Spark - Reading partitioned data from S3 - how does partitioning happen? - apache-spark

When I use Spark to read multiple files from S3 (e.g. a directory with many Parquet files) -
Does the logical partitioning happen at the beginning, then each executor downloads the data directly (on the worker node)?
Or does the driver download the data (partially or fully) and only then partitions and sends the data to the executors?
Also, will the partitioning default to the same partitions that were used for write (i.e. each file = 1 partition)?

Data on S3 is external to HDFS obviously.
You can read from S3 by providing a path, or paths, or using Hive Metastore - if you have updated this via creating DDL for External S3 table, and using MSCK for partitions, or ALTER TABLE table_name RECOVER PARTITIONS for Hive on EMR.
If you use:
val df = spark.read.parquet("/path/to/parquet/file.../...")
then there is no guarantee on partitioning and it depends on various settings - see Does Spark maintain parquet partitioning on read?, noting APIs evolve and get better.
But, this:
val df = spark.read.parquet("/path/to/parquet/file.../.../partitioncolumn=*")
will return partitions over executors in some manner as per your saved partition structure, a bit like SPARK bucketBy.
The Driver only gets the metadata if specifying S3 directly.
In your terms:
"... each executor downloads the data directly (on the worker node)? " YES
Metadata is gotten in some way with Driver coordination and other system components for file / directory locations on S3, but not that the data is first downloaded to Driver - that would be a big folly in design. But it depends also on format of statement how the APIs respond.

Related

Spark write Dataframes directly from Hive to local file system

This question is almost a replica of the requirement here: Writing files to local system with Spark in Cluster mode
but my query is with a twist. The page above writes files from HDFS directly to local filesystem using spark but after converting it to RDD.
I'm in search of options available with just the Dataframe; conversion to RDD for huge data takes a toll on resource utilisation.
You can make use of below syntax to directly write a dataframe to HDFS filesystem.
df.write.format("csv").save("path in hdfs")
Refer spark doc for more details: https://spark.apache.org/docs/2.2.0/sql-programming-guide.html#generic-loadsave-functions

Parquet VS Database

I am trying to understand which of the below two would be better option especially in case of Spark environment :
Loading the parquet file directly into a dataframe and access the data (1TB of data table)
Using any database to store and access the data.
I am working on data pipeline design and trying to understand which of the above two options will result in more optimized solution.
Loading the parquet file directly into a dataframe and access the data is more scalable comparing to reading RDBMS like Oracle through JDBC connector. I handle the data more the 10TB but I prefer ORC format for better performance. I suggest you have to directly read data from files the reason for that is data locality - if your run your Spark executors on the same hosts, where HDFS data nodes located and can effectively read data into memory without network overhead. See https://jaceklaskowski.gitbooks.io/mastering-apache-spark/content/spark-data-locality.html and How does Apache Spark know about HDFS data nodes? for more details.

HIVE partition & bucketing support in Spark not working as expected

When working with partitions in S3, Spark is listing down all the partitions one by one, which is consuming time.Rather it should look for the partition in the meta-store table & should go to the partition immediately.
I tried with an example of 125 partitions.When I calculate the exact location of the S3 by appending the partition column value & try to access it, it executes within 5sec.But if I try to let Spark figures out the partition, it is listing down all the partitions, which itself is taking more than 30 sec.
How can I let Spark figures out the partition from the meta-store using the predicate push-down?
You need to setup external hive metastore(it can be mysql or postgres). So the definitions of tables/partitions will be persisted there and will survive different spark context lifespans

Does Spark support Partition Pruning with Parquet Files

I am working with a large dataset, that is partitioned by two columns - plant_name and tag_id. The second partition - tag_id has 200000 unique values, and I mostly access the data by specific tag_id values. If I use the following Spark commands:
sqlContext.setConf("spark.sql.hive.metastorePartitionPruning", "true")
sqlContext.setConf("spark.sql.parquet.filterPushdown", "true")
val df = sqlContext.sql("select * from tag_data where plant_name='PLANT01' and tag_id='1000'")
I would expect a fast response as this resolves to a single partition. In Hive and Presto this takes seconds, however in Spark it runs for hours.
The actual data is held in a S3 bucket, and when I submit the sql query, Spark goes off and first gets all the partitions from the Hive metastore (200000 of them), and then calls refresh() to force a full status list of all these files in the S3 object store (actually calling listLeafFilesInParallel).
It is these two operations that are so expensive, are there any settings that can get Spark to prune the partitions earlier - either during the call to the metadata store, or immediately afterwards?
Yes, spark supports partition pruning.
Spark does a listing of partitions directories (sequential or parallel listLeafFilesInParallel) to build a cache of all partitions first time around. The queries in the same application, that scan data takes advantage of this cache. So the slowness that you see could be because of this cache building. The subsequent queries that scan data make use of the cache to prune partitions.
These are the logs which shows partitions being listed to populate the cache.
App > 16/11/14 10:45:24 main INFO ParquetRelation: Listing s3://test-bucket/test_parquet_pruning/month=2015-01 on driver
App > 16/11/14 10:45:24 main INFO ParquetRelation: Listing s3://test-bucket/test_parquet_pruning/month=2015-02 on driver
App > 16/11/14 10:45:24 main INFO ParquetRelation: Listing s3://test-bucket/test_parquet_pruning/month=2015-03 on driver
These are the logs showing pruning is happening.
App > 16/11/10 12:29:16 main INFO DataSourceStrategy: Selected 1 partitions out of 20, pruned 95.0% partitions.
Refer convertToParquetRelation and getHiveQlPartitions in HiveMetastoreCatalog.scala.
Just a thought:
Spark API documentation for HadoopFsRelation says,
( https://spark.apache.org/docs/1.6.2/api/java/org/apache/spark/sql/sources/HadoopFsRelation.html )
"...when reading from Hive style partitioned tables stored in file
systems, it's able to discover partitioning information from the paths
of input directories, and perform partition pruning before start
reading the data..."
So, i guess "listLeafFilesInParallel" could not be a problem.
A similar issue is already in spark jira: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-10673
In spite of "spark.sql.hive.verifyPartitionPath" set to false and, there is no effect in performance, I suspect that the
issue might have been caused by unregistered partitions. Please list out the partitions of the table and verify if all
the partitions are registered. Else, recover your partitions as shown in this link:
Hive doesn't read partitioned parquet files generated by Spark
Update:
I guess appropriate parquet block size and page size were set while writing the data.
Create a fresh hive table with partitions mentioned, and file-format as parquet, load it from non-partitioned table using dynamic partition approach.
( https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Hive/DynamicPartitions )
Run a plain hive query and then compare by running a spark program.
Disclaimer: I am not a spark/parquet expert. The problem sounded interesting, and hence responded.
similar question popped up here recently:
http://apache-spark-user-list.1001560.n3.nabble.com/Spark-SQL-reads-all-leaf-directories-on-a-partitioned-Hive-table-td35997.html#a36007
This question is old but I thought I'd post the solution here as well.
spark.sql.hive.convertMetastoreParquet=false
will use the Hive parquet serde instead of the spark inbuilt parquet serde. Hive's Parquet serde will not do a listLeafFiles on all partitions, but only and directly read from the selected partitions. On tables with many partitions and files, this is much faster (and cheaper, too). Feel free to try it ou! :)

