How to export data from Spark SQL to CSV

Since Spark 2.X spark-csv is integrated as native datasource. Therefore, the necessary statement simplifies to (windows)

df.write
  .option("header", "true")
  .csv("file:///C:/out.csv")

or UNIX

df.write
  .option("header", "true")
  .csv("/var/out.csv")

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Notice: as the comments say, it is creating the directory by that name with the partitions in it, not a standard CSV file. This, however, is most likely what you want since otherwise your either crashing your driver (out of RAM) or you could be working with a non distributed environment.

You can use below statement to write the contents of dataframe in CSV format df.write.csv("/data/home/csv")

If you need to write the whole dataframe into a single CSV file, then use df.coalesce(1).write.csv("/data/home/sample.csv")

For spark 1.x, you can use spark-csv to write the results into CSV files

Below scala snippet would help

import org.apache.spark.sql.hive.HiveContext
// sc - existing spark context
val sqlContext = new HiveContext(sc)
val df = sqlContext.sql("SELECT * FROM testtable")
df.write.format("com.databricks.spark.csv").save("/data/home/csv")

To write the contents into a single file

import org.apache.spark.sql.hive.HiveContext
// sc - existing spark context
val sqlContext = new HiveContext(sc)
val df = sqlContext.sql("SELECT * FROM testtable")
df.coalesce(1).write.format("com.databricks.spark.csv").save("/data/home/sample.csv")

The answer above with spark-csv is correct but there is an issue - the library creates several files based on the data frame partitioning. And this is not what we usually need. So, you can combine all partitions to one:

df.coalesce(1).
    write.
    format("com.databricks.spark.csv").
    option("header", "true").
    save("myfile.csv")

and rename the output of the lib (name "part-00000") to a desire filename.

This blog post provides more details: https://fullstackml.com/2015/12/21/how-to-export-data-frame-from-apache-spark/