How to use groupBy to collect rows into a map?

Question

Context

sqlContext.sql(s\"\"\"
SELECT
school_name,
name,
age
FROM my_table
\"\"\")

Ask

Given the

Answer 1

Following will work with Spark 2.0. You can use map function available since 2.0 release to get columns as Map.

val df1 = df.groupBy(col("school_name")).agg(collect_list(map($"name",$"age")) as "map")
df1.show(false)

This will give you below output.

+-----------+------------------------------------+
|school_name|map                                 |
+-----------+------------------------------------+
|school B   |[Map(cathy -> 10), Map(shaun -> 5)] |
|school A   |[Map(michael -> 7), Map(emily -> 5)]|
+-----------+------------------------------------+

Now you can use UDF to join individual Maps into single Map like below.

import org.apache.spark.sql.functions.udf
val joinMap = udf { values: Seq[Map[String,Int]] => values.flatten.toMap }

val df2 = df1.withColumn("map", joinMap(col("map")))
df2.show(false)

This will give required output with Map[String,Int].

+-----------+-----------------------------+
|school_name|map                          |
+-----------+-----------------------------+
|school B   |Map(cathy -> 10, shaun -> 5) |
|school A   |Map(michael -> 7, emily -> 5)|
+-----------+-----------------------------+

If you want to convert a column value into JSON String then Spark 2.1.0 has introduced to_json function.

val df3 = df2.withColumn("map",to_json(struct($"map")))
df3.show(false)

The to_json function will return following output.

+-----------+-------------------------------+
|school_name|map                            |
+-----------+-------------------------------+
|school B   |{"map":{"cathy":10,"shaun":5}} |
|school A   |{"map":{"michael":7,"emily":5}}|
+-----------+-------------------------------+