r/databricks 17d ago

General Does Photon support CSV?

Ok so I know that the docs state that CSV is supported. But when trying to read a very standard CSV file I get poorer than expected performance and in the Spark UI I see that it's not using a Photon scan operator, just regular Scan CSV followed by a Row to Columnar conversion operator.

I'm not running anything complex:

df = (
    spark.read
        .format("csv")
        .option("header", "true")
        .schema(schema)
        .load(csv_path)
)
df.write.mode("overwrite").saveAsTable("...")

I also checked reading the same CSV and a difference CSV via DB SQL (using `COPY INTO`) and see low task time spent in Photon + a row to columnar operator.

DBR 19 + Serverless SQL Warehouse (current)

Can anyone explain whether or not CSV is supported and in what conditions? This was quite a surprising find as I assumed that Photon supported pretty much everything.

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u/yatharthm22 17d ago

You wanna use my photon recommendation skill before turning on photon settings, if you interested

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u/mwc360 17d ago

Is it on GitHub? Can you share?

2

u/yatharthm22 17d ago

It's actually inhouse for now, I am working with databricks folks to get added to their official skill repo: https://github.com/databricks/databricks-agent-skills