Auto Loader options

  • Article

Configuration options specific to the cloudFiles source are prefixed with cloudFiles so that they are in a separate namespace from other Structured Streaming source options.

Common Auto Loader options

You can configure the following options for directory listing or file notification mode.

Option
cloudFiles.allowOverwrites

Type: Boolean

Whether to allow input directory file changes to overwrite existing data.

There are a few caveats regarding enabling this config. Please refer to Does Auto Loader process the file again when the file gets appended or overwritten? for details.

Default value: false
cloudFiles.backfillInterval

Type: Interval String

Auto Loader can trigger asynchronous backfills at a given interval,
e.g. 1 day to backfill once a day, or 1 week to backfill once a week. File event notification systems do not guarantee 100% delivery of all files that have been uploaded therefore you can use backfills to guarantee that all files eventually get processed, available in Databricks Runtime 8.4 (EoS) and above.

Default value: None
cloudFiles.format

Type: String

The data file format in the source path. Allowed values include:

* avro: Avro file
* binaryFile: Binary file
* csv: Read CSV files
* json: JSON file
* orc: ORC file
* parquet: Read Parquet files using Azure Databricks
* text: Text file

Default value: None (required option)
cloudFiles.includeExistingFiles

Type: Boolean

Whether to include existing files in the stream processing input path or to only process new files arriving after initial setup. This option is evaluated only when you start a stream for the first time. Changing this option after restarting the stream has no effect.

Default value: true
cloudFiles.inferColumnTypes

Type: Boolean

Whether to infer exact column types when leveraging schema inference. By default, columns are inferred as strings when inferring JSON and CSV datasets. See schema inference for more details.

Default value: false
cloudFiles.maxBytesPerTrigger

Type: Byte String

The maximum number of new bytes to be processed in every trigger. You can specify a byte string such as 10g to limit each microbatch to 10 GB of data. This is a soft maximum. If you have files that are 3 GB each, Azure Databricks processes 12 GB in a microbatch. When used together with cloudFiles.maxFilesPerTrigger, Azure Databricks consumes up to the lower limit of cloudFiles.maxFilesPerTrigger or cloudFiles.maxBytesPerTrigger, whichever is reached first. This option has no effect when used with Trigger.Once() (Trigger.Once() is deprecated).

Default value: None
cloudFiles.maxFileAge

Type: Interval String

How long a file event is tracked for deduplication purposes. Databricks does not recommend tuning this parameter unless you are ingesting data at the order of millions of files an hour. See the section on Event retention for more details.

Tuning cloudFiles.maxFileAge too aggressively can cause data quality issues such as duplicate ingestion or missing files. Therefore, Databricks recommends a conservative setting for cloudFiles.maxFileAge, such as 90 days, which is similar to what comparable data ingestion solutions recommend.

Default value: None
cloudFiles.maxFilesPerTrigger

Type: Integer

The maximum number of new files to be processed in every trigger. When used together with cloudFiles.maxBytesPerTrigger, Azure Databricks consumes up to the lower limit of cloudFiles.maxFilesPerTrigger or cloudFiles.maxBytesPerTrigger, whichever is reached first. This option has no effect when used with Trigger.Once() (deprecated).

Default value: 1000
cloudFiles.partitionColumns

Type: String

A comma separated list of Hive style partition columns that you would like inferred from the directory structure of the files. Hive style partition columns are key value pairs combined by an equality sign such as
<base-path>/a=x/b=1/c=y/file.format. In this example, the partition columns are a, b, and c. By default these columns will be automatically added to your schema if you are using schema inference and provide the <base-path> to load data from. If you provide a schema, Auto Loader expects these columns to be included in the schema. If you do not want these columns as part of your schema, you can specify "" to ignore these columns. In addition, you can use this option when you want columns to be inferred the file path in complex directory structures, like the example below:

<base-path>/year=2022/week=1/file1.csv
<base-path>/year=2022/month=2/day=3/file2.csv
<base-path>/year=2022/month=2/day=4/file3.csv

Specifying cloudFiles.partitionColumns as year,month,day will return
year=2022 for file1.csv, but the month and day columns will be null.
month and day will be parsed correctly for file2.csv and file3.csv.

Default value: None
cloudFiles.schemaEvolutionMode

Type: String

The mode for evolving the schema as new columns are discovered in the data. By default, columns are inferred as strings when inferring JSON datasets. See schema evolution for more details.

