Answer by sauraI3h for How can I change column types in Spark SQL's DataFrame?

the answers suggesting to use cast, FYI, the cast method in spark 1.4.1 is broken.

for example, a dataframe with a string column having value "8182175552014127960" when casted to bigint has value "8182175552014128100"

    df.show+-------------------+|                  a|+-------------------+|8182175552014127960|+-------------------+    df.selectExpr("cast(a as bigint) a").show+-------------------+|                  a|+-------------------+|8182175552014128100|+-------------------+

We had to face a lot of issue before finding this bug because we had bigint columns in production.