python Spark avro

Question

When attempting to write avro, I get the following error:

org.apache.spark.SparkException: Job aborted due to stage failure: Task 7 in stage 35.0 failed 1 times, most recent failure: Lost task 7.0 in stage 35.0 (TID 110, localhost): java.lang.ClassCastException: java.util.HashMap cannot be cast to org.apache.avro.mapred.AvroWrapper

I had read in an avro file with 3 records using:

avro_rdd = sc.newAPIHadoopFile(
    "threerecords.avro",
    "org.apache.avro.mapreduce.AvroKeyInputFormat",
    "org.apache.avro.mapred.AvroKey",
    "org.apache.hadoop.io.NullWritable",
    keyConverter="org.apache.spark.examples.pythonconverters.AvroWrapperToJavaConverter",
    conf=None)

output = avro_rdd.map(lambda x: x[0]).collect()
 

Then I tried to write out a single record (output kept in avro) with:

conf = {"avro.schema.input.key": reduce(lambda x, y: x + y, sc.textFile("myschema.avsc", 1).collect())}

sc.parallelize([output[0]]).map(lambda x: (x, None)).saveAsNewAPIHadoopFile(
    "output.avro",
    "org.apache.avro.mapreduce.AvroKeyOutputFormat",
    "org.apache.avro.mapred.AvroKey",
    "org.apache.hadoop.io.NullWritable",
    keyConverter="org.apache.spark.examples.pythonconverters.AvroWrapperToJavaConverter",
    conf=conf)

Answer 1

It looks like this isn't supported at the moment. You are now trying to use the java map as an Avro Record and convert it to a Java map again. That's why you get the error about the java hashmap.

There is a pull request from staslos to add the Avro output format, see link for the pull request and the example.

There is a converter required which is missing in AvroConverters.scala to convert from the java map back to the avro format.