Calculating duration by subtracting two datetime columns in string format

As of Spark 1.5 you can use unix_timestamp:

from pyspark.sql import functions as F
timeFmt = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSS"
timeDiff = (F.unix_timestamp('EndDateTime', format=timeFmt)
            - F.unix_timestamp('StartDateTime', format=timeFmt))
df = df.withColumn("Duration", timeDiff)

Note the Java style time format.

>>> df.show()
+---+--------------------+--------------------+--------+
| ID|         EndDateTime|       StartDateTime|Duration|
+---+--------------------+--------------------+--------+
|X01|2014-02-13T12:36:...|2014-02-13T12:31:...|     258|
|X02|2014-02-13T12:35:...|2014-02-13T12:32:...|     204|
|X03|2014-02-13T12:36:...|2014-02-13T12:32:...|     228|
|XO4|2014-02-13T12:37:...|2014-02-13T12:32:...|     269|
|XO5|2014-02-13T12:36:...|2014-02-13T12:33:...|     202|
+---+--------------------+--------------------+--------+