Inspecting Spark Catalog & Database Metadata

How can we programmatically inspect registered databases, tables, columns, and functions in the Spark session catalog?

Advanced⏱ 3 Minutes⭐ 850 XP

🤔 THE QUESTION

How can we programmatically inspect registered databases, tables, columns, and functions in the Spark session catalog?

💡 WHAT IS IT?

spark.catalog provides methods like listDatabases(), listTables(), and listColumns() for runtime metadata discovery.

🎯 WHAT IS IT USED FOR?

Building generic ingestion pipelines that validate target schema tables dynamically before appending records.

💻 EXAMPLE

tables = spark.catalog.listTables("default")
table_names = [t.name for t in tables]
columns = spark.catalog.listColumns("v_sales_transactions")

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