How to find which partition is skewed (while joining large tables)? - apache-spark

I am joining 2 large tables (billions x hundreds of millions of rows) by an id. e.g.,
table1.join(table2, Seq("id"))
My Spark Jobs gets to this point "fairly quickly":
Stage 19: 60000/60001 (1 running)
The problem is that this 1 running job takes hours which is an order of magnitude more than the other jobs.
==> How can I determine which "key" in the join is causing the long running job?
==> Is there a way to write to stdout of the executor to give more debug information?

Since you are joining based on the column Id
One easy thing which I follow is to count max occurrence of an Id.
df.groupBy("id").count.sort(desc("count")).take(10).foreach(println)
This will give you top 10 "id" which has max number of occurrences in the dataset.

Related

Spark Window Function Null Skew

Recently I've encountered an issue running one of our PySpark jobs. While analyzing the stages in Spark UI I have noticed that the longest running stage takes 1.2 hours to run out of the total 2.5 hours that takes for the entire process to run.
Once I took a look at the stage details it was clear that I'm facing a severe data skew, causing a single task to run for the entire 1.2 hours while all other tasks finish within 23 seconds.
The DAG showed this stage involves Window Functions which helped me to quickly narrow down the problematic area to a few queries and finding the root cause -> The column, account, that was being used in the Window.partitionBy("account") had 25% of null values.
I don't have an interest to calculate the sum for the null accounts though I do need the involved rows for further calculations therefore I can't filter them out prior the window function.
Here is my window function query:
problematic_account_window = Window.partitionBy("account")
sales_with_account_total_df = sales_df.withColumn("sum_sales_per_account", sum(col("price")).over(problematic_account_window))
So we found the one to blame - What can we do now? How can we resolve the skew and the performance issue?
We basically have 2 solutions for this issue:
Break the initial dataframe to 2 different dataframes, one that filters out the null values and calculates the sum on, and the second that contains only the null values and is not part of the calculation. Lastly we union the two together.
Apply salting technique on the null values in order to spread the nulls on all partitions and provide stability to the stage.
Solution 1:
account_window = Window.partitionBy("account")
# split to null and non null
non_null_accounts_df = sales_df.where(col("account").isNotNull())
only_null_accounts_df = sales_df.where(col("account").isNull())
# calculate the sum for the non null
sales_with_non_null_accounts_df = non_null_accounts_df.withColumn("sum_sales_per_account", sum(col("price")).over(account_window)
# union the calculated result and the non null df to the final result
sales_with_account_total_df = sales_with_non_null_accounts_df.unionByName(only_null_accounts_df, allowMissingColumns=True)
Solution 2:
SPARK_SHUFFLE_PARTITIONS = spark.conf.get("spark.sql.shuffle.partitions")
modified_sales_df = (sales_df
# create a random partition value that spans as much as number of shuffle partitions
.withColumn("random_salt_partition", lit(ceil(rand() * SPARK_SHUFFLE_PARTITIONS)))
# use the random partition values only in case the account value is null
.withColumn("salted_account", coalesce(col("account"), col("random_salt_partition")))
)
# modify the partition to use the salted account
salted_account_window = Window.partitionBy("salted_account")
# use the salted account window to calculate the sum of sales
sales_with_account_total_df = sales_df.withColumn("sum_sales_per_account", sum(col("price")).over(salted_account_window))
In my solution I've decided to use solution 2 since it didn't force me to create more dataframes for the sake of the calculation, and here is the result:
As seen above the salting technique helped resolving the skewness. The exact same stage now runs for a total of 5.5 minutes instead of 1.2 hours. The only modification in the code was the salting column in the partitionBy. The comparison shown is based on the exact same cluster/nodes amount/cluster config.

How can I automate the process of running the same aggregation in 12 parquet files and then join the results in 1 table using PySpark?

