Hi, I've tried searching the archives and haven't found anything relevant - but apologies if this has been discussed before.
I was wondering how viable it would be to alter the behavior of Spark to allow: "String1" + "String2" = "String1String2" Currently it tries to cast both Strings to double and subsequently returns null. Just having a quick look at the code and there are already precedents for this in org.apache.spark.sql.catalyst.expressions.{BinaryArithmetic, Add} in that it handles Dates and Decimals differently from numeric. Extending that to handle Strings seems straightforward, but I am obviously not an expert on the Spark code base. thanks, Mark Le Noury