Unpivot in spark-sql/pyspark
I have a problem statement at hand wherein I want to unpivot table in spark-sql/pyspark. I have gone through the documentation and I could see there is support only for pivot but no support for un-pivot so far. Is there a way I can achieve this?
Let my initial table look like this:
when I pivot this in pyspark using below mentioned command:
df.groupBy("A").pivot("B").sum("C")
I get this as the output:
Now I want to unpivot the pivoted table. In general this operation may/may not yield the original table based on how I've pivoted the original table.
Spark-sql as of now doesn't provide out of the box support for unpivot. Is there a way I can achieve this?
Answer
You can use the built in stack function, for example in Scala:
scala> val df = Seq(("G",Some(4),2,None),("H",None,4,Some(5))).toDF("A","X","Y", "Z")
df: org.apache.spark.sql.DataFrame = [A: string, X: int ... 2 more fields]
scala> df.show
+---+----+---+----+
| A| X| Y| Z|
+---+----+---+----+
| G| 4| 2|null|
| H|null| 4| 5|
+---+----+---+----+
scala> df.select($"A", expr("stack(3, 'X', X, 'Y', Y, 'Z', Z) as (B, C)")).where("C is not null").show
+---+---+---+
| A| B| C|
+---+---+---+
| G| X| 4|
| G| Y| 2|
| H| Y| 4|
| H| Z| 5|
+---+---+---+
Or in pyspark:
In [1]: df = spark.createDataFrame([("G",4,2,None),("H",None,4,5)],list("AXYZ"))
In [2]: df.show()
+---+----+---+----+
| A| X| Y| Z|
+---+----+---+----+
| G| 4| 2|null|
| H|null| 4| 5|
+---+----+---+----+
In [3]: df.selectExpr("A", "stack(3, 'X', X, 'Y', Y, 'Z', Z) as (B, C)").where("C is not null").show()
+---+---+---+
| A| B| C|
+---+---+---+
| G| X| 4|
| G| Y| 2|
| H| Y| 4|
| H| Z| 5|
+---+---+---+