Difference between createOrReplaceTempView and registerTempTable

Question

I'm new to Spark and I cannot seem to find a difference between createOrReplaceTempView and registerTempTable.

They seem almost same.

Help needed

Answer 1

createOrReplaceTempView() creates/replaces a local temp view with the dataframe provided. Lifetime of this view is dependent to SparkSession class, is you want to drop this view :

spark.catalog.dropTempView("name")

createGlobalTempView() creates a global temporary view with the dataframe provided . Lifetime of this view is dependent to spark application itself. If you want to drop :

spark.catalog.dropGlobalTempView("name")

Answer 2

I am pretty sure createOrReplaceTempView just replaced registerTempTable in Spark 2.0. I don't know exactly what changed in the underlying code, but you can use them basically the same way.

https://spark.apache.org/docs/2.4.5/api/python/pyspark.sql.html?highlight=registertemptable#pyspark.sql.DataFrame.registerTempTable

registerTempTable(name)[source]

Registers this DataFrame as a temporary table using the given name.

The lifetime of this temporary table is tied to the SparkSession that was used to create this DataFrame.

>>> df.registerTempTable("people")
>>> df2 = spark.sql("select * from people")
>>> sorted(df.collect()) == sorted(df2.collect())
True
>>> spark.catalog.dropTempView("people")

Note

Deprecated in 2.0, use createOrReplaceTempView instead.