DataFrame equality in Apache Spark

Question

Assume df1 and df2 are two DataFrames in Apache Spark, computed using two different mechanisms, e.g., Spark SQL vs. the Scala/Java/Python API.

Is there an idiomatic way to determine whether the two data frames are equivalent (equal, isomorphic), where equivalence is determined by the data (column names and column values for each row) being identical save for the ordering of rows & columns?

The motivation for the question is that there are often many ways to compute some big data result, each with its own trade-offs. As one explores these trade-offs, it is important to maintain correctness and hence the need to check for the equivalence/equality on a meaningful test data set.

Answer 1

Out of all the standard ways in the Apache Spark test suites most of these involve collecting the data locally and if you want to do equality testing on large DataFrames then that is likely not a suitable solution.

Checking the schema first and then you could do an intersection to df3 and verify that the count of df1,df2 & df3 are all equal (however this only works if there aren't duplicate rows).

Another option would be getting the underlying RDDs of both of the DataFrames, mapping to (Row, 1), doing a reduceByKey to count the number of each Row, and then cogroup the two resulting RDDs. Finally, do a regular aggregate and return false if any of the iterators are not equal.