I have to make 6 different calculations (sums and averages by day) in a parquet file that contains 1 year of data (day level). The problem is the file is too big and Jupyter crashes in the process. So I divided the file into 12 months (12 parquet files). I tested if the server would be able to make the calculations in 1 month of data in a reasonable time and it did. I want to avoid writing 72 different queries (6 calculations * 12 months). The result of each calculation would have to be saved in a parquet file and then joined in a final table. How would you recommend solving this by automating the process in PySpark? I would appreciate any suggestions. Thanks.
This is an example of the code I have to run in each of the 12 parts of the data:
month1= spark.read.parquet("s3://af/my_folder/month1.parquet")
month1.createOrReplaceTempView("month1")
month1sum= spark.sql("select id, date, sum(sessions) as sum_num_sessions from month1 where group by 1,2 order_by 1 asc")
month1sum.write.mode("overwrite").parquet("s3://af/my_folder/month1sum.parquet")
month1sum.createOrReplaceTempView("month1sum")
month_1_calculation=month1sum.groupBy('date').agg(avg('sum_num_sessions').alias('avg_sessions'))
month_1_calculation.write.mode("overwrite").parquet("s3://af/my_folder/month_1_calculation.parquet")```
Quick approach: how about a for loop?
for i in range(1, 13):
month= spark.read.parquet(f"s3://af/my_folder/month{i}.parquet")
month.createOrReplaceTempView(f"month{i}")
monthsum= spark.sql(f"select id, date, sum(sessions) as sum_num_sessions from month{i} where group by 1,2 order_by 1 asc")
monthsum.write.mode("overwrite").parquet(f"s3://af/my_folder/month{i}sum.parquet")
monthsum.createOrReplaceTempView(f"month{i}sum")
month_calculation = monthsum.groupBy('date').agg(avg('sum_num_sessions').alias('avg_sessions'))
month_calculation.write.mode("overwrite").parquet(f"s3://af/my_folder/month_{i}_calculation.parquet")
Long-term approach: Spark is designed to handle big data, so no matter how big your data is, as long as you have sufficient hardware (number of cores and memory), Spark should be able to take care of it with correct configurations. So adjusting your number of core, executor memory, driver memory, improving parallelism (by changing number of partitions), ... would definitely solve your issue.

How to avoid selecting too many data

What we are doing is pretty much like
putting time series data into cassandra
running an spark aggregation job every hour and put aggregated data back to cassandra
One of the problems we found is, if the hourly job does not succeed, for example, continuously, 1 AM ~ 2 AM, 2 AM ~ 3 AM, 3 AM ~ 4 AM (or more), then next time, it'll aggregate the data from 1 AM to 5 AM (last success time is recorded in cassandra). The issue comes at this hour, because it's now 4 (or more) hours data, and it's way larger than one hour data which then results in an OutofMemory exception by selecting too many data from cassandra into dataframe.
Well, adding memory to spark executor is a way fixing this. However, considering it's an edge issue, I'm wondering if there's any mature pattern or architecture to deal with this issue.

Cassandra - IN or TOKEN query for querying an entire partition?

I want to query a complete partition of my table.
My compound partition key consists of (id, date, hour_of_timestamp). id and date are strings, hour_of_timestamp is an integer.
I needed to add the hour_of_timestamp field to my partition key because of hotspots while ingesting the data.
Now I'm wondering what's the most efficient way to query a complete partition of my data?
According to this blog, using SELECT * from mytable WHERE id = 'x' AND date = '10-10-2016' AND hour_of_timestamp IN (0,1,...23); is causing a lot of overhead on the coordinator node.
Is it better to use the TOKEN function and query the partition with two tokens? Such as SELECT * from mytable WHERE TOKEN(id,date,hour_of_timestamp) >= TOKEN('x','10-10-2016',0) AND TOKEN(id,date,hour_of_timestamp) <= TOKEN('x','10-10-2016',23);
So my question is:
Should I use the IN or TOKEN query for querying an entire partition of my data? Or should I use 23 queries (one for each value of hour_of_timestamp) and let the driver do the rest?
I am using Cassandra 3.0.8 and the latest Datastax Java Driver to connect to a 6 node cluster.
You say:
Now I'm wondering what's the most efficient way to query a complete
partition of my data? According to this blog, using SELECT * from
mytable WHERE id = 'x' AND date = '10-10-2016' AND hour_of_timestamp
IN (0,1,...23); is causing a lot of overhead on the coordinator node.
but actually you'd query 24 partitions.
What you probably meant is that you had a design where a single partition was what now consists of 24 partitions, because you add the hour to avoid an hotspot during data ingestion. Noting that in both models (the old one with hotspots and this new one) data is still ordered by timestamp, you have two choices:
Run 1 query at time.
Run 2 queries the first time, and then one at time to "prefetch" results.
Run 24 queries in parallel.
CASE 1
If you process data sequentially, the first choice is to run the query for the hour 0, process the data and, when finished, run the query for the hour 1 and so on... This is a straightforward implementation, and I don't think it deserves more than this.
CASE 2
If your queries take more time than your data processing, you could "prefetch" some data. So, the first time you could run 2 queries in parallel to get the data of both the hours 0 and 1, and start processing data for hour 0. In the meantime, data for hour 1 arrives, so when you finish to process data for hour 0 you could prefetch data for hour 2 and start processing data for hour 1. And so on.... In this way you could speed up data processing. Of course, depending on your timings (data processing and query times) you should optimize the number of "prefetch" queries.
Also note that the Java Driver does pagination for you automatically, and depending on the size of the retrieved partition, you may want to disable that feature to avoid blocking the data processing, or may want to fetch more data preemptively with something like this:
ResultSet rs = session.execute("your query");
for (Row row : rs) {
if (rs.getAvailableWithoutFetching() == 100 && !rs.isFullyFetched())
rs.fetchMoreResults(); // this is asynchronous
// Process the row ...
}
where you could tune that rs.getAvailableWithoutFetching() == 100 to better suit your prefetch requirements.
You may also want to prefetch more than one partition the first time, so that you ensure your processing won't wait on any data fetching part.
CASE 3
If you need to process data from different partitions together, eg you need both data for hour 3 and 6, then you could try to group data by "dependency" (eg query both hour 3 and 6 in parallel).
If you need all of them then should run 24 queries in parallel and then join them at application level (you already know why you should avoid the IN for multiple partitions). Remember that your data is already ordered, so your application level efforts would be very small.

