Simba JDBC Exception When Querying Tables via BigQuery Databricks Connection

KristiLogos
Contributor

‎01-31-2025 07:19 AM

Hello, 
I have a federated connection to BigQuery that has GA events tables for each of our projects. I'm trying to query each daily table which contains about 400,000 each day, and load into another table, but I keep seeig this Simba JDBC exception. I've even chunked out (offset) the query  to fetch/append 5000 rows at a time, with a sleep inbetween but I still see this error:
 
SparkException: Job aborted due to stage failure: Task 0 in stage 2947.0 failed 4 times, most recent failure: Lost task 0.3 in stage 2947.0 (TID 15843) (10.21.40.215 executor 20): java.sql.SQLException: [Simba][JDBC](11380) Null pointer exception. at bigquery.shaded.com.simba.googlebigquery.googlebigquery.dataengine.BQHTParser.avroStructToString(Unknown Source) at bigquery.shaded.com.simba.googlebigquery.googlebigquery.dataengine.BQHTParser.avroToString(Unknown Source) at bigquery.shaded.com.simba.googlebigquery.googlebigquery.dataengine.BQHTParser.avroStructToString(Unknown Source) at bigquery.shaded.com.simba.googlebigquery.googlebigquery.dataengine.BQHTParser.avroToString(Unknown Source) at bigquery.shaded.com.simba.googlebigquery.googlebigquery.dataengine.BQHTDataHandler.retrieveData(Unknown Source) at bigquery.shaded.com.simba.googlebigquery.googlebigquery.dataengine.BQResultSet.getData(Unknown Source) at bigquery.shaded.com.simba.googlebigquery.jdbc.common.SForwardResultSet.getData(Unknown Source) at bigquery.shaded.com.simba.googlebigquery.jdbc.common.SForwardResultSet.getString(Unknown Source) at org.apache.spark.sql.execution.datasources.jdbc.JdbcUtils$.$anonfun$makeGetter$13(JdbcUtils.scala:484) at org.apache.spark.sql.execution.datasources.jdbc.JdbcUtils$.$anonfun$makeGetter$13$adapted(JdbcUtils.scala:482) at org.apache.spark.sql.execution.datasources.jdbc.JdbcUtils$$anon$1.getNext(JdbcUtils.scala:376) at org.apache.spark.sql.execution.datasources.jdbc.JdbcUtils$$anon$1.getNext(JdbcUtils.scala:357) at org.apache.spark.util.NextIterator.hasNext(NextIterator.scala:73) at org.apache.spark.InterruptibleIterator.hasNext(InterruptibleIterator.scala:37) at org.apache.spark.util.CompletionIterator.hasNext(CompletionIterator.scala:31) at org.apache.spark.sql.catalyst.expressions.GeneratedClass$GeneratedIteratorForCodegenStage1.processNext(Unknown Source) at org.apache.spark.sql.execution.BufferedRowIterator.hasNext(BufferedRowIterator.java:43) at org.apache.spark.sql.execution.WholeStageCodegenEvaluatorFac...
File <command-6291825545273755>, line 88 85 df_chunk = df_chunk.withColumn("event_date", lit(event_date)) 87 # Append chunk to Bronze table ---> 88 df_chunk.write.option("mergeSchema", "true").mode("append").saveAsTable(bronze_table) 90 offset += BATCH_SIZE
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Alberto_Umana
Databricks Employee
Databricks Employee

‎02-01-2025 08:11 AM

Hello @KristiLogos,

The error you are encountering, java.sql.SQLException: [Simba][JDBC](11380) Null pointer exception, is a known issue with the Simba JDBC driver for BigQuery. This error typically occurs when there is a problem with the data being fetched, such as null values or unexpected data types that the driver cannot handle. Could you please advise which JDBC version are you using?

You might need to adjust settings such as spark.sql.shuffle.partitions and spark.executor.memory

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KristiLogos
Contributor
In response to Alberto_Umana

‎02-10-2025 09:22 AM

@Alberto_Umana My cluster's JDBC URL  shows: 2.6.25 or later
Also, where would I adjust the spark.sql.shuffle.partitions and spark.executor.memory? in the notebook? 

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KristiLogos
Contributor

‎02-10-2025 10:15 AM

@Alberto_Umana  In addition to my last comment:
For adjusting the spark.sql.shuffle.partitions and spark.executor.memory, I tried this but I was still seeing the same error 

 

spark = (
    SparkSession.builder
    .appName("GA4 Bronze Table Ingestion")
    .config("spark.sql.shuffle.partitions", "100")
    .config("spark.executor.memory", "4g")
    .config("spark.driver.memory", "4g")
    .config("spark.sql.execution.arrow.pyspark.enabled", "true")
    .getOrCreate()
)
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tsekityam_2
New Contributor II

‎06-16-2025 12:45 AM

I also have this issue, and I resolved it by cast all the records columns in bigquery to string before I dump the data.

I first create a view like

create view xxx as 
select 
string_1,
string_2,
string_3,
to_json_string(record_1) as record_1,
to_json_string(record_2) as record_2,
.
.
.
from yyy

 I don't know which record column has issue, so I cast them all.

Then in databricks, I query the data only from the view xxx. instead of the original table yyy. With this method, I can dump millions of rows from bigquery view xxx at once.