with newer versions of spark, the sqlContext is not load by default, you have to specify it explicitly :   scala> val sqlContext = new org.apache.spark.sql.SQLContext(sc) warning: there was one deprecation warning; re-run with -deprecation for details sqlContext: org.apache.spark.sql.SQLContext = org.apache.spark.sql.SQLContext@6179af64 scala> import sqlContext.implicits._ import sqlContext.implicits._ scala> sqlContext.sql("describe mytable") res2: org.apache.spark.sql.DataFrame = [col_name: string, data_type: string ... 1 more field]  I'm working with spark 2.3.2 ... View more