I have a Spark DataFrame query that is guaranteed to return single column with single Int value. What is the best way to extract this value as Int from the resulting DataFrame?<
This could solve your problem.
df.map{
    row => row.getInt(0)
}.first()
In Pyspark, you can simply get the first element if the dataframe is single entity with one column as a response, otherwise, a whole row will be returned, then you have to get dimension-wise response i.e. 2 Dimension list like df.head()[0][0]
df.head()[0]
You can use head
df.head().getInt(0)
or first
df.first().getInt(0)
Check DataFrame scala docs for more details