What is the difference between sort and orderBy functions in Spark

OrderBy is just an alias for the sort function.

From the Spark documentation:

  /**
   * Returns a new Dataset sorted by the given expressions.
   * This is an alias of the `sort` function.
   *
   * @group typedrel
   * @since 2.0.0
   */
  @scala.annotation.varargs
  def orderBy(sortCol: String, sortCols: String*): Dataset[T] = sort(sortCol, sortCols : _*)