Nidhi Gupta
3 min readSep 18, 2024

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PySpark Schema Strategies: When to Use InferSchema, MergeSchema, and OverwriteSchema

Hello, everyone! I’m happy to be back with another article for you. In my recent project, I’ve been focusing on updating the schema of a table to align with the latest defined schema requirements. This involves carefully managing the structure and organization of the data to ensure it meets the project’s needs.

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Dealing with schemas is essential for properly structuring and processing data in PySpark. We have several options when handling schemas in PySpark.When dealing with schemas while reading or writing data in formats like Parquet, we might encounter scenarios where we must merge or overwrite schemas.

MergeSchema

This is particularly useful when you’re reading Parquet files that have different schemas across partitions. PySpark can automatically merge the schemas of these…

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Nidhi Gupta
Nidhi Gupta

Written by Nidhi Gupta

Azure Data Engineer 👨‍💻.Heading towards cloud technologies expertise✌️.

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