Spark 2.1 - Error While instantiating HiveSessionS

Question

With a fresh install of Spark 2.1, I am getting an error when executing the pyspark command.

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/local/spark/python/pyspark/shell.py", line 43, in <module>
spark = SparkSession.builder\
File "/usr/local/spark/python/pyspark/sql/session.py", line 179, in getOrCreate
session._jsparkSession.sessionState().conf().setConfString(key, value)
File "/usr/local/spark/python/lib/py4j-0.10.4-src.zip/py4j/java_gateway.py", line 1133, in __call__
File "/usr/local/spark/python/pyspark/sql/utils.py", line 79, in deco
raise IllegalArgumentException(s.split(': ', 1)[1], stackTrace)
pyspark.sql.utils.IllegalArgumentException: u"Error while instantiating 'org.apache.spark.sql.hive.HiveSessionState':"

I have Hadoop and Hive on the same machine. Hive is configured to use MySQL for the metastore. I did not get this error with Spark 2.0.2.

Can someone please point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

I had the same problem. Some of the answers sudo chmod -R 777 /tmp/hive/, or to downgrade spark with hadoop to 2.6 didn't work for me. I realized that what caused this problem for me is that I was doing SQL queries using the sqlContext instead of using the sparkSession.

sparkSession =SparkSession.builder.master("local[*]").appName("appName").config("spark.sql.warehouse.dir", "./spark-warehouse").getOrCreate()
sqlCtx.registerDataFrameAsTable(..)
df = sparkSession.sql("SELECT ...")

this perfectly works for me now.

Answer 2

I saw this error on a new (2018) Mac, which came with Java 10. The fix was to set JAVA_HOME to Java 8:

export JAVA_HOME=`usr/libexec/java_home -v 1.8`