Spark JSON text field to RDD

Question

I've got a cassandra table with a field of type text named snapshot containing JSON objects:

[identifier, timestamp, snapshot]

I understood that to be able to do transformations on that field with Spark, I need to convert that field of that RDD to another RDD to make transformations on the JSON schema.

Is that correct? How should I proceed to to that?

Edit: For now I managed to create an RDD from a single text field:

val conf = new SparkConf().setAppName("signal-aggregation")
val sc = new SparkContext(conf)
val sqlContext = new SQLContext(sc)
val snapshots = sc.cassandraTable[(String, String, String)]("listener", "snapshots")
val first = snapshots.first()
val firstJson = sqlContext.jsonRDD(sc.parallelize(Seq(first._3)))
firstJson.printSchema()

Which shows me the JSON schema. Good!

How do I proceed to tell Spark that this schema should be applied on all rows of the table Snapshots, to get an RDD on that snapshot field from each row?

Answer 1

Almost there, you just want to pass your an RDD[String] with your json into the jsonRDD method

val conf = new SparkConf().setAppName("signal-aggregation")
val sc = new SparkContext(conf)
val sqlContext = new SQLContext(sc)
val snapshots = sc.cassandraTable[(String, String, String)]("listener", "snapshots")
val jsons = snapshots.map(_._3) // Get Third Row Element Json(RDD[String]) 
val jsonSchemaRDD = sqlContext.jsonRDD(jsons) // Pass in RDD directly
jsonSchemaRDD.registerTempTable("testjson")
sqlContext.sql("SELECT * FROM testjson where .... ").collect 

---

A quick example

val stringRDD = sc.parallelize(Seq(""" 
  { "isActive": false,
    "balance": "$1,431.73",
    "picture": "http://placehold.it/32x32",
    "age": 35,
    "eyeColor": "blue"
  }""",
   """{
    "isActive": true,
    "balance": "$2,515.60",
    "picture": "http://placehold.it/32x32",
    "age": 34,
    "eyeColor": "blue"
  }""", 
  """{
    "isActive": false,
    "balance": "$3,765.29",
    "picture": "http://placehold.it/32x32",
    "age": 26,
    "eyeColor": "blue"
  }""")
)
sqlContext.jsonRDD(stringRDD).registerTempTable("testjson")
csc.sql("SELECT age from testjson").collect
//res24: Array[org.apache.spark.sql.Row] = Array([35], [34], [26])