Have you tried Caching the tables (subset) before executing the queries? Keep in mind, when doing caching on a DataFrame it is Lazy caching which means it will only cache what rows are used in the next processing event. So if you do a query on that DataFrame and only scan 100 rows, those will only be cached, not the entire table. If you do CACHE TABLE MyTableName in SQL though, it is defaulted to be eager caching and will cache the entire table. You can choose LAZY caching in SQL like so: CACHE LAZY TABLE Sales_Data_1998 ... View more