Default value: "addNewColumns" when a schema is not provided.
"none" otherwise.
cloudFiles.schemaHints

Type: String

Schema information that you provide to Auto Loader during schema inference. See schema hints for more details.

Default value: None
cloudFiles.schemaLocation

Type: String

The location to store the inferred schema and subsequent changes. See schema inference for more details.

Default value: None (required when inferring the schema)
cloudFiles.useStrictGlobber

Type: Boolean

Whether to use a strict globber that matches the default globbing behavior of other file sources in Apache Spark. See Common data loading patterns for more details. Available in Databricks Runtime 12.2 LTS and above.

Default value: false
cloudFiles.validateOptions

Type: Boolean

Whether to validate Auto Loader options and return an error for unknown or inconsistent options.

Default value: true

Directory listing options

The following options are relevant to directory listing mode.

Option
cloudFiles.useIncrementalListing (deprecated)

Type: String

This feature has been deprecated. Databricks recommends using file notification mode instead of
cloudFiles.useIncrementalListing.

Whether to use the incremental listing rather than the full listing in directory listing mode. By default, Auto Loader makes the best effort to automatically detect if a given directory is applicable for the incremental listing. You can explicitly use the incremental listing or use the full directory listing by setting it as true or false respectively.

Incorrectly enabling incremental listing on a non-lexically ordered directory prevents Auto Loader from discovering new files.

Works with Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (abfss://), S3 (s3://), and GCS (gs://).

Available in Databricks Runtime 9.1 LTS and above.

Default value: auto

Available values: auto, true, false

File notification options

The following options are relevant to file notification mode.

Option
cloudFiles.fetchParallelism

Type: Integer

Number of threads to use when fetching messages from the queueing service.

Default value: 1
cloudFiles.pathRewrites

Type: A JSON string

Required only if you specify a queueUrl that receives file notifications from multiple S3 buckets and you want to leverage mount points configured for accessing data in these containers. Use this option to rewrite the prefix of the bucket/key path with the mount point. Only prefixes can be rewritten. For example, for the configuration
{"<databricks-mounted-bucket>/path": "dbfs:/mnt/data-warehouse"}, the path
s3://<databricks-mounted-bucket>/path/2017/08/fileA.json is rewritten to dbfs:/mnt/data-warehouse/2017/08/fileA.json.

Default value: None
cloudFiles.resourceTag

Type: Map(String, String)

A series of key-value tag pairs to help associate and identify related resources, for example:

cloudFiles.option("cloudFiles.resourceTag.myFirstKey", "myFirstValue")
.option("cloudFiles.resourceTag.mySecondKey", "mySecondValue")

For more information on AWS, see Amazon SQS cost allocation tags and Configuring tags for an Amazon SNS topic. (1)

For more information on Azure, see Naming Queues and Metadata and the coverage of properties.labels in Event Subscriptions. Auto Loader stores these key-value tag pairs in JSON as labels. (1)

Default value: None
cloudFiles.useNotifications

Type: Boolean

Whether to use file notification mode to determine when there are new files. If false, use directory listing mode. See Compare Auto Loader file detection modes.

Default value: false

(1) Auto Loader adds the following key-value tag pairs by default on a best-effort basis:

  • vendor: Databricks
  • path: The location from where the data is loaded. Unavailable in GCP due to labeling limitations.
  • checkpointLocation: The location of the stream's checkpoint. Unavailable in GCP due to labeling limitations.
  • streamId: A globally unique identifier for the stream.

These key names are reserved and you cannot overwrite their values.

File format options

With Auto Loader you can ingest JSON, CSV, PARQUET, AVRO, TEXT, BINARYFILE, and ORC files.

Generic options

The following options apply to all file formats.

Option
ignoreCorruptFiles

Type: Boolean

Whether to ignore corrupt files. If true, the Spark jobs will continue to run when encountering corrupted files and the contents that have been read will still be returned. Observable as numSkippedCorruptFiles in the
operationMetrics column of the Delta Lake history. Available in Databricks Runtime 11.3 LTS and above.

Default value: false
ignoreMissingFiles

Type: Boolean

Whether to ignore missing files. If true, the Spark jobs will continue to run when encountering missing files and the contents that have been read will still be returned. Available in Databricks Runtime 11.3 LTS and above.

