Spark as execution engine or spark as an application? - apache-spark

Which option is better to use, spark as an execution engine on hive or accessing hive tables using spark SQL? And Why?

A few assumptions here are:
Reason to opt for SQL is to stay user friendly, e.g. if you have business users trying to access data.
Hive is in consideration because it provides an SQL like interface and persistence of data
If that is true, Spark-SQL is perhaps the better way forward. It is better integrated within Spark and as an integral part of Spark, it will provide more features (one example is structured streaming). You will still get user friendliness and an SQL like interface to Spark so you will get full benefits. But you will need to manage your system only from Spark's point of view. Hive installation and management will still be there but from a single perspective.
Using Hive with Spark as execution engine will keep you limited based upon how good a translation Hive's libraries are able to do to convert your HQL to Spark. They may do a pretty good job but you will still loose the advanced features of Spark SQL. And new features may take longer to get integrated in Hive compared to Spark SQL.
Also, with Hive exposed to end users, some advanced users or data engineering teams may want access to Spark. This will cause you to manage two tools. System management may get more tedious compared to only using Spark-SQL in this scenario as Spark SQL has the potential to serve both non-technical and advanced users and even if advanced users use pyspark, spark-shell or more, they will still be integrated within the same toolset.

Related

What is exactly the need of spark when using talend?

I am new to both spark and talend.
But I read everywhere that both of these are ETL tools. I read another stackoverflow answer here. From the other answer what I understood is talend do use spark for large data processing. But can talend do all the ETL work efficiently that spark is doing without using spark under the hood? Or is it essentially a wrapper over spark where all the data is send to talend is actually put inside the spark inside talend for processing?
I am quite confused with this. Can someone clarify this?
Unlike Informatica BDM which has its own Blaze framework for processing on Hadoop (native), Talend relies on other frameworks such as Map Reduce (Hadoop using possibly tez underneath) or Spark engine. So you could avoid Spark, but there is less point in doing so. The key point is that we could expect I think some productivity using Talend as it is graphical based, which is handy when there are many fields and you do not need possibly the most skilled staff.
For NOSQL, like HBase, they provide specific connectors or could use the Phoenix route. Talend also has connectors for KAFKA.
Spark is just one of the frameworks supported by Talend. When you create a new job, you can pick Spark from the dropdown list. You can get more details in the docs.

Spark goodness with Cassandra?

I've been reading about Apache Cassandra lately to learn how it works and how to use it for IoT projects, especially in the need of time series based database..
However, I started to notice that Apache Spark is often mentioned when people talk about Cassandra too.
The question is, as long as I can use Cassandra cluster of nodes to serve my app, to store and read data, why would I need Apache Spark? any useful use-cases are appreciated!
The answer is broad but summarizing ... Cassandra is highly scalable and there are lot of scenarios where it fits but CQL sintax has some limitations if you don't have your schema ready for some queries.
If you want to make use of your data without restrictions and doing analytical workloads with your cassandra data or join with other tables Spark is the most appropriate complement. Spark has a tight integration with Cassandra.
I recommend you to check this slides: http://www.slideshare.net/patrickmcfadin/apache-cassandra-and-spark-you-got-the-the-lighter-lets-start-the-fire?qid=48e2528c-a03c-49b4-879e-45599b2aff34&v=&b=&from_search=5
Cassandra is for storing data where as Spark is for performing some computation on top of it. Analogy with Hadoop: Cassandra is like HDFS where as Spark is like Map Reduce.
Especially with computations, when using DataStax Cassandra connector, data locality can be exploited. If you need to do some computation which modifies a row (but doesn't really depend on anything else), then that operation is optimized to run locally on each machine in cluster without any data movement in network.
Same goes with a lot of other Spark workload, the actions(some function which modifies the data) are done locally and only result is sent to client. As far as I know, when you want to do analytics on top of data stored in Cassandra, Spark is well supported and popular choice. If you don't need to do any operations on the data, still you can use Spark for other purposes like I mentioned below.
Spark streaming can be used to ingest or export data from Cassandra ( I used it a lot personally). The same data import/export can be achieved with small hand-written JDBC agents but Spark streaming code I wrote for ingesting 10GB data from Cassandra contains less than 20 lines of code with multi machine-multi threading built-in and an admin UI where I can see the job progress.
With Spark+Zeppelin, we can visualize Cassandra data using Spark, we can build beautiful UIs with little Spark code where users can even enter input and see the result as graph/table etc.
Note: Actually, visualization can be better with Kibana/ElasticSearch or Solr/Banana when used with Cassandra but they are very hard to setup and indexing has it's own issues to deal with.
There are a lot of other use cases, but personally I used Spark as a Swiss army knife for multiple tasks.
Apache cassandra is have feature like fast read and write so you can use it with the apache spark streaming to write your data directly into cassandra without legacy.
For use case you can consider any video application to upload video with the help of streaming and directly store it into cassandra blob.

