[SPARK-18748] UDF multiple evaluations causes very poor performance

• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Incomplete
• Affects Version/s: 2.3.0, 2.4.0
• Component/s: SQL
• Labels: bulk-closed
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Ohad Raviv
• Created: 06/Dec/16 19:42
• Updated: 25/May/21 01:54
• Resolved: 25/May/21 01:43

Description

We have a use case where we have a relatively expensive UDF that needs to be calculated. The problem is that instead of being calculated once, it gets calculated over and over again.
for example:

def veryExpensiveCalc(str:String) = {println("blahblah1"); "nothing"}
hiveContext.udf.register("veryExpensiveCalc", veryExpensiveCalc _)
hiveContext.sql("select * from (select veryExpensiveCalc('a') c)z where c is not null and c<>''").show

with the output:

blahblah1
blahblah1
blahblah1
-------

c

-------

nothing

-------

You can see that for each reference of column "c" you will get the println.
that causes very poor performance for our real use case.
This also came out on StackOverflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/40320563/spark-udf-called-more-than-once-per-record-when-df-has-too-many-columns
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34587596/trying-to-turn-a-blob-into-multiple-columns-in-spark/

with two problematic work-arounds:
1. cache() after the first time. e.g.

hiveContext.sql("select veryExpensiveCalc('a') as c").cache().where("c is not null and c<>''").show

while it works, in our case we can't do that because the table is too big to cache.

2. move back and forth to rdd:

val df = hiveContext.sql("select veryExpensiveCalc('a') as c")
hiveContext.createDataFrame(df.rdd, df.schema).where("c is not null and c<>''").show

which works but then we loose some of the optimizations like push down predicate features, etc. and its very ugly.

Any ideas on how we can make the UDF get calculated just once in a reasonable way?

Issue Links

• duplicates: SPARK-17728 UDFs are run too many times