Check if a table exists in Hive in pyspark sparksession

Question

I have the following code. What I am trying to achieve is to check if a table already exists in a database in Hive. If yes, then append new data into. If not then create a new table.

 if "table1" in sqlContext.tableNames("db1"):
    df.write.format("orc").mode("append").insertInto("db1.table1")
 else:
    df.write.format("orc").saveAsTable("db1.table1")

But I am getting this error:

NameError: name 'sqlContext' is not defined

I am using spark session in Pyspark with Jupyter Notebook:

spark = SparkSession.builder.config(conf=conf).enableHiveSupport().getOrCreate()

How can I fix the error?

Answer 1

It depends on your Apache Spark version. If your Spark version is 1.x then you need to do as follows:

from pyspark.sql import SQLContext
sqlContext = SQLContext(sc)