Spark SQL replacement for MySQL's GROUP_CONCAT aggregate function

Question

I have a table of two string type columns (username, friend) and for each username, I want to collect all of its friends on one row, concatenated as strings. For example: ('username1', 'friends1, friends2, friends3')

I know MySQL does this with GROUP_CONCAT. Is there any way to do this with Spark SQL?

Answer 1

Before you proceed: This operations is yet another another groupByKey. While it has multiple legitimate applications it is relatively expensive so be sure to use it only when required.

---

Not exactly concise or efficient solution but you can use UserDefinedAggregateFunction introduced in Spark 1.5.0:

object GroupConcat extends UserDefinedAggregateFunction {
    def inputSchema = new StructType().add("x", StringType)
    def bufferSchema = new StructType().add("buff", ArrayType(StringType))
    def dataType = StringType
    def deterministic = true 

    def initialize(buffer: MutableAggregationBuffer) = {
      buffer.update(0, ArrayBuffer.empty[String])
    }

    def update(buffer: MutableAggregationBuffer, input: Row) = {
      if (!input.isNullAt(0)) 
        buffer.update(0, buffer.getSeq[String](0) :+ input.getString(0))
    }

    def merge(buffer1: MutableAggregationBuffer, buffer2: Row) = {
      buffer1.update(0, buffer1.getSeq[String](0) ++ buffer2.getSeq[String](0))
    }

    def evaluate(buffer: Row) = UTF8String.fromString(
      buffer.getSeq[String](0).mkString(","))
}

Example usage:

val df = sc.parallelize(Seq(
  ("username1", "friend1"),
  ("username1", "friend2"),
  ("username2", "friend1"),
  ("username2", "friend3")
)).toDF("username", "friend")

df.groupBy($"username").agg(GroupConcat($"friend")).show

## +---------+---------------+
## | username|        friends|
## +---------+---------------+
## |username1|friend1,friend2|
## |username2|friend1,friend3|
## +---------+---------------+

You can also create a Python wrapper as shown in Spark: How to map Python with Scala or Java User Defined Functions?

In practice it can be faster to extract RDD, groupByKey, mkString and rebuild DataFrame.

You can get a similar effect by combining collect_list function (Spark >= 1.6.0) with concat_ws:

import org.apache.spark.sql.functions.{collect_list, udf, lit}

df.groupBy($"username")
  .agg(concat_ws(",", collect_list($"friend")).alias("friends"))