What specific benefits can we get by using SparkSQL to access Hive tables compared to using JDBC to read tables from SQL server?

I just got this question while designing the storage part for a Hadoop-based platform. If we want to have data scientists to have access to the tables which have already been stored in a relational database (e.g.SQL-server of a Azure Virtual Machine), then will there be any particular benefits if we import the tables from SQL-server to HDFS (e.g. WASB) and create Hive tables on top of them?
In other words, since Spark allows users to read data from other databases using JDBC,is there any performance improvement if we persist the tables from the database in appropriate format (avro, parquet etc.) in HDFS and use SparkSQL to access them using HQL?
I am sorry if this question has been asked, I have done some research but could not get a comparison between the two methodologies.
I think there will be a big performance improvement as the data is local (assuming Spark is running on same Hadoop cluster where the data is stored on HDFS). Using JDBC if the actions/processing performed is interactive then user has to wait for the data to be loaded through JDBC from another machine (N/W latency and IO throughput) whereas if that is done upfront then user (data scientist) can concentrate on performing the actions straight away.

SparkSQL vs Hive on Spark - Difference and pros and cons?

SparkSQL CLI internally uses HiveQL and in case Hive on spark(HIVE-7292) , hive uses spark as backend engine. Can somebody throw some more light, how exactly these two scenarios are different and pros and cons of both approaches?
When SparkSQL uses hive
SparkSQL can use HiveMetastore to get the metadata of the data stored in HDFS. This metadata enables SparkSQL to do better optimization of the queries that it executes. Here Spark is the query processor.
When Hive uses Spark See the JIRA entry: HIVE-7292
Here the the data is accessed via spark. And Hive is the Query processor. So we have all the deign features of Spark Core to take advantage of. But this is a Major Improvement for Hive and is still "in progress" as of Feb 2 2016.
There is a third option to process data with SparkSQL
Use SparkSQL without using Hive. Here SparkSQL does not have access to the metadata from the Hive Metastore. And the queries run slower. I have done some performance tests comparing options 1 and 3. The results are here.
SparkSQL vs Spark API you can simply imagine you are in RDBMS world:
SparkSQL is pure SQL, and Spark API is language for writing stored procedure
Hive on Spark is similar to SparkSQL, it is a pure SQL interface that use spark as execution engine, SparkSQL uses Hive's syntax, so as a language, i would say they are almost the same.
but Hive on Spark has a much better support for hive features, especially hiveserver2 and security features, hive features in SparkSQL is really buggy, there is a hiveserver2 impl in SparkSQL, but in latest release version (1.6.x), hiveserver2 in SparkSQL doesn't work with hivevar and hiveconf argument anymore, and the username for login via jdbc doesn't work either...
see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-13983
i believe hive support in spark project is really very low priority stuff...
sadly Hive on spark integration is not that easy, there are a lot of dependency conflicts... such as
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-13301
and, when i'm trying hive with spark integration, for debug purpose, i'm always starting hive cli like this:
export HADOOP_USER_CLASSPATH_FIRST=true
bin/hive --hiveconf hive.root.logger=DEBUG,console
our requirement is using spark with hiveserver2 in a secure way (with authentication and authorization), currently SparkSQL alone can not provide this, we are using ranger/sentry + Hive on Spark.
hope this can help you to get a better idea which direction you should go.
here is related answer I find in the hive official site:
