I have queries that work in Impala but not Hive. I am creating a simply PySpark file such as:
from pyspark import SparkConf, SparkContext
from pyspark.sql import SQLContext, HiveContext
sconf = SparkConf()
sc = SparkContext.getOrCreate(conf=sconf)
sqlContext = HiveContext(sc)
sqlContext.sql('use db1')
...
When I run this script, it's queries get the errors I get when I run them in the Hive editor (they work in the Impala editor). Is there a way to fix this so that I can run these queries in the script using Impala?
You can use Impala or HiveServer2 in Spark SQL via JDBC Data Source. That requires you to install Impala JDBC driver, and configure connection to Impala in Spark application. But "you can" doesn't mean "you should", because it incurs overhead and creates extra dependencies without any particular benefits.
Typically (and that is what your current application is trying to do), Spark SQL runs against underlying file system directly, not needing to go through either HiveServer2 or Impala coordinators. In this scenario, Spark only (re)uses Hive Metastore to retrieve the metadata -- database and table definitions.