---
title: "How to write to a SQL database using JDBC in PySpark"
description: "How to use JDBC driver in PySpark to write a DataFrame to a SQL database"
author: "Bartosz Mikulski"
author_bio: "Principal AI Engineer & MLOps Architect. I bridge the gap between \"it works in a notebook\" and \"it works for 200 million users.\""
author_url: https://mikulskibartosz.name
author_linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikulskibartosz/
author_github: https://github.com/mikulskibartosz
canonical_url: https://mikulskibartosz.name/write-to-jdbc-from-pyspark
---

To write a PySpark DataFrame to a table in a SQL database using JDBC, we need a few things.

First, we have to add the JDBC driver to the driver node and the worker nodes. We can do that using the `--jars` property while submitting a new PySpark job:

```bash
spark-submit --deploy-mode cluster \
    --jars s3://some_bucket/jdbc_driver.jar \
    s3://some_bucket/pyspark_job.py
```

After that, we have to prepare the JDBC connection URL. The URL consists of three parts: the database name, the host with port, and the database (schema) name. If I want to connect to Postgres running on the local machine, the URL should look like this:

```python
url = "jdbc:postgresql://localhost/database_name"
```

In addition to that, I have to prepare a dictionary of properties, which contains the username and password used to connect to the database:

```python
properties = {
    "user": "the_username",
    "password": "the_password"
}
```

Please do not store the credentials in the code. It is better to use the AWS SecretsManager (if you run your code on EMR) or any other method of passing the credentials securely from an external source.

I have to decide how Spark should behave when there is already some data in the table. Let's assume that I want to overwrite the existing data with the DataFrame `df` content. In this case, I have to set the write mode to 'overwrite'.

The last information I need is the table name that will be populated with the DataFrame. When I have all of the required information, I can call the `write.jdbc` function:

```python
df.write.jdbc(url=url, table="the_table_name", mode='overwrite', properties=properties)
```