Spark and SparkSQL: How to imitate window function?

Question

Description

Given a dataframe df

id |       date
---------------
 1 | 2015-09-01
 2 | 2015-09-01
 1 | 2015-09-03
 1 | 2015-09-04
 2 |          


        

Answer 1

You can do this with RDDs. Personally I find the API for RDDs makes a lot more sense - I don't always want my data to be 'flat' like a dataframe.

val df = sqlContext.sql("select 1, '2015-09-01'"
    ).unionAll(sqlContext.sql("select 2, '2015-09-01'")
    ).unionAll(sqlContext.sql("select 1, '2015-09-03'")
    ).unionAll(sqlContext.sql("select 1, '2015-09-04'")
    ).unionAll(sqlContext.sql("select 2, '2015-09-04'"))

// dataframe as an RDD (of Row objects)
df.rdd 
  // grouping by the first column of the row
  .groupBy(r => r(0)) 
  // map each group - an Iterable[Row] - to a list and sort by the second column
  .map(g => g._2.toList.sortBy(row => row(1).toString))     
  .collect()

The above gives a result like the following:

Array[List[org.apache.spark.sql.Row]] = 
Array(
  List([1,2015-09-01], [1,2015-09-03], [1,2015-09-04]), 
  List([2,2015-09-01], [2,2015-09-04]))

If you want the position within the 'group' as well, you can use zipWithIndex.

df.rdd.groupBy(r => r(0)).map(g => 
    g._2.toList.sortBy(row => row(1).toString).zipWithIndex).collect()

Array[List[(org.apache.spark.sql.Row, Int)]] = Array(
  List(([1,2015-09-01],0), ([1,2015-09-03],1), ([1,2015-09-04],2)),
  List(([2,2015-09-01],0), ([2,2015-09-04],1)))

You could flatten this back to a simple List/Array of Row objects using FlatMap, but if you need to perform anything on the 'group' that won't be a great idea.

The downside to using RDD like this is that it's tedious to convert from DataFrame to RDD and back again.