Legacy arbitrary stateful operators

note

Databricks recommends using transformWithState to build custom stateful applications. See Build a custom stateful application with transformWithState.

This article has information for features that support mapGroupsWithState, and flatMapGroupsWithState. For more details on these operators, see link.

Specify initial state for mapGroupsWithState

You can specify a user-defined initial state for Structured Streaming stateful processing using flatMapGroupsWithStateor mapGroupsWithState. This allows you to avoid reprocessing data when starting a stateful stream without a valid checkpoint.

Scala

def mapGroupsWithState[S: Encoder, U: Encoder](
    timeoutConf: GroupStateTimeout,
    initialState: KeyValueGroupedDataset[K, S])(
    func: (K, Iterator[V], GroupState[S]) => U): Dataset[U]

def flatMapGroupsWithState[S: Encoder, U: Encoder](
    outputMode: OutputMode,
    timeoutConf: GroupStateTimeout,
    initialState: KeyValueGroupedDataset[K, S])(
    func: (K, Iterator[V], GroupState[S]) => Iterator[U])

Example use case that specifies an initial state to the flatMapGroupsWithState operator:

Scala

val fruitCountFunc =(key: String, values: Iterator[String], state: GroupState[RunningCount]) => {
  val count = state.getOption.map(_.count).getOrElse(0L) + valList.size
  state.update(new RunningCount(count))
  Iterator((key, count.toString))
}

val fruitCountInitialDS: Dataset[(String, RunningCount)] = Seq(
  ("apple", new RunningCount(1)),
  ("orange", new RunningCount(2)),
  ("mango", new RunningCount(5)),
).toDS()

val fruitCountInitial = initialState.groupByKey(x => x._1).mapValues(_._2)

fruitStream
  .groupByKey(x => x)
  .flatMapGroupsWithState(Update, GroupStateTimeout.NoTimeout, fruitCountInitial)(fruitCountFunc)

Example use case that specifies an initial state to the mapGroupsWithState operator:

Scala

val fruitCountFunc =(key: String, values: Iterator[String], state: GroupState[RunningCount]) => {
  val count = state.getOption.map(_.count).getOrElse(0L) + valList.size
  state.update(new RunningCount(count))
  (key, count.toString)
}

val fruitCountInitialDS: Dataset[(String, RunningCount)] = Seq(
  ("apple", new RunningCount(1)),
  ("orange", new RunningCount(2)),
  ("mango", new RunningCount(5)),
).toDS()

val fruitCountInitial = initialState.groupByKey(x => x._1).mapValues(_._2)

fruitStream
  .groupByKey(x => x)
  .mapGroupsWithState(GroupStateTimeout.NoTimeout, fruitCountInitial)(fruitCountFunc)

Test the mapGroupsWithState update function

The TestGroupState API enables you to test the state update function used for Dataset.groupByKey(...).mapGroupsWithState(...) and Dataset.groupByKey(...).flatMapGroupsWithState(...).

The state update function takes the previous state as input using an object of type GroupState. See the Apache Spark GroupState reference documentation. For example:

Scala

import org.apache.spark.sql.streaming._
import org.apache.spark.api.java.Optional

test("flatMapGroupsWithState's state update function") {
  var prevState = TestGroupState.create[UserStatus](
    optionalState = Optional.empty[UserStatus],
    timeoutConf = GroupStateTimeout.EventTimeTimeout,
    batchProcessingTimeMs = 1L,
    eventTimeWatermarkMs = Optional.of(1L),
    hasTimedOut = false)

  val userId: String = ...
  val actions: Iterator[UserAction] = ...

  assert(!prevState.hasUpdated)

  updateState(userId, actions, prevState)

  assert(prevState.hasUpdated)
}