Overwrite Table Partitions Using PySpark

Scenario

In the current example, we are going to understand the process of curation of data in a data lake that are backed by append only storage services like Amazon S3. Since update semantics are not available in these storage services, we are going to run transformation using PySpark transformation on datasets to create new snapshots for target partitions and overwrite them. This example can be executed using Amazon EMR or AWS Glue. For simplicity, we are assuming that all IAM roles and/or LakeFormation permissions have been pre-configured.

Source:

1. Catalog table orders.i_order_input is created on raw ingested datasets in CSV format.

2. The table is partitioned by feed_arrival_date.It receives change records everyday in a new folder in S3 e.g. s3://<bucket_name>/input/<yyyy-mm-dd>/.

3. There can be duplicates due to multiple updates to the same order in a day.

4. order_update_timestamp represents the time when the order was updated

Target

1. Catalog table orders.c_order_output is a curated deduplicated table that is partitioned by order_date.

Example Datasets

You can use Glue crawlers to create tables in your catalog after uploading the files to S3

21KB

2020-01-01.csv

Orders data feed for 2020-01-01

12KB

2020-01-02.csv

Orders data feed for 2020-01-02

Solution Walk through

Import necessary spark libraries.

import os
from pyspark.sql import SparkSession
from pyspark.sql.window import Window
from pyspark.context import SparkContext
from pyspark.sql import functions as F, types as T
spark.conf.set("spark.sql.sources.partitionOverwriteMode","dynamic")

Read source table orders.i_orders_input and creare a dataframe stg_df

stg_df = sqlContext.table("refarch_database.i_orders_input")

Optional transformations to cast datatypes if the datatypes in the catalog are different.

stg_df_cast = stg_df.withColumn('order_date', F.to_date('order_date', 'yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss')).withColumn('order_update_timestamp', F.to_timestamp('order_update_timestamp', 'yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss')).filter(stg_df["feed_arrival_date"] == '2020-01-02')
stg_df_final = stg_df_cast.filter(stg_df_cast["order_id"] > 0) 

Read target table from data catalog to dataframe target_tbl

target_tbl = sqlContext.table("refarch_database.c_orders_output")

Merge the source and target dataframes by column name

final_df = stg_df_final.unionByName(target_tbl)

De-duplicate dataframe using row_number() and window() and select the most latest record for each order_id

rownum = F.row_number().over(Window.partitionBy("order_id")\
									.orderBy(final_df["order_update_timestamp"].desc()))
final_union = final_df.select('*',rownum.alias("row_num"))
final_union_dedupe = final_union.filter(target_df["row_num"] == 1)

Overwrite the partitions with new curated datasets to output location

final_union_dedupe.drop("row_num").coalesce(2).write.partitionBy(["order_date"]).mode("overwrite").parquet("s3://<YOUR_BUCKET>/output")

Putting it all together in one script

import os
from pyspark.sql import SparkSession
from pyspark.sql.window import Window
from pyspark.context import SparkContext
from pyspark.sql import functions as F, types as T
spark.conf.set("spark.sql.sources.partitionOverwriteMode","dynamic")
stg_df = sqlContext.table("refarch_database.i_orders_input")
stg_df_cast = stg_df.withColumn('order_date', F.to_date('order_date', 'yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss')).withColumn('order_update_timestamp', F.to_timestamp('order_update_timestamp', 'yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss')).filter(stg_df["feed_arrival_date"] == '2020-01-02')
stg_df_final = stg_df_cast.filter(stg_df_cast["order_id"] > 0) 
target_tbl = sqlContext.table("refarch_database.c_orders_output")
final_df = stg_df_final.unionByName(target_tbl)
rownum = F.row_number().over(Window.partitionBy("order_id")\
									.orderBy(final_df["order_update_timestamp"].desc()))
final_union = final_df.select('*',rownum.alias("row_num"))
final_union_dedupe = final_union.filter(target_df["row_num"] == 1)
final_union_dedupe.drop("row_num").coalesce(2).write.partitionBy(["order_date"]).mode("overwrite").parquet("s3://<YOUR_BUCKET>/output")
    

Considerations

1. This solution is useful forsmall to medium datasets. Generally in the order of 10s of GBs.

2. Use this method when number of partition impacted is very less.

3. This method can be used for large tables only of number of partitions impacted is small.

4. Can be executed for frequently arriving datasets as the process is idempotent.

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