wr.s3.to_parquet() incorrectly identifies empty columns

[coldenol]

Describe the bug

When I try to write a dataframe using wr.s3.to_parquet() method it often throws the following error on some columns:

UndetectedType Impossible to infer the equivalent Athena data type for the billingaddress column. It is completely empty (only null values) and has a too generic data type (object). Please, cast this columns with a more deterministic data type (e.g. df['billingaddress'] = df['billingaddress'].astype('string')) or pass the column schema as argument(e.g. dtype={'billingaddress': 'string'}

How to Reproduce

First I tried to make a pre-validation before passing the dataframe to the method but it helped partially:

dtype = {}
  for column in data.columns:
      if data[column].isnull().all():
          dtype[column] = "string"
data = data.astype(dtype)

I then discovered that the dataframe column that the method defined as “completely empty” contains a few values, say 3 values per 500 dataframe records.

It seems that the method only analyzes a limited sample of rows to determine a completely empty column and if there are only a few rows with values in the column, then there is a high probability that the column will be treated as completely empty.

The following code is what I did as a working workaround, but with the downside that the data type is rigidly equated to a string.

def _validate_dtypes(self, data: pd.DataFrame) -> pd.DataFrame:
    # awswrangler can not infer the data type from an entire (or mostly) null
    # column, thus we need to manually set the data type for such columns

    dtype = {}

    for column in data.columns:
        non_null_count = data[column].notnull().sum()
        total_count = len(data[column])

        if non_null_count == 0:
            dtype[column] = "string"
        # awswrangler defines a column that has only a few values also as empty
        # this is "less than 10% non-null values" workaround
        elif (non_null_count / total_count < 0.1):
            dtype[column] = "string"

    data = data.astype(dtype)

    return data

I would appreciate a solving this problem.
Thank you for the great tool!

Expected behavior

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Your project

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Screenshots

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OS

Linux

Python version

3.9

AWS SDK for pandas version

awswrangler-3.9.1-py3-none-any.whl

Additional context

No response

[Tian-2017]

Hey Denis, sounds like a plan. I encountered a similar problem and was wondering if this logic could be incorporated into the _df_to_table function here.

However, it might not be necessary to define dtype = {}. Instead, it could only handle cases where the type is 'object' to improve efficiency.

for column in df.select_dtypes(include=['object']).columns:
    # Check if less than 10% of the column values are non-null, treat it as empty
    non_null_ratio = df[column].notnull().sum() / len(df)
    if non_null_ratio < 0.1:
        df[column] = df[column].astype('string')  # Default to 'string' if mostly null
    elif df[column].notnull().sum() == 0:
        df[column] = df[column].astype('string')  # Default to 'string' if all values are null