Flattening Rows in Spark

Question

I am doing some testing for spark using scala. We usually read json files which needs to be manipulated like the following example:

test.json:

{"a":1,"b":[2,3]}

val test = sqlContext.read.json("test.json")

How can I convert it to the following format:

{"a":1,"b":2}
{"a":1,"b":3}

Answer 1

explode is often suggested, but it's from the untyped DataFrame API and given you use Dataset, I think flatMap operator might be a better fit (see org.apache.spark.sql.Dataset).

flatMap[U](func: (T) ⇒ TraversableOnce[U])(implicit arg0: Encoder[U]): Dataset[U]

(Scala-specific) Returns a new Dataset by first applying a function to all elements of this Dataset, and then flattening the results.

You could use it as follows:

val ds = Seq(
  (0, "Lorem ipsum dolor", 1.0, Array("prp1", "prp2", "prp3")))
  .toDF("id", "text", "value", "properties")
  .as[(Integer, String, Double, scala.List[String])]

scala> ds.flatMap { t => 
  t._4.map { prp => 
    (t._1, t._2, t._3, prp) }}.show
+---+-----------------+---+----+
| _1|               _2| _3|  _4|
+---+-----------------+---+----+
|  0|Lorem ipsum dolor|1.0|prp1|
|  0|Lorem ipsum dolor|1.0|prp2|
|  0|Lorem ipsum dolor|1.0|prp3|
+---+-----------------+---+----+

// or just using for-comprehension
for {
  t <- ds
  prp <- t._4
} yield (t._1, t._2, t._3, prp)

Answer 2

You can use explode function:

scala> import org.apache.spark.sql.functions.explode
import org.apache.spark.sql.functions.explode


scala> val test = sqlContext.read.json(sc.parallelize(Seq("""{"a":1,"b":[2,3]}""")))
test: org.apache.spark.sql.DataFrame = [a: bigint, b: array<bigint>]

scala> test.printSchema
root
 |-- a: long (nullable = true)
 |-- b: array (nullable = true)
 |    |-- element: long (containsNull = true)

scala> val flattened = test.withColumn("b", explode($"b"))
flattened: org.apache.spark.sql.DataFrame = [a: bigint, b: bigint]

scala> flattened.printSchema
root
 |-- a: long (nullable = true)
 |-- b: long (nullable = true)

scala> flattened.show
+---+---+
|  a|  b|
+---+---+
|  1|  2|
|  1|  3|
+---+---+