Add new rows to pyspark Dataframe

From something I did, using union, showing a block partial coding – you need to adapt of course to your own situation:

val dummySchema = StructType(
StructField("phrase", StringType, true) :: Nil)
var dfPostsNGrams2 = spark.createDataFrame(sc.emptyRDD[Row], dummySchema)
for (i <- i_grams_Cols) {
    val nameCol = col({i})
    dfPostsNGrams2 = dfPostsNGrams2.union(dfPostsNGrams.select(explode({nameCol}).as("phrase")).toDF )
 }

union of DF with itself is the way to go.

Another alternative would be to utilize the partitioned parquet format, and add an extra parquet file for each dataframe you want to append. This way you can create (hundreds, thousands, millions) of parquet files, and spark will just read them all as a union when you read the directory later.

This example uses pyarrow

Note I also showed how to write a single parquet (example.parquet) that isn’t partitioned, if you already know where you want to put the single parquet file.

import pyarrow.parquet as pq
import pandas as pd

headers=['A', 'B', 'C']

row1 = ['a1', 'b1', 'c1']
row2 = ['a2', 'b2', 'c2']

df1 = pd.DataFrame([row1], columns=headers)
df2 = pd.DataFrame([row2], columns=headers)

df3 = df1.append(df2, ignore_index=True)


table = pa.Table.from_pandas(df3)

pq.write_table(table, 'example.parquet', flavor='spark')
pq.write_to_dataset(table, root_path="test_part_file", partition_cols=['B', 'C'], flavor='spark')

# Adding a new partition (B=b2/C=c3


row3 = ['a3', 'b3', 'c3']
df4 = pd.DataFrame([row3], columns=headers)

table2 = pa.Table.from_pandas(df4)
pq.write_to_dataset(table2, root_path="test_part_file", partition_cols=['B', 'C'], flavor='spark')

# Add another parquet file to the B=b2/C=c2 partition
# Note this does not overwrite existing partitions, it just appends a new .parquet file.
# If files already exist, then you will get a union result of the two (or multiple) files when you read the partition
row5 = ['a5', 'b2', 'c2']
df5 = pd.DataFrame([row5], columns=headers)
table3 = pa.Table.from_pandas(df5)
pq.write_to_dataset(table3, root_path="test_part_file", partition_cols=['B', 'C'], flavor='spark')

Reading the output afterwards

from pyspark.sql import SparkSession

spark = (SparkSession
         .builder
         .appName("testing parquet read")
         .getOrCreate())

df_spark = spark.read.parquet('test_part_file')
df_spark.show(25, False)

You should see something like this

+---+---+---+
|A  |B  |C  |
+---+---+---+
|a5 |b2 |c2 |
|a2 |b2 |c2 |
|a1 |b1 |c1 |
|a3 |b3 |c3 |
+---+---+---+

If you run the same thing end to end again, you should see duplicates like this (since all of the previous parquet files are still there, spark unions them).

+---+---+---+
|A  |B  |C  |
+---+---+---+
|a2 |b2 |c2 |
|a5 |b2 |c2 |
|a5 |b2 |c2 |
|a2 |b2 |c2 |
|a1 |b1 |c1 |
|a1 |b1 |c1 |
|a3 |b3 |c3 |
|a3 |b3 |c3 |
+---+---+---+

To append row to dataframe one can use collect method also. collect() function converts dataframe to list and you can directly append data to list and again convert list to dataframe.

my spark dataframe called df is like

+---+----+------+
| id|name|gender|
+---+----+------+
|  1|   A|     M|
|  2|   B|     F|
|  3|   C|     M|
+---+----+------+

convert this dataframe to list using collect

collect_df = df.collect()
print(collect_df)

[Row(id=1, name='A', gender='M'),
 Row(id=2, name='B', gender='F'),
 Row(id=3, name='C', gender='M')]

append new row to this list

collect_df.append({"id" : 5, "name" : "E", "gender" : "F"})
print(collect_df)

[Row(id=1, name='A', gender='M'),
 Row(id=2, name='B', gender='F'),
 Row(id=3, name='C', gender='M'),
 {'id': 5, 'name': 'E', 'gender': 'F'}]

convert this list to dataframe

added_row_df = spark.createDataFrame(collect_df)
added_row_df.show()

+---+----+------+
| id|name|gender|
+---+----+------+
|  1|   A|     M|
|  2|   B|     F|
|  3|   C|     M|
|  5|   E|     F|
+---+----+------+