It is not a very good idea to save the results in the exact same place as
the data. Any failures during the job could lead to corrupted data, because
recomputing the lost partitions would involve reading the original
(now-nonexistent) data.

As such, the only "safe" way to do this would be to do as you said, and
only delete the input data once the entire output has been successfully
created.


On Sun, Jun 8, 2014 at 10:32 PM, innowireless TaeYun Kim <
taeyun....@innowireless.co.kr> wrote:

> Without (C), what is the best practice to implement the following scenario?
>
> 1. rdd = sc.textFile(FileA)
> 2. rdd = rdd.map(...)  // actually modifying the rdd
> 3. rdd.saveAsTextFile(FileA)
>
> Since the rdd transformation is 'lazy', rdd will not materialize until
> saveAsTextFile(), so FileA must still exist, but it must be deleted before
> saveAsTextFile().
>
> What I can think is:
>
> 3. rdd.saveAsTextFile(TempFile)
> 4. delete FileA
> 5. rename TempFile to FileA
>
> This is not very convenient...
>
> Thanks.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Patrick Wendell [mailto:pwend...@gmail.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2014 11:40 AM
> To: user@spark.apache.org
> Subject: Re: How can I make Spark 1.0 saveAsTextFile to overwrite existing
> file
>
> (A) Semantics in Spark 0.9 and earlier: Spark will ignore Hadoo's output
> format check and overwrite files in the destination directory.
> But it won't clobber the directory entirely. I.e. if the directory already
> had "part1" "part2" "part3" "part4" and you write a new job outputing only
> two files ("part1", "part2") then it would leave the other two files
> intact,
> confusingly.
>
> (B) Semantics in Spark 1.0 and earlier: Runs Hadoop OutputFormat check
> which
> means the directory must not exist already or an excpetion is thrown.
>
> (C) Semantics proposed by Nicholas Chammas in this thread (AFAIK):
> Spark will delete/clobber an existing destination directory if it exists,
> then fully over-write it with new data.
>
> I'm fine to add a flag that allows (B) for backwards-compatibility reasons,
> but my point was I'd prefer not to have (C) even though I see some cases
> where it would be useful.
>
> - Patrick
>
> On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 4:25 PM, Sean Owen <so...@cloudera.com> wrote:
> > Is there a third way? Unless I miss something. Hadoop's OutputFormat
> > wants the target dir to not exist no matter what, so it's just a
> > question of whether Spark deletes it for you or errors.
> >
> > On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 12:22 AM, Patrick Wendell <pwend...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> We can just add back a flag to make it backwards compatible - it was
> >> just missed during the original PR.
> >>
> >> Adding a *third* set of "clobber" semantics, I'm slightly -1 on that
> >> for the following reasons:
> >>
> >> 1. It's scary to have Spark recursively deleting user files, could
> >> easily lead to users deleting data by mistake if they don't
> >> understand the exact semantics.
> >> 2. It would introduce a third set of semantics here for saveAsXX...
> >> 3. It's trivial for users to implement this with two lines of code
> >> (if output dir exists, delete it) before calling saveAsHadoopFile.
> >>
> >> - Patrick
> >>
>
>

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