Default value: false (true for COPY INTO)
modifiedAfter

Type: Timestamp String, for example, 2021-01-01 00:00:00.000000 UTC+0

An optional timestamp to ingest files that have a modification timestamp after the provided timestamp.

Default value: None
modifiedBefore

Type: Timestamp String, for example, 2021-01-01 00:00:00.000000 UTC+0

An optional timestamp to ingest files that have a modification timestamp before the provided timestamp.

Default value: None
pathGlobFilter or fileNamePattern

Type: String

A potential glob pattern to provide for choosing files. Equivalent to
PATTERN in COPY INTO. fileNamePattern can be used in read_files.

Default value: None
recursiveFileLookup

Type: Boolean

Whether to skip partition inference during schema inference. This does not affect which files are loaded.

Default value: false

JSON options

Option
allowBackslashEscapingAnyCharacter

Type: Boolean

Whether to allow backslashes to escape any character that succeeds it. If not enabled, only characters that are explicitly listed by the JSON specification can be escaped.

Default value: false
allowComments

Type: Boolean

Whether to allow the use of Java, C, and C++ style comments ('/', '*', and '//' varieties) within parsed content or not.

Default value: false
allowNonNumericNumbers

Type: Boolean

Whether to allow the set of not-a-number (NaN) tokens as legal floating number values.

Default value: true
allowNumericLeadingZeros

Type: Boolean

Whether to allow integral numbers to start with additional (ignorable) zeroes (for example, 000001).

Default value: false
allowSingleQuotes

Type: Boolean

Whether to allow use of single quotes (apostrophe, character '\') for quoting strings (names and String values).

Default value: true
allowUnquotedControlChars

Type: Boolean

Whether to allow JSON strings to contain unescaped control characters (ASCII characters with value less than 32, including tab and line feed characters) or not.

Default value: false
allowUnquotedFieldNames

Type: Boolean

Whether to allow use of unquoted field names (which are allowed by JavaScript, but not by the JSON specification).

Default value: false
badRecordsPath

Type: String

The path to store files for recording the information about bad JSON records.

Default value: None
columnNameOfCorruptRecord

Type: String

The column for storing records that are malformed and cannot be parsed. If the mode for parsing is set as DROPMALFORMED, this column will be empty.

Default value: _corrupt_record
dateFormat

Type: String

The format for parsing date strings.

Default value: yyyy-MM-dd
dropFieldIfAllNull

Type: Boolean

Whether to ignore columns of all null values or empty arrays and structs during schema inference.

Default value: false
encoding or charset

Type: String

The name of the encoding of the JSON files. See java.nio.charset.Charset for list of options. You cannot use UTF-16 and UTF-32 when multiline is true.

Default value: UTF-8
inferTimestamp

Type: Boolean

Whether to try and infer timestamp strings as a TimestampType. When set to
true, schema inference might take noticeably longer. You must enable cloudFiles.inferColumnTypes to use with Auto Loader.

Default value: false
lineSep

Type: String

A string between two consecutive JSON records.

Default value: None, which covers \r, \r\n, and \n
locale

Type: String

A java.util.Locale identifier. Influences default date, timestamp, and decimal parsing within the JSON.

Default value: US
mode

Type: String

Parser mode around handling malformed records. One of 'PERMISSIVE',
'DROPMALFORMED', or 'FAILFAST'.

Default value: PERMISSIVE
multiLine

Type: Boolean

Whether the JSON records span multiple lines.

Default value: false
prefersDecimal

Type: Boolean

Attempts to infer strings as DecimalType instead of float or double type when possible. You must also use schema inference, either by enabling
inferSchema or using cloudFiles.inferColumnTypes with Auto Loader.

Default value: false
primitivesAsString

Type: Boolean

Whether to infer primitive types like numbers and booleans as StringType.

Default value: false
readerCaseSensitive

Type: Boolean

Specifies the case sensitivity behavior when rescuedDataColumn is enabled. If true, rescue the data columns whose names differ by case from the schema; otherwise, read the data in a case-insensitive manner. Available in Databricks Runtime
13.3 and above.

Default value: true
rescuedDataColumn

Type: String

Whether to collect all data that can't be parsed due to a data type mismatch or schema mismatch (including column casing) to a separate column. This column is included by default when using Auto Loader. For more details, refer to What is the rescued data column?.

