to do is read the current table, overwrite the contents AND the schema, and change the partition column:
val input = spark.read.table("mytable")
input.write.format("delta")
.mode("overwrite")
.option("overwriteSchema", "true")
.partitionBy("colB") // different column
.saveAsTable("mytable")
UPDATE: There previously was a bug with time travel and changes in partitioning that has now been fixed.
As Silvio pointed out there is no need to drop the table. In fact the strongly recommended approach by databricks is to replace the table.
https://docs.databricks.com/sql/language-manual/sql-ref-syntax-ddl-create-table-using.html#parameters
in spark SQL, This can be done easily by
REPLACE TABLE <tablename>
USING DELTA
PARTITIONED BY (view_date)
AS
SELECT * FROM <tablename>
Modded example from:
https://docs.databricks.com/delta/best-practices.html#replace-the-content-or-schema-of-a-table
Python solution:
If you need more than one column in the partition
partitionBy(column, column_2, ...)
def change_partition_of(table_name, column):
df = spark.read.table(tn)
df.write.format("delta").mode("overwrite").option("overwriteSchema", "true").partitionBy(column).saveAsTable(table_name)
change_partition_of("i.love_python", "column_a")
For a given DataFrame just before being save'd to parquet here is the schema: notice that the centroid0 is the first column and is StringType:
However when saving the file using:
df.write.partitionBy(dfHolder.metadata.partitionCols: _*).format("parquet").mode("overwrite").save(fpath)
and with the partitionCols as centroid0:
then there is a (to me) surprising result:
the centroid0 partition column has been moved to the end of the Row
the data type has been changed to Integer
I confirmed the output path via println :
path=/git/block/target/scala-2.11/test-classes/data/output/blocking/out//level1/clusters
And here is the schema upon reading back from the saved parquet:
Why are those two modifications to the input schema occurring - and how can they be avoided - while still maintaining the centroid0 as a partitioning column?
Update A preferred answer should mention why /when the partitions were added to the end (vs the beginning) of the columns list. We need an understanding of the deterministic ordering.
In addition - is there any way to cause spark to "change it's mind" on the inferred column types? I have had to change the partitions from 0, 1 etc to c0, c1 etc in order to get the inference to map to StringType. Maybe that were required .. but if there were some spark setting to change the behavior that would make for an excellent answer.
When you write.partitionBy(...) Spark saves the partition field(s) as folder(s)
This is can be beneficial for reading data later as (with some file types, parquet included) it can optimize to read data just from partitions that you use (i.e. if you'd read and filter for centroid0==1 spark wouldn't read the other partitions
The effect of this is that the partition fields (centroid0 in your case) are not written into the parquet file only as folder names (centroid0=1, centroid0=2, etc.)
The side effect of these are 1. the type of the partition is inferred at run time (since the schema is not saved in the parquet) and in your case it happened that you only had integer values so it was inferred to integer.
The other side effect is that the partition field is added at the end/beginning of the schema as it reads the schema from the parquet files as one chunk and then it adds to that the partition field(s) as another (again, it is no longer part of the schema that is stored in the parquet)
You can actually pretty easily make use of ordering of the columns of a case class that holds the schema of your partitioned data. You will need to read the data from the path, inside which the partitioning columns are stored underneath to make Spark infer the values of these columns. Then simply apply re-ordering by using the case class schema with a statement like:
val encoder: Encoder[RecordType] = Encoders.product[RecordType]
spark.read
.schema(encoder.schema)
.format("parquet")
.option("mergeSchema", "true")
.load(myPath)
// reorder columns, since reading from partitioned data, the partitioning columns are put to end
.select(encoder.schema.fieldNames.head, encoder.schema.fieldNames.tail: _*)
.as[RecordType]
The reason is in fact pretty simple. When you partition by a column, each partition can only contain one value of the said column. Therefore it is useless to actually write the same value everywhere in the file, and this is why Spark does not. When the file is read, Spark uses the information contained in the names of the files to reconstruct the partitioning column and it is put at the end of the schema. The type of the column is not stored, it is inferred when reading, hence the integer type in your case.
NB: There is no particular reason as to why the column is added at the end. It could have been at the beginning. I guess it is just an arbitrary choice of implementation.
To avoid losing the type and the order of the columns, you could duplicate the partitioning column like this df.withColumn("X", 'YOUR_COLUMN).write.partitionBy("X").parquet("...").
You will waste space though. Also, spark uses the partitioning to optimize filters for instance. Don't forget to use the X column for filters after reading the data and not your column or Spark won't be able to perform any optimizations.