MetadataChangedException Exception in databricks

[thushar]

Reading around 20 text files from ADLS, doing some transformations, and after that these files are written back to ADLS as a single delta file (all operations are in parallel through the thread pool). Here from 20 threads, it is writing to a single file, using dataframe.append method. and getting the below error,

"Exception type : MetadataChangedException Exception message : The metadata of the Delta table has been changed by a concurrent update. Please try the operation again. ,operation:WRITE,operationParameters:{mode:Append,partitionBy:[]} readVersion:0,isolationLevel:WriteSerializable,isBlindAppend:true,operationMetrics:{numFiles:20,numOutputRows:1650135,numOutputBytes:80649658}} Refer to https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/databricks/delta/concurrency-control for more details"

This is an INSERT operation, hence should be treated as blind INSERTS and the default isolation level, then why I am getting the concurrent update/metadata change exception here? Any idea ?

[Sandeep]

Can you share a sample code?

[thushar]

See the code below

 df.write.format("delta")\

                    .mode('append')\

                    .option("overwriteSchema",False)\

                    .option("mergeSchema",True)\

                    .save(/mnt/r/xyz.delta)

[naga_databricks]

I have seen this problem with Identity column causing concurrency issues. But you seem to be getting similar error when writing to files. I don't know completely know your use case completely here, but would advice retrying this operation by managing the MetadataException in a try except block. Let us know what solved the problem?

[jkb7]

How can we import the exception "MetadataChangedException"?
Or does Databricks recommend to catch / except Exception and parse the string?