Can I read data faster from Cassandra using Spark? - apache-spark

I am using cassandra database and I have a python script for reading data from cassandra database. Script is doing well. I wonder this if I use spark, can I read data faster from Cassandra ( using cql )?

Yes definitely, spark is made processing huge amount of data , but if the data is less you will not gain anything than to take more time to read.

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2 million queries against a dataframe

I need to run 2 million queries against a three columns table t (s,p,o) which size is 10 billions rows. The data type of each column is string.
Only two types of queries:
select s p o from t where s = param
select s p o from t where o = param
If I store the table in a Postgresql database takes 6 hours using a Java ThreadPoolExecutor.
Do you think Spark can speed up the queries processing even more?
What would be the best strategy? These are my ideas:
Load the table into a dataframe and launch the queries against the dataframe.
Load the table into a parquet database and launch the queries against this database.
Use Spark 2.4 to launch queries against the Postgresql database instead of querying directly.
Use Spark 3.0 to launch queries against the database loaded into PG-Strom, an extension module of PostgreSQL with GPU support.
Thanks,
Using Apache Spark on top of the existing MySQL or PostgresSQL server(s) (without the need to export or even stream data to Spark or Hadoop) can increase query performance more than ten times. Using multiple MySQL servers (replication or Percona XtraDB Cluster) gives us an additional performance increase for some queries. You can also use the Spark cache function to cache the whole MySQL query results table.
The idea is simple: Spark can read MySQL or PostgresSQL data via JDBC and can also execute SQL queries, so we can connect it directly to DB's and run the queries. Why is this faster? For long-running (i.e., reporting or BI) queries, it can be much faster as Spark is a massively parallel system. For example, MySQL can only use one CPU core per query, whereas Spark can use all cores on all cluster nodes.
But I recommend you use No-SQL(HBase, Cassandra,...) or New-SQL solutions for your analyses because they have better performance when the scale of your data increase.
Static Data? Spark; Otherwise tune Postgres
If the 10 billion rows are static or rarely updated, your best bet is going to be using Spark with appropriate partitions. The magic happens with parallelization, so the more cores you have, the better. You want to aim for partitions that are about half a gig in size each.
Determine the size of the data by running SELECT pg_size_pretty( pg_total_relation_size('tablename')); Divide the result by the number of cores available to Spark until you get between 1/8 and 3/4 gig.
Save as parquet if you really have static data or if you want to recover from a failure quickly.
If the source data are updated frequently, you're going to want to add indices in Postgres. It could be as straightforward as adding an index on each column. Partitioning in Postgres would also help.
Stick to Postgres. Newer databases are not appropriate for structured data such as yours. There are parallelization options. Aurora, if you're on AWS.
PG-Strom is not going to work for you here. You have simple data with few columns. Getting them into and out of a GPU is going to slow you down too much.

Can Apache Spark be used in place of Sqoop

I have tried connecting spark with JDBC connections to fetch data from MySQL / Teradata or similar RDBMS and was able analyse the data.
Can spark be used to store the data to HDFS?
Is there any possibility for spark outperforming
the activities of Sqoop.
Looking for you valuable answers and explanations.
There are two main things about Sqoop and Spark. The main difference is Sqoop will read the data from your RDMS doesn't matter what you have and you don't need to worry much about how you table is configured.
With Spark using JDBC connection is a little bit different how you need to load the data. If your database doesn't have any column like numeric ID or timestamp Spark will load ALL the data in one single partition. And then will try to process and save. If you have one column to use as partition than Spark sometimes can be even faster than Sqoop.
I would recommend you to take a look in this doc.enter link description here
The conclusion is, if you are going to do a simple export and that need to be done daily with no transformation I would recommend Sqoop to be simple to use and will not impact your database that much. Using Spark will work well IF your table is ready for that, besides that goes with Sqoop

What is the best way to get Dataframe Abstraction over HBase Data without Pheonix

I want to save and read the data from HBase from/to Spark.
I want to get the Dataframe abstraction as dataframe is best for memory management compared to RDD and it is convenient to do any processing.
I looked at possible candidates for getting Dataframe abstraction. One of them is Phoenix based solution. I do not want to have pheonix layer on top of HBase due to approvals. I searched for other solutions, but would want to know the best possibility that someone had tried.
We have a performant one at Splice Machine (Open Source). We wrote a separate InputFormat for HBase so we can read directly from store files in hbase vs. performing remote scans. The killer for Spark performance on top of hbase is the remote scan based InputFormat (i.e. how you read the data).
Sean Busbey at Cloudera has worked on a Spark HBase connector and here is a blog from HortonWorks on a similar idea...
http://hortonworks.com/blog/spark-hbase-dataframe-based-hbase-connector/
The "connectors" functionally work but perform poorly for large data sets.
Hope this helps and good luck.

Is MySQL more efficient in query optimization and general efficiency than Apache spark

I find that Apache spark is much slower then a MySQL server for the same query and the same table query on a spark data frame.
So where would be spark more efficient then MySQL?
Note : tried on a table with 1 million rows all of 10 columns of type text.
The size of table in json is about 10GB
Using a standalone pyspark notebook with Xeon 16 core and 64gb RAM and on same server MySql
In general I would like to know guidelines on when to use SPARK vs SQL server in terms of the size of target data to get real snappy results from analytic queries.
Ok, so going to try and help here even though it's still very difficult to answer this without knowing more. Assuming there is no contention for resources, there are a number of things that are going on here. If you're running on yarn and your json is stored in hdfs. It is likely split into many blocks, those blocks are then processed in different partitions. Since json doesn't split very well, you'd lose alot of parallel capabilities. Also, spark isn't meant to really have the super low latency queries like a tuned rdbms. Where you benefit from spark is on heavy data processing, large amounts of data (TB or PB). If you are looking for low latency queries you should use Impala or Hive with Tez. You should also consider changing your file format to avro, parquet or ORC.

spark connector loading vs sstableloader performance

I have a spark job that right now pulls data from HDFS and transforms the data into flat files to load into the Cassandra.
The cassandra table is essentially 3 columns but the last two are map collections, so a "complex" data structure.
Right now I use the COPY command and get about 3k rows/sec load but thats extremely slow given that I need to load about 50milllion records.
I see I can convert the CSV file to sstables but I don't see an example involving map collections and/or lists.
Can I use the spark connector to cassandra to load data with map collections and lists and get better performance than just the COPY command?
Yes the Spark Cassandra Connector can be much much faster for files already in HDFS. Using spark you'll be able to distributedly grab and write into C*.
Even without Spark using a java based loader like https://github.com/brianmhess/cassandra-loader will give you a significant speed improvement.

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