[jira] [Comment Edited] (SPARK-38388) Repartition + Stage retries could lead to incorrect data

["Bo Xiong (Jira)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-38388?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=18095065#comment-18095065 ] 

Bo Xiong edited comment on SPARK-38388 at 7/9/26 6:08 PM:
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On Spark 3.5, it's still observed that this causes silent data drops in production — no errors, no alerts, jobs succeed normally.

{*}The problem{*}: `repartition(n)` without a deterministic key and rand() used as a salting mechanism both produce non-deterministic data. When Spark retries a stage (executor loss, memory pressure), it regenerates different data — silently corrupting output.

Given that the bug is unpatched (open since 2022), we had to build some workarounds.
   • Any `repartition(n)` without a partition key column → replace with repartition(n, col("immutable_key"))
   • Any rand() or uuid() upstream of a shuffle → replace with deterministic salt (e.g., hash(immutable_key) % N)


was (Author: JIRAUSER302302):
On Spark 3.5, it's still observed that this causes silent data drops in production — no errors, no alerts, jobs succeed normally.

{*}The problem{*}: repartition(n) without a deterministic key and rand() used as a salting mechanism both produce non-deterministic data. When Spark retries a stage (executor loss, memory pressure), it regenerates different data — silently corrupting output.

Given that the bug is unpatched (open since 2022), we had to build some workarounds.
   • Any repartition(n) without a partition key column → replace with repartition(n, col("immutable_key"))
   • Any rand() or uuid() upstream of a shuffle → replace with deterministic salt (e.g., hash(immutable_key) % N)

> Repartition + Stage retries could lead to incorrect data 
> ---------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: SPARK-38388
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-38388
>             Project: Spark
>          Issue Type: Bug
>          Components: SQL
>    Affects Versions: 2.4.0, 3.1.1
>         Environment: Spark 2.4 and 3.x
>            Reporter: Jason Xu
>            Priority: Major
>              Labels: correctness, data-loss
>
> Spark repartition uses RoundRobinPartitioning, the generated results is non-deterministic when data has some randomness and stage/task retries happen.
> The bug can be triggered when upstream data has some randomness, a repartition is called on them, then followed by result stage (could be more stages).
> As the pattern shows below:
> upstream stage (data with randomness) -> (repartition shuffle) -> result stage
> When one executor goes down at result stage, some tasks of that stage might have finished, others would fail, shuffle files on that executor also get lost, some tasks from previous stage (upstream data generation, repartition) will need to rerun to generate dependent shuffle data files.
> Because data has some randomness, regenerated data in upstream retried tasks is slightly different, repartition then generates inconsistent ordering, then tasks at result stage will be retried generating different data.
> This is similar but different to https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-23207, fix for it uses extra local sort to make the row ordering deterministic, the sorting algorithm it uses simply compares row/record hash. But in this case, upstream data has some randomness, the sorting algorithm doesn't help keep the order, thus RoundRobinPartitioning introduced non-deterministic result.
> The following code returns 986415, instead of 1000000:
> {code:java}
> import scala.sys.process._
> import org.apache.spark.TaskContext
> case class TestObject(id: Long, value: Double)
> val ds = spark.range(0, 1000 * 1000, 1).repartition(100, $"id").withColumn("val", rand()).repartition(100).map { 
>   row => if (TaskContext.get.stageAttemptNumber == 0 && TaskContext.get.attemptNumber == 0 && TaskContext.get.partitionId > 97) {
>     throw new Exception("pkill -f java".!!)
>   }
>   TestObject(row.getLong(0), row.getDouble(1))
> }
> ds.toDF("id", "value").write.mode("overwrite").saveAsTable("tmp.test_table")
> spark.sql("select count(distinct id) from tmp.test_table").show{code}
> Command: 
> {code:java}
> spark-shell --num-executors 10 (--conf spark.dynamicAllocation.enabled=false --conf spark.shuffle.service.enabled=false){code}
> To simulate the issue, disable external shuffle service is needed (if it's also enabled by default in your environment),  this is to trigger shuffle file loss and previous stage retries.
> In our production, we have external shuffle service enabled, this data correctness issue happened when there were node losses.
> Although there's some non-deterministic factor in upstream data, user wouldn't expect  to see incorrect result.



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