Data in Unity Catalog that can't be previewed

DavidKxx
Contributor

This is a small deficiency, but a fix would be nice to have.

For a long time now, the Sample Data previewer in the Unity Catalog explorer has been unable to show tables that contain a certain kind of column.  Instead of showing sample rows of the table, it shows:


Error getting sample data
Unexpected token '(', "(8000,[0,2"... is not valid JSON

That little data snippet mentioning "8000" is enough to point me to a specific column causing the trouble, whose type can be described in several different ways. 

1)  The Overview tab shows it as a struct that breaks out as:
{"type": "tinyint", "size": "int", "indices": {"items": "int"}, "values": {"items": "double"}}

2)  A SQL DESCRIBE shows the column as having datatype "vector".

3)  The column was created via a UDF whose key operation is: 

from pyspark.ml.linalg import Vectors
 ...
[output] = Vectors.sparse(inputs)

Any chance of getting this fixed so that the table containing this data type can be previewed?