Default value: None
singleVariantColumn

Type: String

Whether to ingest the entire JSON document, parsed into a single Variant column with the given string as the column's name. If disabled, the JSON fields will be ingested into their own columns.

Default value: None
timestampFormat

Type: String

The format for parsing timestamp strings.

Default value: yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss[.SSS][XXX]
timeZone

Type: String

The java.time.ZoneId to use when parsing timestamps and dates.

Default value: None

CSV options

Option
badRecordsPath

Type: String

The path to store files for recording the information about bad CSV records.

Default value: None
charToEscapeQuoteEscaping

Type: Char

The character used to escape the character used for escaping quotes. For example, for the following record: [ " a\\", b ]:

* If the character to escape the '\' is undefined, the record won't be parsed. The parser will read characters: [a],[\],["],[,],[ ],[b] and throw an error because it cannot find a closing quote.
* If the character to escape the '\' is defined as '\', the record will be read with 2 values: [a\] and [b].

Default value: '\0'
columnNameOfCorruptRecord

> [!NOTE] > > Supported for Auto Loader. Not supported for COPY INTO.

Type: String

The column for storing records that are malformed and cannot be parsed. If the mode for parsing is set as DROPMALFORMED, this column will be empty.

Default value: _corrupt_record
comment

Type: Char

Defines the character that represents a line comment when found in the beginning of a line of text. Use '\0' to disable comment skipping.

Default value: '\u0000'
dateFormat

Type: String

The format for parsing date strings.

Default value: yyyy-MM-dd
emptyValue

Type: String

String representation of an empty value.

Default value: ""
encoding or charset

Type: String

The name of the encoding of the CSV files. See java.nio.charset.Charset for the list of options. UTF-16 and UTF-32 cannot be used when multiline is true.

Default value: UTF-8
enforceSchema

Type: Boolean

Whether to forcibly apply the specified or inferred schema to the CSV files. If the option is enabled, headers of CSV files are ignored. This option is ignored by default when using Auto Loader to rescue data and allow schema evolution.

Default value: true
escape

Type: Char

The escape character to use when parsing the data.

Default value: '\'
header

Type: Boolean

Whether the CSV files contain a header. Auto Loader assumes that files have headers when inferring the schema.

Default value: false
ignoreLeadingWhiteSpace

Type: Boolean

Whether to ignore leading whitespaces for each parsed value.

Default value: false
ignoreTrailingWhiteSpace

Type: Boolean

Whether to ignore trailing whitespaces for each parsed value.

Default value: false
inferSchema

Type: Boolean

Whether to infer the data types of the parsed CSV records or to assume all columns are of StringType. Requires an additional pass over the data if set to true. For Auto Loader, use cloudFiles.inferColumnTypes instead.

Default value: false
lineSep

Type: String

A string between two consecutive CSV records.

Default value: None, which covers \r, \r\n, and \n
locale

Type: String

A java.util.Locale identifier. Influences default date, timestamp, and decimal parsing within the CSV.

Default value: US
maxCharsPerColumn

Type: Int

Maximum number of characters expected from a value to parse. Can be used to avoid memory errors. Defaults to -1, which means unlimited.

Default value: -1
maxColumns

Type: Int

The hard limit of how many columns a record can have.

Default value: 20480
mergeSchema

Type: Boolean

Whether to infer the schema across multiple files and to merge the schema of each file. Enabled by default for Auto Loader when inferring the schema.

Default value: false
mode

Type: String

Parser mode around handling malformed records. One of 'PERMISSIVE',
'DROPMALFORMED', and 'FAILFAST'.

Default value: PERMISSIVE
multiLine

Type: Boolean

Whether the CSV records span multiple lines.

Default value: false
nanValue

Type: String

The string representation of a non-a-number value when parsing FloatType and DoubleType columns.

Default value: "NaN"
negativeInf

Type: String

The string representation of negative infinity when parsing FloatType or DoubleType columns.

Default value: "-Inf"
nullValue

Type: String

String representation of a null value.

Default value: ""
parserCaseSensitive (deprecated)

Type: Boolean

While reading files, whether to align columns declared in the header with the schema case sensitively. This is true by default for Auto Loader. Columns that differ by case will be rescued in the rescuedDataColumn if enabled. This option has been deprecated in favor of readerCaseSensitive.

