How to create an empty DataFrame? Why “ValueError: RDD is empty”?

extending Joe Widen’s answer, you can actually create the schema with no fields like so:

schema = StructType([])

so when you create the DataFrame using that as your schema, you’ll end up with a DataFrame[].

>>> empty = sqlContext.createDataFrame(sc.emptyRDD(), schema)
DataFrame[]
>>> empty.schema
StructType(List())

In Scala, if you choose to use sqlContext.emptyDataFrame and check out the schema, it will return StructType().

scala> val empty = sqlContext.emptyDataFrame
empty: org.apache.spark.sql.DataFrame = []

scala> empty.schema
res2: org.apache.spark.sql.types.StructType = StructType()