I am new to pySpark. I am trying get the latest partition (date partition) of a hive table using PySpark-dataframes and done like below. But I am sure there is a better way to do it using dataframe functions (not by writing SQL). Could you please share inputs on better ways.
This solution is scanning through entire data on Hive table to get it.
df_1 = sqlContext.table("dbname.tablename");
df_1_dates = df_1.select('partitioned_date_column').distinct().orderBy(df_1['partitioned_date_column'].desc())
lat_date_dict=df_1_dates.first().asDict()
lat_dt=lat_date_dict['partitioned_date_column']
I agree with @philantrovert what has mentioned in the comment. You can use below approach for partition pruning to filter to limit the number of partitions scanned for your hive table.
you can see in above plan that PartitionCount: 1 it has scanned only one partition from 12 available partitions.