Tips and Traps¶

1. The easist way to define a UDF in PySpark is to use the @udf tag, and similarly the easist way to define a Pandas UDF in PySpark is to use the @pandas_udf tag. Pandas UDFs are preferred to UDFs for server reasons. First, pandas UDFs are typically much faster than UDFs. Second, pandas UDFs are more flexible than UDFs on parameter passing. Both UDFs and pandas UDFs can take multiple columns as parameters. In addition, pandas UDFs can take a DataFrame as parameter (when passed to the apply