Spark Streaming to Hive, too many small files per partition - apache-spark

I have a spark streaming job with a batch interval of 2 mins(configurable).
This job reads from a Kafka topic and creates a Dataset and applies a schema on top of it and inserts these records into the Hive table.
The Spark Job creates one file per batch interval in the Hive partition like below:
dataset.coalesce(1).write().mode(SaveMode.Append).insertInto(targetEntityName);
Now the data that comes in is not that big, and if I increase the batch duration to maybe 10mins or so, then even I might end up getting only 2-3mb of data, which is way less than the block size.
This is the expected behaviour in Spark Streaming.
I am looking for efficient ways to do a post processing to merge all these small files and create one big file.
If anyone's done it before, please share your ideas.

I would encourage you to not use Spark to stream data from Kafka to HDFS.
Kafka Connect HDFS Plugin by Confluent (or Apache Gobblin by LinkedIn) exist for this very purpose. Both offer Hive integration.
Find my comments about compaction of small files in this Github issue
If you need to write Spark code to process Kafka data into a schema, then you can still do that, and write into another topic in (preferably) Avro format, which Hive can easily read without a predefined table schema
I personally have written a "compaction" process that actually grabs a bunch of hourly Avro data partitions from a Hive table, then converts into daily Parquet partitioned table for analytics. It's been working great so far.
If you want to batch the records before they land on HDFS, that's where Kafka Connect or Apache Nifi (mentioned in the link) can help, given that you have enough memory to store records before they are flushed to HDFS

I have exactly the same situation as you. I solved it by:
Lets assume that your new coming data are stored in a dataset: dataset1
1- Partition the table with a good partition key, in my case I have found that I can partition using a combination of keys to have around 100MB per partition.
2- Save using spark core not using spark sql:
a- load the whole partition in you memory (inside a dataset: dataset2) when you want to save
b- Then apply dataset union function: dataset3 = dataset1.union(dataset2)
c- make sure that the resulted dataset is partitioned as you wish e.g: dataset3.repartition(1)
d - save the resulting dataset in "OverWrite" mode to replace the existing file
If you need more details about any step please reach out.

Related

Problems in reading existing multilevel partitioned files data from from middle in Spark Structured Streaming

I am working on structured spark streaming with existing multilevel partitioned parquet file as source. I have following issue while using it.
Starting spark streaming job to read data from particular partition instead of starting from beginning.
Suppose if we observed that there is data quality issue in partition year=2018/month=10/hour=10. Now suppose i have corrected that data till date by replacing correct files.
Now Question is how to reprocess data starting from this day instead of starting from beginning? Because in structured streaming lets say i use file stream as source which will load all files i want to ignore few files. Here i need to remove my checkpoint directory as well because it has offset till date.
Suppose if we observed that there is data quality issue in partition year=2018/month=10/hour=10. Then how to reprocess data starting from this day instead of starting from beginning?
I don't think it's possible in Spark Structured Streaming (wish I'd be mistaken).
Since we're talking about a streaming query, you'd have to rewind the "stream". The only way to achieve it (I can think of) is to re-upload the data (no idea how to do it) or simply process data that would "delete" the previous version of the partition year=2018/month=10/hour=10 and then upload a new corrected version.
The question is how to inform the parquet data source that whatever has already been processed should be "evicted" from the result (that may've been sent out to external sources for further processing).

