How to perform union on two DataFrames with different amounts of columns in Spark?

Question

I have 2 DataFrames:

I need union like this:

The unionAll function doesn't work because the number and the name of columns are different.

How can I do this?

Answer 1

In Scala you just have to append all missing columns as nulls.

import org.apache.spark.sql.functions._

// let df1 and df2 the Dataframes to merge
val df1 = sc.parallelize(List(
  (50, 2),
  (34, 4)
)).toDF("age", "children")

val df2 = sc.parallelize(List(
  (26, true, 60000.00),
  (32, false, 35000.00)
)).toDF("age", "education", "income")

val cols1 = df1.columns.toSet
val cols2 = df2.columns.toSet
val total = cols1 ++ cols2 // union

def expr(myCols: Set[String], allCols: Set[String]) = {
  allCols.toList.map(x => x match {
    case x if myCols.contains(x) => col(x)
    case _ => lit(null).as(x)
  })
}

df1.select(expr(cols1, total):_*).unionAll(df2.select(expr(cols2, total):_*)).show()

+---+--------+---------+-------+
|age|children|education| income|
+---+--------+---------+-------+
| 50|       2|     null|   null|
| 34|       4|     null|   null|
| 26|    null|     true|60000.0|
| 32|    null|    false|35000.0|
+---+--------+---------+-------+

---

Update

Both temporal DataFrames will have the same order of columns, because we are mapping through total in both cases.

df1.select(expr(cols1, total):_*).show()
df2.select(expr(cols2, total):_*).show()

+---+--------+---------+------+
|age|children|education|income|
+---+--------+---------+------+
| 50|       2|     null|  null|
| 34|       4|     null|  null|
+---+--------+---------+------+

+---+--------+---------+-------+
|age|children|education| income|
+---+--------+---------+-------+
| 26|    null|     true|60000.0|
| 32|    null|    false|35000.0|
+---+--------+---------+-------+