1.3 Comparison with Shark and Spark SQL 
There are two related projects in the Spark ecosystem that provide Hive QL support on Spark: Shark and Spark SQL. 
●The Shark project translates query plans generated by Hive into its own representation and executes them over Spark.  
●Spark SQL is a feature in Spark. It uses Hive’s parser as the frontend to provide Hive QL support. Spark application developers can easily express their data processing logic in SQL, as well as the other Spark operators, in their code. Spark SQL supports a different use case than Hive. 
Compared with Shark and Spark SQL, our approach by design supports all existing Hive features, including Hive QL (and any future extension), and Hive’s integration with authorization, monitoring, auditing, and other operational tools. 
3. Hive­-Level Design 
As noted in the introduction, this project takes a different approach from that of Shark or Spark SQL in the sense that we are not going to implement SQL semantics using Spark's primitives. On the contrary, we will implement it using MapReduce primitives. The only new thing here is that these MapReduce primitives will be executed in Spark. In fact, only a few of Spark's primitives will be used in this design. 
The approach of executing Hive’s MapReduce primitives on Spark that is different from what Shark or Spark SQL does has the following direct advantages: 
1.Spark users will automatically get the whole set of Hive’s rich features, including any new features that Hive might introduce in the future. 
2.This approach avoids or reduces the necessity of any customization work in Hive’s Spark execution engine.
3.It will also limit the scope of the project and reduce longterm maintenance by keeping Hive­-on­-Spark congruent to Hive MapReduce and Tez. 

Big Data Analytics using Redshift vs Spark, Oozie Workflow Scheduler with Redshift Analytics

We want to do Big Data Analytics on our data stored in Amazon Redshift (currently in Terabytes, but will grow with time).
Currently, it seems that all our Analytics can be done through Redshift queries (and hence, no distributed processing might be required at our end) but we are not sure if that will remain to be the case in future.
In order to build a generic system that should be able to cater our future needs as well, we are looking to use Apache Spark for data analytics.
I know that data can be read into Spark RDDs from HDFS, HBase and S3, but does it support data reading from Redshift directly?
If not, we can look to transfer our data to S3 and then read it in Spark RDDs.
My question is if we should carry out our Data Analytics through Redshift's queries directly or should we look to go with the approach above and do analytics through Apache Spark (Problem here is that Data Locality optimization might not be available)?
In case we do analytics through Redshift queries directly, can anyone please suggest a good Workflow Scheduler to write our Analytics jobs with. Our requirement is to be able to execute jobs as a DAG (Job2 should execute only if Job1 succeeds, etc) and be able to schedule our workflows through the proposed Workflow Engine.
Oozie seems like a good fit for our requirements but it turns out that Oozie cannot be used without Hadoop. Does it make sense to set up Hadoop on our machines and then use Oozie Workflow Scheduler to schedule our Data Analysis jobs through Redshift queries?
You cannot access data stored on Redshift nodes directly (each via Spark), only via SQL queries submitted the cluster as a whole.
My suggestion would be to use Redshift as long as possible and only take on the complexity of Spark/Hadoop when you absolutely need it.
If, in the future, you move to Hadoop then Cascading Lingual gives you the option of running your existing Redshift analytics more or less unchanged.
Regarding workflow, Oozie is not a good fit for Redshift. I would suggest you look at Azkaban (true DAG) or Luigi (uses a Python DSL).

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