Join two ordinary RDDs with/without Spark SQL

Question

I need to join two ordinary RDDs on one/more columns. Logically this operation is equivalent to the database join operation of two tables. I wonder if this is possible only through Spark SQL or there are other ways of doing it.

As a concrete example, consider RDD r1 with primary key ITEM_ID:

(ITEM_ID, ITEM_NAME, ITEM_UNIT, COMPANY_ID)

and RDD r2 with primary key COMPANY_ID:

(COMPANY_ID, COMPANY_NAME, COMPANY_CITY)

I want to join r1 and r2.

How can this be done?

Answer 1

Soumya Simanta gave a good answer. However, the values in joined RDD are Iterable, so the results may not be very similar to ordinary table joining.

Alternatively, you can:

val mappedItems = items.map(item => (item.companyId, item))
val mappedComp = companies.map(comp => (comp.companyId, comp))
mappedItems.join(mappedComp).take(10).foreach(println)

The output would be:

(c1,(Item(1,first,2,c1),Company(c1,company-1,city-1)))
(c1,(Item(2,second,2,c1),Company(c1,company-1,city-1)))
(c2,(Item(3,third,2,c2),Company(c2,company-2,city-2)))