If you’ve worked with Spark SQL, you might have come across the concept of User Defined Functions (UDFs). As the name suggests, it’s a feature where you define a function, pretty straight forward. But how is this different from any other custom function that you write? Well, when you’re working with Spark in a distributed environment, your code is distributed across the cluster. For this to happen, your code entities have to be serializable, including the various functions you call. When you want to manipulate columns in your Dataset, Spark provides a variety of built-in functions. But there are cases when you want a custom implementation to work with your columns. For this, Spark provides UDF. But you should be warned, UDFs should be used as sparingly as possible. This is because ...