How does Spark parallelize the processing of a 1TB file?

Imaginary problem
A gigantic CSV log file, let's say 1 TB in size, the file is located on a USB drive
The log contains activities logs of users around the world, let's assume that the line contains 50 columns, among those there is Country.
We want a line count per country, descending order.
Let's assume the Spark cluster has enough nodes with RAM to process the entire 1TB in memory (20 nodes, 4 cores CPU, each node has 64GB RAM)
My Poorman's conceptual solution
Using SparkSQL & Databricks spark-csv
$ ./spark-shell --packages com.databricks:spark-csv_2.10:1.4.0
val dfBigLog = sqlContext.read
.format("com.databricks.spark.csv")
.option("header", "true")
.load("/media/username/myUSBdrive/bogusBigLog1TB.log")
dfBigLog.select("Country")
.groupBy("Country")
.agg(count($"Country") as "CountryCount")
.orderBy($"CountryCount".desc).show
Question 1: How does Spark parallelize the processing?
I suppose the majority of the execution time (99% ?) of the above solution is to read the 1TB file from the USB drive into the Spark cluster. Reading the file from the USB drive is not parallelizable. But after reading the entire file, what does Spark do under the hood to parallelize the processing?
How many nodes used for creating the DataFrame? (maybe only one?)
How many nodes used for groupBy & count? Let's assume there are 100+ countries (but Spark doesn't know that yet). How would Spark partition to distribute the 100+ country values on 20 nodes?
Question 2: How to make the Spark application the fastest possible?
I suppose the area of improvement would be to parallelize the reading of the 1TB file.
Convert the CSV File into a Parquet file format + using Snappy compression. Let's assume this can be done in advance.
Copy the Parquet file on HDFS. Let's assume the Spark cluster is within the same Hadoop cluster and the datanodes are independant from the 20 nodes Spark cluster.
Change the Spark application to read from HDFS. I suppose Spark would now use several nodes to read the file as Parquet is splittable.
Let's assume the Parquet file compressed by Snappy is 10x smaller, size = 100GB, HDFS block = 128 MB in size. Total 782 HDFS blocks.
But then how does Spark manage to use all the 20 nodes for both creating the DataFrame and the processing (groupBy and count)? Does Spark use all the nodes each time?
Question 1: How does Spark parallelize the processing (of reading a
file from a USB drive)?
This scenario is not possible.
Spark relies on a hadoop compliant filesystem to read a file. When you mount the USB drive, you can only access it from the local host. Attempting to execute
.load("/media/username/myUSBdrive/bogusBigLog1TB.log")
will fail in cluster configuration, as executors in the cluster will not have access to that local path.
It would be possible to read the file with Spark in local mode (master=local[*]) in which case you only will have 1 host and hence the rest of the questions would not apply.
Question 2: How to make the Spark application the fastest possible?
Divide and conquer.
The strategy outlined in the question is good. Using Parquet will allow Spark to do a projection on the data and only .select("Country") column, further reducing the amount of data required to be ingested and hence speeding things up.
The cornerstone to parallelism in Spark are partitions. Again, as we are reading from a file, Spark relies on the Hadoop filesystem. When reading from HDFS, the partitioning will be dictated by the splits of the file on HDFS. Those splits will be evenly distributed among the executors. That's how Spark will initially distribute the work across all available executors for the job.
I'm not deeply familiar with the Catalist optimizations, but I think I could assume that .groupBy("Country").agg(count($"Country") will become something similar to: rdd.map(country => (country,1)).reduceByKey(_+_)
The map operation will not affect partitioning, so can be applied on site.
The reduceByKey will be applied first locally on each partition and partial results will be combined on the driver. So most counting happens distributed in the cluster, and adding it up will be centralized.
Reading the file from the USB drive is not parallelizable.
USB drive or any other data source the same rules apply. Either source is accessible from the driver and all worker machines and data is accessed in parallel (up to the source limits) or data is not accessed at all you get an exception.
How many nodes used for creating the DataFrame? (maybe only one?)
Assuming that files is accessible from all machines it depends on a configuration. For starters you should take a look at the split size.
How many nodes used for the GroupBy & Count?
Once again it depends on a configuration.

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