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Pre-Partitioning a delta table to reduce suffling of wide operation

Maatari
New Contributor III

Assuming i need to perfom a groupby i.e. aggregation on a dataset stored in a delta table. If the delta table is partitioned by the field by which to group, can that have an impact on the suffling that the groupby would normally cause ? 

As a connected question, one can ask is there any correlation between how a delta table is partitioned and how the data is put into the dataframe partition when loading the data ?

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

Brahmareddy
Honored Contributor

Hi Maatari!

How are you doing today?

When you group data by a column in a Delta table, Spark typically has to shuffle the data to get all the same values together. But if your Delta table is already partitioned by that same column, the shuffling is much less because the data is already nicely organized.

For example, if your Delta table is partitioned by store_id, and you want to group by store_id to see total sales per store, Spark can do that faster since it doesn't need to move data around as much.

Also, when you load data from a Delta table into a DataFrame, Spark usually respects the table’s partitioning. So if your table is partitioned by store_id, your DataFrame might also be partitioned that way, which again helps reduce shuffling during operations like groupby.

In short, if you partition your Delta table by the column you plan to group by, it can make your queries run a lot smoother! 

Have a good day.

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