Extract and analyze data from JSON - Hadoop vs Spark

I'm trying to learn the whole open source big data stack, and I've started with HDFS, Hadoop MapReduce and Spark. I'm more or less limited with MapReduce and Spark (SQL?) for "ETL", HDFS for storage, and no other limitation for other things.
I have a situation like this:
My Data Sources
Data Source 1 (DS1): Lots of data - totaling to around 1TB. I have IDs (let's call them ID1) inside each row - used as a key. Format: 1000s of JSON files.
Data Source 2 (DS2): Additional "metadata" for data source 1. I have IDs (let's call them ID2) inside each row - used as a key. Format: Single TXT file
Data Source 3 (DS3): Mapping between Data Source 1 and 2. Only pairs of ID1, ID2 in CSV files.
My workspace
I currently have a VM with enough data space, about 128GB of RAM and 16 CPUs to handle my problem (the whole project is a research for, not a production-use-thing). I have CentOS 7 and Cloudera 6.x installed. Currently, I'm using HDFS, MapReduce and Spark.
The task
I need only some attributes (ID and a few strings) from Data Source 1. My guess is that it comes to less than 10% in data size.
I need to connect ID1s from DS3 (pairs: ID1, ID2) to IDs in DS1 and ID2s from DS3 (pairs: ID1, ID2) to IDs in DS2.
I need to add attributes from DS2 (using "mapping" from the previous bullet) to my extracted attributes from DS1
I need to make some "queries", like:
Find the most used words by years
Find the most common words, used by a certain author
Find the most common words, used by a certain author, on a yearly basi
etc.
I need to visualize data (i.e. wordclouds, histograms, etc.) at the end.
My questions:
Which tool to use to extract data from JSON files the most efficient way? MapReduce or Spark (SQL?)?
I have arrays inside JSON. I know the explode function in Spark can transpose my data. But what is the best way to go here? Is it the best way to
extract IDs from DS1 and put exploded data next to them, and write them to new files? Or is it better to combine everything? How to achieve this - Hadoop, Spark?
My current idea was to create something like this:
Extract attributes needed (except arrays) from DS1 with Spark and write them to CSV files.
Extract attributes needed (exploded arrays only + IDs) from DS1 with Spark and write them to CSV files - each exploded attribute to own file(s).
This means I have extracted all the data I need, and I can easily connect them with only one ID. I then wanted to make queries for specific questions and run MapReduce jobs.
The question: Is this a good idea? If not, what can I do better? Should I insert data into a database? If yes, which one?
Thanks in advance!
Thanks for asking!! Being a BigData developer for last 1.5 years and having experience with both MR and Spark, I think I may guide you to the correct direction.
The final goals which you want to achieve can be obtained using both MapReduce and Spark. For visualization purpose you can use Apache Zeppelin, which can run on top of your final data.
Spark jobs are memory expensive jobs, i.e, the whole computation for spark jobs run on memory, i.e, RAM. Only the final result is written to the HDFS. On the other hand, MapReduce uses less amount of memory and used HDFS for writing intermittent stage results, thus making more I/O operations and more time consuming.
You can use Spark's Dataframe feature. You can directly load data to Dataframe from a structured data (it can be plaintext file also) which will help you to get the required data in a tabular format. You can write the Dataframe to a plaintext file, or you can store to a hive table from where you can visualize data. On the other hand, using MapReduce you will have to first store in Hive table, then write hive operations to manipulate data, and store final data to another hive table. Writing native MapReduce jobs can be very hectic so I would suggest to refrain from choosing that option.
At the end, I would suggest to use Spark as processing engine (128GB and 16 cores is enough for spark) to get your final result as soon as possible.

How Spark SQL reads Parquet partitioned files

I have a parquet file of around 1 GB. Each data record is a reading from an IOT device which captures the energy consumed by the device in the last one minute.
Schema: houseId, deviceId, energy
The parquet file is partitioned on houseId and deviceId. A file contains the data for the last 24 hours only.
I want to execute some queries on the data residing in this parquet file using Spark SQL An example query finds out the average energy consumed per device for a given house in the last 24 hours.
Dataset<Row> df4 = ss.read().parquet("/readings.parquet");
df4.as(encoder).registerTempTable("deviceReadings");
ss.sql("Select avg(energy) from deviceReadings where houseId=3123).show();
The above code works well. I want to understand that how spark executes this query.
Does Spark read the whole Parquet file in memory from HDFS without looking at the query? (I don't believe this to be the case)
Does Spark load only the required partitions from HDFS as per the query?
What if there are multiple queries which need to be executed? Will Spark look at multiple queries while preparing an execution plan? One query may be working with just one partition whereas the second query may need all the partitions, so a consolidated plan shall load the whole file from disk in memory (if memory limits allow this).
Will it make a difference in execution time if I cache df4 dataframe above?
Does Spark read the whole Parquet file in memory from HDFS without looking at the query?
It shouldn't scan all data files, but it might in general, access metadata of all files.
Does Spark load only the required partitions from HDFS as per the query?
Yes, it does.
Does Spark load only the required partitions from HDFS as per the query?
It does not. Each query has its own execution plan.
Will it make a difference in execution time if I cache df4 dataframe above?
Yes, at least for now, it will make a difference - Caching dataframes while keeping partitions

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! :)

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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