Apache Spark startsWith in SQL expression

With regexp_replace, you can get the same results without UDFs. Check this out

scala> val df=Seq(("bPREFIX",1),("PREFIXb",2)).toDF("a","b")
df: org.apache.spark.sql.DataFrame = [a: string, b: int]

scala> df.show
+-------+---+
|      a|  b|
+-------+---+
|bPREFIX|  1|
|PREFIXb|  2|
+-------+---+


scala> df.filter(regexp_replace('a,"""^PREFIX.*""","")==="").show
+-------+---+
|      a|  b|
+-------+---+
|PREFIXb|  2|
+-------+---+


scala>

or using regexp_extract()

scala> df.filter(regexp_extract('a,"""(^PREFIX)""",1)==="PREFIX").show
+-------+---+
|      a|  b|
+-------+---+
|PREFIXb|  2|
+-------+---+


scala>

Using instr() function

scala> df.filter("instr(a,'PREFIX')=1").show
+-------+---+
|      a|  b|
+-------+---+
|PREFIXb|  2|
+-------+---+


scala>

I found the following solution that works with Spark SQL query without custom UDP and out of the box, for example:

CASE WHEN instr(PRICE_SOURCE_INDICATOR,'MAC') = 1