User-defined scalar functions - Scala
This article contains Scala user-defined function (UDF) examples. It shows how to register UDFs, how to invoke UDFs, and caveats regarding evaluation order of subexpressions in Spark SQL. See External user-defined scalar functions (UDFs) for more details.
Note
Scala UDFs on Unity Catalog-enabled compute resources with shared access mode requires Databricks Runtime 14.2 and above.
Register a function as a UDF
val squared = (s: Long) => {
s * s
}
spark.udf.register("square", squared)
Call the UDF in Spark SQL
spark.range(1, 20).createOrReplaceTempView("test")
%sql select id, square(id) as id_squared from test
Use UDF with DataFrames
import org.apache.spark.sql.functions.{col, udf}
val squared = udf((s: Long) => s * s)
display(spark.range(1, 20).select(squared(col("id")) as "id_squared"))
Evaluation order and null checking
Spark SQL (including SQL and the DataFrame and Dataset APIs) does not guarantee the order of evaluation of subexpressions. In particular, the inputs of an operator or function are not necessarily evaluated left-to-right or in any other fixed order. For example, logical AND
and OR
expressions do not have left-to-right “short-circuiting” semantics.
Therefore, it is dangerous to rely on the side effects or order of evaluation of Boolean expressions, and the order of WHERE
and HAVING
clauses, since such expressions and clauses can be reordered during query optimization and planning. Specifically, if a UDF relies on short-circuiting semantics in SQL for null checking, there’s no guarantee that the null check will happen before invoking the UDF. For example,
spark.udf.register("strlen", (s: String) => s.length)
spark.sql("select s from test1 where s is not null and strlen(s) > 1") // no guarantee
This WHERE
clause does not guarantee the strlen
UDF to be invoked after filtering out nulls.
To perform proper null checking, we recommend that you do either of the following:
Make the UDF itself null-aware and do null checking inside the UDF itself
Use
IF
orCASE WHEN
expressions to do the null check and invoke the UDF in a conditional branch
spark.udf.register("strlen_nullsafe", (s: String) => if (s != null) s.length else -1)
spark.sql("select s from test1 where s is not null and strlen_nullsafe(s) > 1") // ok
spark.sql("select s from test1 where if(s is not null, strlen(s), null) > 1") // ok
Typed Dataset APIs
Note
This feature is supported on Unity Catalog-enabled clusters with shared access mode in Databricks Runtime 15.4 and above.
Typed Dataset APIs allow you to run transformations such as map, filter, and aggregations on resulting Datasets with a user-defined function.
For example, the following Scala application uses the map()
API to modify a number in a result column to a prefixed string.
spark.range(3).map(f => s"row-$f").show()
While this example uses the map()
API, this also applies to other typed Dataset APIs, such as filter()
, mapPartitions()
, foreach()
, foreachPartition()
, reduce()
, and flatMap()
.