Default value: false
positiveInf

Type: String

The string representation of positive infinity when parsing FloatType or DoubleType columns.

Default value: "Inf"
preferDate

Type: Boolean

Attempts to infer strings as dates instead of timestamp when possible. You must also use schema inference, either by enabling inferSchema or using
cloudFiles.inferColumnTypes with Auto Loader.

Default value: true
quote

Type: Char

The character used for escaping values where the field delimiter is part of the value.

Default value: "
readerCaseSensitive

Type: Boolean

Specifies the case sensitivity behavior when rescuedDataColumn is enabled. If true, rescue the data columns whose names differ by case from the schema; otherwise, read the data in a case-insensitive manner.

Default value: true
rescuedDataColumn

Type: String

Whether to collect all data that can't be parsed due to: a data type mismatch, and schema mismatch (including column casing) to a separate column. This column is included by default when using Auto Loader. For more details refer to What is the rescued data column?.

Default value: None
sep or delimiter

Type: String

The separator string between columns.

Default value: ","
skipRows

Type: Int

The number of rows from the beginning of the CSV file that should be ignored (including commented and empty rows). If header is true, the header will be the first unskipped and uncommented row.

Default value: 0
timestampFormat

Type: String

The format for parsing timestamp strings.

Default value: yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss[.SSS][XXX]
timeZone

Type: String

The java.time.ZoneId to use when parsing timestamps and dates.

Default value: None
unescapedQuoteHandling

Type: String

The strategy for handling unescaped quotes. Allowed options:

* STOP_AT_CLOSING_QUOTE: If unescaped quotes are found in the input, accumulate the quote character and proceed parsing the value as a quoted value, until a closing quote is found.
* BACK_TO_DELIMITER: If unescaped quotes are found in the input, consider the value as an unquoted value. This will make the parser accumulate all characters of the current parsed value until the delimiter defined by sep is found. If no delimiter is found in the value, the parser will continue accumulating characters from the input until a delimiter or line ending is found.
* STOP_AT_DELIMITER: If unescaped quotes are found in the input, consider the value as an unquoted value. This will make the parser accumulate all characters until the delimiter defined by sep, or a line ending is found in the input.
* SKIP_VALUE: If unescaped quotes are found in the input, the content parsed for the given value will be skipped (until the next delimiter is found) and the value set in nullValue will be produced instead.
* RAISE_ERROR: If unescaped quotes are found in the input, a
TextParsingException will be thrown.

Default value: STOP_AT_DELIMITER

XML options

Option Description Scope
rowTag The row tag of the XML files to treat as a row. In the example XML <books> <book><book>...<books>, the appropriate value is book. This is a required option. read
samplingRatio Defines a fraction of rows used for schema inference. XML built-in functions ignore this option. Default: 1.0. read
excludeAttribute Whether to exclude attributes in elements. Default: false. read
mode Mode for dealing with corrupt records during parsing.

PERMISSIVE: For corrupted records, puts the malformed string into a field configured by columnNameOfCorruptRecord, and sets malformed fields to null. To keep corrupt records, you can set a string type field named columnNameOfCorruptRecord in a user-defined schema. If a schema does not have the field, corrupt records are dropped during parsing. When inferring a schema, the parser implicitly adds a columnNameOfCorruptRecord field in an output schema.

DROPMALFORMED: Ignores corrupted records. This mode is unsupported for XML built-in functions.

