spark reading missing columns in parquet - apache-spark

I have parquet files which I need to read from spark. Some files have few columns missing which are present in new files.
Since I do not know which files have column missing, I need to read all the files in spark. I have list of columns that I need to read. It may also be the case that all the files may have some column missing. I need to put a null in those columns which are missing.
When I try to do a
sqlContext.sql('query') it gives me error saying that columns are missing
If I define the schema and do a
sqlContext.read.parquet('s3://....').schema(parquet_schema)
It gives me the same error.
Help me here

You need to use parquet schema evolution strategy to address this situation.
As defined in the spark documentation
Users can start with a simple schema, and gradually add more columns to the schema as needed. In this way, users may end up with multiple Parquet files with different but mutually compatible schemas. The Parquet data source is now able to automatically detect this case and merge schemas of all these files.
All you need to do is
val mergedDF = spark.read.option("mergeSchema", "true").parquet("'s3://....'")
This will give you parquet data with complete schema.
Pain point
In case your schema is non compatible for example one parquet file has col1 DataType as String and another parquet file has col1 DataType as Long.
Then the merge schema will fail.

Related

How to ingest multiple csv files into a Spark dataframe?

I am trying to ingest 2 csv files into a single spark dataframe. However, the schema of these 2 datasets is very different, and when I perform the below operation, I get back only the schema of the second csv, as if the first one doesn't exist. How can I solve this? My final goal is to count the total number of words.
paths = ["abfss://lmne.dfs.core.windows.net/csvs/MachineLearning_reddit.csv", "abfss://test1#lmne.dfs.core.windows.net/csvs/bbc_news.csv"]
df0_spark=spark.read.format("csv").option("header","false").load(paths)
df0_spark.write.mode("overwrite").saveAsTable("ML_reddit2")
df0_spark.show()
I tried to load both of the files into a single spark dataframe, but it only gives me back one of the tables.
I have reproduced the above and got the below results.
For sample, I have two csv files in dbfs with different schemas. when I execute the above code, I got the same result.
To get the desired schema enable mergeSchemaand header while reading the files.
Code:
df0_spark=spark.read.format("csv").option("mergeSchema","true").option("header","true").load(paths)
df0_spark.show()
If you want to combine the two files without nulls, we should have a common identity column and we have to read the files individually and use inner join for that.
The solution that has worked for me the best in such cases was to read all distinct files separately, and then union them after they have been put into DataFrames. So your code could look something like this:
paths = ["abfss://lmne.dfs.core.windows.net/csvs/MachineLearning_reddit.csv", "abfss://test1#lmne.dfs.core.windows.net/csvs/bbc_news.csv"]
# Load all distinct CSV files
df1 = spark.read.option("header", false).csv(paths[0])
df2 = spark.read.option("header", false).csv(paths[1])
# Union DataFrames
combined_df = df1.unionByName(df2, allowMissingColumns=True)
Note: if the names of columns differ between the files, then for all columns from first file that are not present in second one, you will have null values. If the schema should be matching, then you can always rename the columns, before the unionByName step.

spark parquet partitioning which remove the partition column

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.

Exclude column/list of columns while loading into dataframe

I have a weird question or issue which I am facing, my parquet file is having around 1200 columns out of which few are corrupt columns for some reason. I can't edit the files for some reason so I want to exclude those columns from being introduced to a data frame I want to create. I don't seem to find any such feature which would help me to do so.
The idea of creating a data frame first and then dropping the columns do crossed my mind but that can't be done because getting the issue of
Failed to merge incompatible data types string and bigint
So any way we can exclude the columns before hand even before loading in called is welcomed. Declaring a schema is going to be tedious job which I want to avoid at any cost because I want to keep the process as dynamic as possible.
Any leads or ideas are more than welcome.
Thanks
Ashit
can you provide some more information?
do all files have the same schema? except for some "corrupted" columns - which seems that they have a different type?
if this is the case - I would recommend not avoiding providing a schema. you can do something like this (this is the scala version) :
val df = spark.read.parquet("path to on file that has a good schema")
val allColumns = df.columns.toSet //get all columns
val goodColumns = allColumns - "badColumn"
val allData = spark.read.parquet("path to all data").select(goodColumns: _*) //syntax for exploding the set and providing the strings
spark should project only the needed columns and skip the corrupted once
you can also do the same with getting the schemaType from one file drop the not needed columns and provide this schema

