riutilizzare il risultato di un'espressione select nella clausola GROUP BY?

Sì, lo è . Puoi farlo funzionare in Spark SQL in 2 modi per utilizzare la nuova colonna in GROUP BY e ORDER BY clausole

Approccio 1 utilizzando la sottoquery :

SELECT timeHour, someThing FROM (SELECT  
      from_unixtime((starttime/1000)) AS timeHour
    , sum(...)                          AS someThing
    , starttime
FROM
    some_table) 
WHERE
    starttime >= 1000*unix_timestamp('2017-09-16 00:00:00')
      AND starttime <= 1000*unix_timestamp('2017-09-16 04:00:00')
GROUP BY
    timeHour
ORDER BY
    timeHour
LIMIT 10;

Approccio 2 usando WITH // elegant way :

-- create alias 
WITH table_aliase AS(SELECT  
      from_unixtime((starttime/1000)) AS timeHour
    , sum(...)                          AS someThing
    , starttime
FROM
    some_table)

-- use the same alias as table
SELECT timeHour, someThing FROM table_aliase
WHERE
    starttime >= 1000*unix_timestamp('2017-09-16 00:00:00')
      AND starttime <= 1000*unix_timestamp('2017-09-16 04:00:00')
GROUP BY
    timeHour
ORDER BY
    timeHour
LIMIT 10;

Alternativa utilizzando l'API Spark DataFrame(wo SQL) con Scala :

// This code may need additional import to work well

val df = .... //load the actual table as df

import org.apache.spark.sql.functions._

df.withColumn("timeHour", from_unixtime($"starttime"/1000))
  .groupBy($"timeHour")
  .agg(sum("...").as("someThing"))
  .orderBy($"timeHour")
  .show()

//another way - as per eliasah comment
df.groupBy(from_unixtime($"starttime"/1000).as("timeHour"))
  .agg(sum("...").as("someThing"))
  .orderBy($"timeHour")
  .show()