FAILFAST: Throws an exception when the parser meets corrupted records.		 read
inferSchema If true, attempts to infer an appropriate type for each resulting DataFrame column. If false, all resulting columns are of string type. Default:
true. XML built-in functions ignore this option.		 read
columnNameOfCorruptRecord Allows renaming the new field that contains a malformed string created by
PERMISSIVE mode. Default: spark.sql.columnNameOfCorruptRecord.		 read
attributePrefix The prefix for attributes to differentiate attributes from elements. This will be the prefix for field names. Default is _. Can be empty for reading XML, but not for writing. read, write
valueTag The tag used for the character data within elements that also have attribute(s) or child element(s) elements. User can specify the valueTag field in the schema or it will be added automatically during schema inference when character data is present in elements with other elements or attributes. Default: _VALUE read,write
encoding For reading, decodes the XML files by the given encoding type. For writing, specifies encoding (charset) of saved XML files. XML built-in functions ignore this option. Default: UTF-8. read, write
ignoreSurroundingSpaces Defines whether surrounding white spaces from values being read should be skipped. Default: true. Whitespace-only character data are ignored. read
rowValidationXSDPath Path to an optional XSD file that is used to validate the XML for each row individually. Rows that fail to validate are treated like parse errors as above. The XSD does not otherwise affect the schema provided, or inferred. read
ignoreNamespace If true, namespaces' prefixes on XML elements and attributes are ignored. Tags <abc:author> and <def:author>, for example, are treated as if both are just <author>. Namespaces cannot be ignored on the rowTag element, only its read children. XML parsing is not namespace-aware even if false. Default: false. read
timestampFormat Custom timestamp format string that follows the datetime pattern format. This applies to timestamp type. Default: yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss[.SSS][XXX]. read, write
timestampNTZFormat Custom format string for timestamp without timezone that follows the datetime pattern format. This applies to TimestampNTZType type. Default:
yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss[.SSS]		 read, write
dateFormat Custom date format string that follows the datetime pattern format. This applies to date type. Default: yyyy-MM-dd. read, write
locale Sets a locale as a language tag in IETF BCP 47 format. For instance, locale is used while parsing dates and timestamps. Default: en-US. read
rootTag Root tag of the XML files. For example, in <books> <book><book>...</books>, the appropriate value is books. You can include basic attributes by specifying a value like books foo="bar". Default: ROWS. write
declaration Content of XML declaration to write at the start of every output XML file, before the rootTag. For example, a value of foo causes <?xml foo?> to be written. Set to an empty string to suppress. Default: version="1.0"
encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes".		 write
arrayElementName Name of XML element that encloses each element of an array-valued column when writing. Default: item. write
nullValue Sets the string representation of a null value. Default: string null. When this is null, the parser does not write attributes and elements for fields. read, write
compression Compression code to use when saving to file. This can be one of the known case-insensitive shortened names (none, bzip2, gzip,lz4, snappy, and
deflate). XML built-in functions ignore this option. Default: none.		 write
validateName If true, throws an error on XML element name validation failure. For example, SQL field names can have spaces, but XML element names cannot. Default:
true.		 write
readerCaseSensitive Specifies the case sensitivity behavior when rescuedDataColumn is enabled. If true, rescue the data columns whose names differ by case from the schema; otherwise, read the data in a case-insensitive manner. Default: true. read
rescuedDataColumn Whether to collect all data that can't be parsed due to a data type mismatch and schema mismatch (including column casing) to a separate column. This column is included by default when using Auto Loader. For more details, see What is the rescued data column?. Default: None. read

PARQUET options

Option
datetimeRebaseMode

Type: String

Controls the rebasing of the DATE and TIMESTAMP values between Julian and Proleptic Gregorian calendars. Allowed values: EXCEPTION, LEGACY, and
CORRECTED.

Default value: LEGACY
int96RebaseMode

Type: String

Controls the rebasing of the INT96 timestamp values between Julian and Proleptic Gregorian calendars. Allowed values: EXCEPTION, LEGACY, and
CORRECTED.

Default value: LEGACY
mergeSchema

Type: Boolean

Whether to infer the schema across multiple files and to merge the schema of each file.

Default value: false
readerCaseSensitive

Type: Boolean

Specifies the case sensitivity behavior when rescuedDataColumn is enabled. If true, rescue the data columns whose names differ by case from the schema; otherwise, read the data in a case-insensitive manner.

Default value: true
rescuedDataColumn

Type: String

Whether to collect all data that can't be parsed due to: a data type mismatch, and schema mismatch (including column casing) to a separate column. This column is included by default when using Auto Loader. For more details refer to What is the rescued data column?.

Default value: None

AVRO options

Option
avroSchema

Type: String

Optional schema provided by a user in Avro format. When reading Avro, this option can be set to an evolved schema, which is compatible but different with the actual Avro schema. The deserialization schema will be consistent with the evolved schema. For example, if you set an evolved schema containing one additional column with a default value, the read result will contain the new column too.

Default value: None
datetimeRebaseMode

Type: String

Controls the rebasing of the DATE and TIMESTAMP values between Julian and Proleptic Gregorian calendars. Allowed values: EXCEPTION, LEGACY, and
CORRECTED.

