Spark SQL window function with complex condition

Spark >= 3.2

Recent Spark releases provide native support for session windows in both batch and structured streaming queries (see SPARK-10816 and its sub-tasks, especially SPARK-34893).

The official documentation provides nice usage example.

Spark < 3.2

Here is the trick. Import a bunch of functions:

import org.apache.spark.sql.expressions.Window
import org.apache.spark.sql.functions.{coalesce, datediff, lag, lit, min, sum}

Define windows:

val userWindow = Window.partitionBy("user_name").orderBy("login_date")
val userSessionWindow = Window.partitionBy("user_name", "session")

Find the points where new sessions starts:

val newSession =  (coalesce(
  datediff($"login_date", lag($"login_date", 1).over(userWindow)),
  lit(0)
) > 5).cast("bigint")

val sessionized = df.withColumn("session", sum(newSession).over(userWindow))

Find the earliest date per session:

val result = sessionized
  .withColumn("became_active", min($"login_date").over(userSessionWindow))
  .drop("session")

With dataset defined as:

val df = Seq(
  ("SirChillingtonIV", "2012-01-04"), ("Booooooo99900098", "2012-01-04"),
  ("Booooooo99900098", "2012-01-06"), ("OprahWinfreyJr", "2012-01-10"), 
  ("SirChillingtonIV", "2012-01-11"), ("SirChillingtonIV", "2012-01-14"),
  ("SirChillingtonIV", "2012-08-11")
).toDF("user_name", "login_date")

The result is:

+----------------+----------+-------------+
|       user_name|login_date|became_active|
+----------------+----------+-------------+
|  OprahWinfreyJr|2012-01-10|   2012-01-10|
|SirChillingtonIV|2012-01-04|   2012-01-04| <- The first session for user
|SirChillingtonIV|2012-01-11|   2012-01-11| <- The second session for user
|SirChillingtonIV|2012-01-14|   2012-01-11| 
|SirChillingtonIV|2012-08-11|   2012-08-11| <- The third session for user
|Booooooo99900098|2012-01-04|   2012-01-04|
|Booooooo99900098|2012-01-06|   2012-01-04|
+----------------+----------+-------------+

Refactoring the other answer to work with Pyspark

In Pyspark you can do like below.

create data frame

df = sqlContext.createDataFrame(
[
("SirChillingtonIV", "2012-01-04"), 
("Booooooo99900098", "2012-01-04"), 
("Booooooo99900098", "2012-01-06"), 
("OprahWinfreyJr", "2012-01-10"), 
("SirChillingtonIV", "2012-01-11"), 
("SirChillingtonIV", "2012-01-14"), 
("SirChillingtonIV", "2012-08-11")
], 
("user_name", "login_date"))

The above code creates a data frame like below

+----------------+----------+
|       user_name|login_date|
+----------------+----------+
|SirChillingtonIV|2012-01-04|
|Booooooo99900098|2012-01-04|
|Booooooo99900098|2012-01-06|
|  OprahWinfreyJr|2012-01-10|
|SirChillingtonIV|2012-01-11|
|SirChillingtonIV|2012-01-14|
|SirChillingtonIV|2012-08-11|
+----------------+----------+

Now we want to first find out the difference between login_date is more than 5 days.

For this do like below.

Necessary imports

from pyspark.sql import functions as f
from pyspark.sql import Window


# defining window partitions  
login_window = Window.partitionBy("user_name").orderBy("login_date")
session_window = Window.partitionBy("user_name", "session")

session_df = df.withColumn("session", f.sum((f.coalesce(f.datediff("login_date", f.lag("login_date", 1).over(login_window)), f.lit(0)) > 5).cast("int")).over(login_window))

When we run the above line of code if the date_diff is NULL then the coalesce function will replace NULL to 0.

+----------------+----------+-------+
|       user_name|login_date|session|
+----------------+----------+-------+
|  OprahWinfreyJr|2012-01-10|      0|
|SirChillingtonIV|2012-01-04|      0|
|SirChillingtonIV|2012-01-11|      1|
|SirChillingtonIV|2012-01-14|      1|
|SirChillingtonIV|2012-08-11|      2|
|Booooooo99900098|2012-01-04|      0|
|Booooooo99900098|2012-01-06|      0|
+----------------+----------+-------+


# add became_active column by finding the `min login_date` for each window partitionBy `user_name` and `session` created in above step
final_df = session_df.withColumn("became_active", f.min("login_date").over(session_window)).drop("session")

+----------------+----------+-------------+
|       user_name|login_date|became_active|
+----------------+----------+-------------+
|  OprahWinfreyJr|2012-01-10|   2012-01-10|
|SirChillingtonIV|2012-01-04|   2012-01-04|
|SirChillingtonIV|2012-01-11|   2012-01-11|
|SirChillingtonIV|2012-01-14|   2012-01-11|
|SirChillingtonIV|2012-08-11|   2012-08-11|
|Booooooo99900098|2012-01-04|   2012-01-04|
|Booooooo99900098|2012-01-06|   2012-01-04|
+----------------+----------+-------------+