DataFrameWriter (Spark 3.5.5 JavaDoc) (original) (raw)

Saves the content of the DataFrame as the specified table.

In the case the table already exists, behavior of this function depends on the save mode, specified by the mode function (default to throwing an exception). When mode is Overwrite, the schema of the DataFrame does not need to be the same as that of the existing table.

When mode is Append, if there is an existing table, we will use the format and options of the existing table. The column order in the schema of the DataFrame doesn't need to be same as that of the existing table. Unlike insertInto, saveAsTable will use the column names to find the correct column positions. For example:

    scala> Seq((1, 2)).toDF("i", "j").write.mode("overwrite").saveAsTable("t1")
    scala> Seq((3, 4)).toDF("j", "i").write.mode("append").saveAsTable("t1")
    scala> sql("select * from t1").show
    +---+---+
    |  i|  j|
    +---+---+
    |  1|  2|
    |  4|  3|
    +---+---+
 

In this method, save mode is used to determine the behavior if the data source table exists in Spark catalog. We will always overwrite the underlying data of data source (e.g. a table in JDBC data source) if the table doesn't exist in Spark catalog, and will always append to the underlying data of data source if the table already exists.

When the DataFrame is created from a non-partitioned HadoopFsRelation with a single input path, and the data source provider can be mapped to an existing Hive builtin SerDe (i.e. ORC and Parquet), the table is persisted in a Hive compatible format, which means other systems like Hive will be able to read this table. Otherwise, the table is persisted in a Spark SQL specific format.