Default value: LEGACY
mergeSchema

Type: Boolean

Whether to infer the schema across multiple files and to merge the schema of each file.
mergeSchema for Avro does not relax data types.

Default value: false
readerCaseSensitive

Type: Boolean

Specifies the case sensitivity behavior when rescuedDataColumn is enabled. If true, rescue the data columns whose names differ by case from the schema; otherwise, read the data in a case-insensitive manner.

Default value: true
rescuedDataColumn

Type: String

Whether to collect all data that can't be parsed due to: a data type mismatch, and schema mismatch (including column casing) to a separate column. This column is included by default when using Auto Loader. For more details refer to What is the rescued data column?.

Default value: None

BINARYFILE options

Binary files do not have any additional configuration options.

TEXT options

Option
encoding

Type: String

The name of the encoding of the TEXT files. See java.nio.charset.Charset for list of options.

Default value: UTF-8
lineSep

Type: String

A string between two consecutive TEXT records.

Default value: None, which covers \r, \r\n and \n
wholeText

Type: Boolean

Whether to read a file as a single record.

Default value: false

ORC options

Option
mergeSchema

Type: Boolean

Whether to infer the schema across multiple files and to merge the schema of each file.

Default value: false

Cloud specific options

Auto Loader provides a number of options for configuring cloud infrastructure.

AWS specific options

Provide the following option only if you choose cloudFiles.useNotifications = true and you want Auto Loader to set up the notification services for you:

Option
cloudFiles.region

Type: String

The region where the source S3 bucket resides and where the AWS SNS and SQS services will be created.

Default value: The region of the EC2 instance.

Provide the following option only if you choose cloudFiles.useNotifications = true and you want Auto Loader to use a queue that you have already set up:

Option
cloudFiles.queueUrl

Type: String

The URL of the SQS queue. If provided, Auto Loader directly consumes events from this queue instead of setting up its own AWS SNS and SQS services.

Default value: None

You can use the following options to provide credentials to access AWS SNS and SQS when IAM roles are not available or when you're ingesting data from different clouds.

Option
cloudFiles.awsAccessKey

Type: String

The AWS access key ID for the user. Must be provided with
cloudFiles.awsSecretKey.

Default value: None
cloudFiles.awsSecretKey

Type: String

The AWS secret access key for the user. Must be provided with
cloudFiles.awsAccessKey.

Default value: None
cloudFiles.roleArn

Type: String

The ARN of an IAM role to assume. The role can be assumed from your cluster's instance profile or by providing credentials with
cloudFiles.awsAccessKey and cloudFiles.awsSecretKey.

Default value: None
cloudFiles.roleExternalId

Type: String

An identifier to provide while assuming a role using cloudFiles.roleArn.

Default value: None
cloudFiles.roleSessionName

Type: String

An optional session name to use while assuming a role using
cloudFiles.roleArn.

Default value: None
cloudFiles.stsEndpoint

Type: String

An optional endpoint to provide for accessing AWS STS when assuming a role using cloudFiles.roleArn.

Default value: None

Azure specific options

You must provide values for all of the following options if you specify cloudFiles.useNotifications = true and you want Auto Loader to set up the notification services for you:

Option
cloudFiles.clientId

Type: String

The client ID or application ID of the service principal.

Default value: None
cloudFiles.clientSecret

Type: String

The client secret of the service principal.

Default value: None
cloudFiles.connectionString

Type: String

The connection string for the storage account, based on either account access key or shared access signature (SAS).

Default value: None
cloudFiles.resourceGroup

Type: String

The Azure Resource Group under which the storage account is created.

Default value: None
cloudFiles.subscriptionId

Type: String

The Azure Subscription ID under which the resource group is created.

Default value: None
cloudFiles.tenantId

Type: String

The Azure Tenant ID under which the service principal is created.

Default value: None

Important

Automated notification setup is available in Azure operated by 21Vianet and Government regions with Databricks Runtime 9.1 and later. You must provide a queueName to use Auto Loader with file notifications in these regions for older DBR versions.

Provide the following option only if you choose cloudFiles.useNotifications = true and you want Auto Loader to use a queue that you have already set up:

Option
cloudFiles.queueName

Type: String

The name of the Azure queue. If provided, the cloud files source directly consumes events from this queue instead of setting up its own Azure Event Grid and Queue Storage services. In that case, your cloudFiles.connectionString requires only read permissions on the queue.

Default value: None