Using HDP 2.5 with Spark 2 If you defind the code as follows: val spark = SparkSession .builder .appName("my app") .getOrCreate() import spark.implicits._ val test = spark.sqlContext.sql("select max (test_dt) as test_dt from abc").as[String] val test1 = spark.sqlContext.table("testing") The following two statements will compile val output2 = test1.filter(test1("audit_date").gt(test).toString()) val output2 = test1.filter(test1("audit_date").gt(test)) of course you can always convert test to String and use the variable in the filter clause. ... View more