Batch writes to Cosmos DB from Databricks

Question

Can someone let me know what asterics ** achieves when writing to Cosmos DB from Databrick.

# Write configuration
writeConfig = {
    "Endpoint": "https://doctorwho.documents.azure.com:443/",
    "Masterkey": "YOUR-KEY-HERE",
    "Database": "DepartureDelays",
    "Collection": "flights_fromsea",
    "Upsert": "true"
}

# Write to Cosmos DB from the flights DataFrame
flights.write.format("com.microsoft.azure.cosmosdb.spark").options(
    **writeConfig).save()

Thanks

Answer 1

This is simply to allow you to pass multiple arguments directly using a list, tuple or a dictionary in your case.

So rather than you say:

flights.write.format("com.microsoft.azure.cosmosdb.spark")\
             .option("Endpoint", "https://doctorwho.documents.azure.com:443/")\
             .option("Upsert", "true")\
             .option("Masterkey", "YOUR-KEY-HERE")\
             ...etc 

You simply have all your arguments in a dictionary and then pass it like the following

flights.write.format("com.microsoft.azure.cosmosdb.spark").options(
    **yourdict).save()