Including null values in an Apache Spark Join

I would like to include null values in an Apache Spark join. Spark doesn’t include rows with null by default.

Here is the default Spark behavior.

val numbersDf = Seq(
  ("123"),
  ("456"),
  (null),
  ("")
).toDF("numbers")

val lettersDf = Seq(
  ("123", "abc"),
  ("456", "def"),
  (null, "zzz"),
  ("", "hhh")
).toDF("numbers", "letters")

val joinedDf = numbersDf.join(lettersDf, Seq("numbers"))

Here is the output of joinedDf.show():

+-------+-------+
|numbers|letters|
+-------+-------+
|    123|    abc|
|    456|    def|
|       |    hhh|
+-------+-------+

This is the output I would like:

+-------+-------+
|numbers|letters|
+-------+-------+
|    123|    abc|
|    456|    def|
|       |    hhh|
|   null|    zzz|
+-------+-------+

Answer

Spark provides a special NULL safe equality operator:

numbersDf
  .join(lettersDf, numbersDf("numbers") <=> lettersDf("numbers"))
  .drop(lettersDf("numbers"))

+-------+-------+
|numbers|letters|
+-------+-------+
|    123|    abc|
|    456|    def|
|   null|    zzz|
|       |    hhh|
+-------+-------+

Be careful not to use it with Spark 1.5 or earlier. Prior to Spark 1.6 it required a Cartesian product (SPARK-11111 – Fast null-safe join).

In Spark 2.3.0 or later you can use Column.eqNullSafe in PySpark:

numbers_df = sc.parallelize([
    ("123", ), ("456", ), (None, ), ("", )
]).toDF(["numbers"])

letters_df = sc.parallelize([
    ("123", "abc"), ("456", "def"), (None, "zzz"), ("", "hhh")
]).toDF(["numbers", "letters"])

numbers_df.join(letters_df, numbers_df.numbers.eqNullSafe(letters_df.numbers))

+-------+-------+-------+
|numbers|numbers|letters|
+-------+-------+-------+
|    456|    456|    def|
|   null|   null|    zzz|
|       |       |    hhh|
|    123|    123|    abc|
+-------+-------+-------+

and %<=>% in SparkR:

numbers_df <- createDataFrame(data.frame(numbers = c("123", "456", NA, "")))
letters_df <- createDataFrame(data.frame(
  numbers = c("123", "456", NA, ""),
  letters = c("abc", "def", "zzz", "hhh")
))

head(join(numbers_df, letters_df, numbers_df$numbers %<=>% letters_df$numbers))

  numbers numbers letters
1     456     456     def
2    <NA>    <NA>     zzz
3                     hhh
4     123     123     abc

With SQL (Spark 2.2.0+) you can use IS NOT DISTINCT FROM:

SELECT * FROM numbers JOIN letters 
ON numbers.numbers IS NOT DISTINCT FROM letters.numbers

This is can be used with DataFrame API as well:

numbersDf.alias("numbers")
  .join(lettersDf.alias("letters"))
  .where("numbers.numbers IS NOT DISTINCT FROM letters.numbers")