Generate metadata for parquet files

Question

I have a hive table that is built on top of a load of external parquet files. Parquet files should be generated by the spark job, but due to setting metadata flag to false they

Answer 1

Ok so here is the drill, metadata can be accessed directly using Parquet tools. You'll need to get the footers for your parquet file first :

import scala.collection.JavaConverters.{collectionAsScalaIterableConverter, mapAsScalaMapConverter}

import org.apache.parquet.hadoop.ParquetFileReader
import org.apache.hadoop.fs.{FileSystem, Path}
import org.apache.hadoop.conf.Configuration

val conf = spark.sparkContext.hadoopConfiguration

def getFooters(conf: Configuration, path: String) = {
  val fs = FileSystem.get(conf)
  val footers = ParquetFileReader.readAllFootersInParallel(conf, fs.getFileStatus(new Path(path)))
  footers
}

Now you can get your file metadata as followed :

def getFileMetadata(conf: Configuration, path: String) = {
  getFooters(conf, path)
    .asScala.map(_.getParquetMetadata.getFileMetaData.getKeyValueMetaData.asScala)
}

Now you can get the metadata of your parquet file :

getFileMetadata(conf, "/tmp/foo").headOption

// Option[scala.collection.mutable.Map[String,String]] =
//   Some(Map(org.apache.spark.sql.parquet.row.metadata ->
//     {"type":"struct","fields":[{"name":"id","type":"long","nullable":false,"metadata":{"foo":"bar"}}
//     {"name":"txt","type":"string","nullable":true,"metadata":{}}]}))

We can also use extracted footers to write standalone metadata file when needed:

import org.apache.parquet.hadoop.ParquetFileWriter

def createMetadata(conf: Configuration, path: String) = {
  val footers = getFooters(conf, path)
  ParquetFileWriter.writeMetadataFile(conf, new Path(path), footers)
}

I hope this answers your question. You can read more about Spark DataFrames and Metadata on awesome-spark's spark-gotchas repo.