what is nullable = true or false in spark scala?where need to use this?

Question

what is nullable = true or false in spark scala? where need to use this?

Answer 1

Spark uses a simple set of rules to determine nullable property when creating a Dataset from a statically typed structure,

• If an object of the given type can be null then its DataFrame representation is nullable.
• If object is an Option[_] then its DataFrame representation is nullable with None considered to be SQL NULL.
• Otherwise, it will be marked as not nullable.

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Answer 2

When you create your schema and define the field information, nullable is an option,  by default, it is true which means the field which you have created can not be null. Null or not null is dependent on your use case suppose you are consuming customer data and in your data structure you have the customer's first name that cannot be null hence nullable is true.

So when you get a record with the customer's first name as null an error will be thrown by spark job.

https://github.com/apache/spark/blob/master/sql/catalyst/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/sql/types/StructField.scala