Skip to main content
PYSPARK โ€ข LESSON 135

Temporal Fields with DateType and TimestampType

How do we model calendar business dates (DateType) versus microsecond audit timestamps (TimestampType)?

Advancedโฑ 2 Minutesโญ 710 XP
๐Ÿค” THE QUESTION

How do we model calendar business dates (DateType) versus microsecond audit timestamps (TimestampType)?

๐Ÿ’ก WHAT IS IT?

DateType stores calendar dates (YYYY-MM-DD); TimestampType stores microsecond-level datetime points.

๐ŸŽฏ WHAT IS IT USED FOR?

Audit trails, partition pruning keys, event time watermarks, and SLA measurement.

๐Ÿ’ป EXAMPLE
from pyspark.sql.types import StructType, StructField, DateType, TimestampType

audit_schema = StructType([
    StructField("business_date", DateType(), False),
    StructField("created_timestamp", TimestampType(), False)
])

๐ŸŽฏ Mission Objectives

Practice typing production-grade PySpark code for Temporal Fields with DateType and TimestampType.

  • โœ“ Import DateType and TimestampType
  • โœ“ Model business dates and audit timestamps
  • โœ“ Enforce temporal schema contract