It has been pretty evident for some time that's what it is, hasn't it? Yes that's a better name IMO.
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 2:18 PM, Reynold Xin <r...@databricks.com> wrote: > Hi, > > We are considering renaming SchemaRDD -> DataFrame in 1.3, and wanted to > get the community's opinion. > > The context is that SchemaRDD is becoming a common data format used for > bringing data into Spark from external systems, and used for various > components of Spark, e.g. MLlib's new pipeline API. We also expect more and > more users to be programming directly against SchemaRDD API rather than the > core RDD API. SchemaRDD, through its less commonly used DSL originally > designed for writing test cases, always has the data-frame like API. In > 1.3, we are redesigning the API to make the API usable for end users. > > > There are two motivations for the renaming: > > 1. DataFrame seems to be a more self-evident name than SchemaRDD. > > 2. SchemaRDD/DataFrame is actually not going to be an RDD anymore (even > though it would contain some RDD functions like map, flatMap, etc), and > calling it Schema*RDD* while it is not an RDD is highly confusing. Instead. > DataFrame.rdd will return the underlying RDD for all RDD methods. > > > My understanding is that very few users program directly against the > SchemaRDD API at the moment, because they are not well documented. However, > oo maintain backward compatibility, we can create a type alias DataFrame > that is still named SchemaRDD. This will maintain source compatibility for > Scala. That said, we will have to update all existing materials to use > DataFrame rather than SchemaRDD. >
