I am loading a JSON file with spark in order to insert it into Hive, this works very well. Dataset<Row> testjson = spark.read().json("file:///root/test.json").withColumn("timestamp", new Column("timestamp").cast("timestamp")); My JSON look like this (I simplified it for the purpose of readability): "name": "joe", "age": 30, "hair": "brown", "knowledge": {"java": "average", "php": "good"}, and so on... As you can see this JSON has something that is by default inserted as a struct: "knowledge": {"java": "average", "php": "good"} Now to the problem: I want the knowledge part of my JSON to be inserted as map<string, string> to hive instead of as it is now: struct<java:string,php:string>). I thought I can do like this .withColumn("knowledge", new Column("knowledge").cast("Map")); //Map or Map<String, String> or equal but this is not working as struct cannot be casted to map. This has been disturbing me for a while now and I cannot find a solution to it. I would therefore appreciate help a lot! Please find the whole code: public static void main(String[] args) {<br> SparkSession spark = SparkSession .builder() .appName("Test Spark") .master("local[*]") .config("hive.metastore.uris", "thrift://localhost:9083") .enableHiveSupport() .getOrCreate(); //Here I cast timestamp in my JSON to timestamp in hive, working good Dataset<Row> testjson = spark.read().json("file:///root/test.json").withColumn("timestamp", new Column("timestamp").cast("timestamp")); testjson.createOrReplaceTempView("testjson"); Dataset<Row> showAll = spark.sql("SELECT * FROM testjson"); showAll.write().mode("overwrite").saveAsTable("finaljson"); showAll.show(); spark.stop(); } ... View more