PySpark: how to read in partitioning columns when reading parquet

I have data stored in a parquet files and hive table partitioned by year, month, day. Thus, each parquet file is stored in /table_name/year/month/day/ folder.
I want to read in data for only some of the partitions. I have list of paths to individual partitions as follows:
paths_to_files = ['hdfs://data/table_name/2018/10/29',
'hdfs://data/table_name/2018/10/30']
And then try to do something like:
df = sqlContext.read.format("parquet").load(paths_to_files)
However, then my data does not include the information about year, month and day, as this is not part of the data per se, rather the information is stored in the path to the file.
I could use sql context and a send hive query with some select statement with where on the year, month and day columns to select only data from partitions i am interested in. However, i'd rather avoid constructing SQL query in python as I am very lazy and don't like reading SQL.
I have two questions:
what is the optimal way (performance-wise) to read in the data stored as parquet, where information about year, month, day is not present in the parquet file, but is only included in the path to the file? (either send hive query using sqlContext.sql('...'), or use read.parquet,... anything really.
Can i somehow extract the partitioning columns when using the
approach i outlined above?
Reading the direct file paths to the parent directory of the year partitions should be enough for a dataframe to determine there's partitions under it. However, it wouldn't know what to name the partitions without the directory structure /year=2018/month=10, for example.
Therefore, if you have Hive, then going via the metastore would be better because the partitions are named there, Hive stores extra useful information about your table, and then you're not reliant on knowing the direct path to the files on disk from the Spark code.
Not sure why you think you need to read/write SQL, though.
Use the Dataframe API instead, e.g
df = spark.table("table_name")
df_2018 = df.filter(df['year'] == 2018)
df_2018.show()
Your data isn't stored in a way optimal for parquet so you'd have to load files one by one and add the dates
Alternatively, you can move the files to a directory structure fit for parquet
( e.g. .../table/year=2018/month=10/day=29/file.parquet)
then you can read the parent directory (table) and filter on year, month, and day (and spark will only read the relevant directories) also you'd get these as attributes in your dataframe

SPARK-HIVE-key differences between Hive and Parquet from the perspective of table schema processing

I am new in spark and hive. I do not understand the statement
"Hive considers all columns nullable, while nullability in Parquet is significant"
If any one explain the statement with example it will better for me. Thank your.
In standard SQL syntax, when you create a table, you can state that a specific column is "nullable" (i.e. may contain a Null value) or not (i.e. trying to insert/update a Null value will throw an error).Nullable is the default.
Parquet schema syntax supports the same concept, although when using AVRO serialization, not-nullable is the default.
Caveat -- when you use Spark to read multiple Parquet files, these files may have different schemas. Imagine that the schema definition has changed over time, and newer files have 2 more Nullable columns at the end. Then you have to request "schema merging" so that Spark reads the schema from all files (not just one at random) to make sure that all these schemas are compatible, then at read-time the "undefined" columns are defaulted to Null for older files.
Hive HQL syntax does not support the standard SQL feature; every column is, and must be, nullable -- simply because Hive does not have total control on its data files!
Imagine a Hive partitioned table with 2 partitions...
one partition uses TextFile format and contains CSV dumps from
different sources, some showing up all expected columns, some missing
the last 2 columns because they use an older definition
the second partition uses Parquet format for history, created by Hive INSERT-SELECT queries, but older
Parquet files are missing the last 2 columns also, because they were created using the older table definition
For the Parquet-based partition, Hive does "schema merging", but instead of merging the file schemas together (like Spark), it merges each file schema with the table schema -- ignoring columns that are not defined in the table, and defaulting to Null all table columns that are not in the file.
Note that for the CSV-based partition, it's much more brutal, because the CSV files don't have a "schema" -- they just have a list of values that are mapped to the table columns, in order. On reaching EOL all missing columns are set to Null; on reaching the value for the last column, any extra value on the line is ignored.

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