Cassandra Stress Test results evaluation

I have been using the cassandra-stress tool to evaluate my cassandra cluster for quite some time now.
My problem is that I am not able to comprehend the results generated for my specific use case.
My schema looks something like this:
CREATE TABLE Table_test(
ID uuid,
Time timestamp,
Value double,
Date timestamp,
PRIMARY KEY ((ID,Date), Time)
) WITH COMPACT STORAGE;
I have parsed this information in a custom yaml file and used parameters n=10000, threads=100 and the rest are default options (cl=one, mode=native cql3, etc). The Cassandra cluster is a 3 node CentOS VM setup.
A few specifics of the custom yaml file are as follows:
insert:
partitions: fixed(100)
select: fixed(1)/2
batchtype: UNLOGGED
columnspecs:
-name: Time
size: fixed(1000)
-name: ID
size: uniform(1..100)
-name: Date
size: uniform(1..10)
-name: Value
size: uniform(-100..100)
My observations so far are as follows:
With n=10000 and time: fixed(1000), the number of rows getting inserted is 10 million. (10000*1000=10000000)
The number of row-keys/partitions is 10000(i.e n), within which 100 partitions are taken at a time (which means 100 *1000 = 100000 key-value pairs) out of which 50000 key-value pairs are processed at a time. (This is because of select: fixed(1)/2 ~ 50%)
The output message also confirms the same:
Generating batches with [100..100] partitions and [50000..50000] rows (of[100000..100000] total rows in the partitions)
The results that I get are the following for consecutive runs with the same configuration as above:
Run Total_ops Op_rate Partition_rate Row_Rate Time
1 56 19 1885 943246 3.0
2 46 46 4648 2325498 1.0
3 27 30 2982 1489870 0.9
4 59 19 1932 966034 3.1
5 100 17 1730 865182 5.8
Now what I need to understand are as follows:
Which among these metrics is the throughput i.e, No. of records inserted per second? Is it the Row_rate, Op_rate or Partition_rate? If it’s the Row_rate, can I safely conclude here that I am able to insert close to 1 million records per second? Any thoughts on what the Op_rate and Partition_rate mean in this case?
Why is it that the Total_ops vary so drastically in every run ? Has the number of threads got anything to do with this variation? What can I conclude here about the stability of my Cassandra setup?
How do I determine the batch size per thread here? In my example, is the batch size 50000?
Thanks in advance.
Row Rate is the number of CQL Rows that you have inserted into your database. For your table a CQL row is a tuple like (ID uuid, Time timestamp, Value double, Date timestamp).
The Partition Rate is the number of Partitions C* had to construct. A Partition is the data-structure which holds and orders data in Cassandra, data with the same partition key ends up located on the same node. This Partition rate is equal to the number of unique values in the Partition Key that were inserted in the time window. For your table this would be unique values for (ID,Date)
Op Rate is the number of actually CQL operations that had to be done. From your settings it is running unlogged Batches to insert the data. Each insert contains approximately 100 Partitions (Unique combinations of ID and Date) which is why OP Rate * 100 ~= Partition Rate
Total OP should include all operations, read and write. So if you have any read operations those would also be included.
I would suggest changing your batch size to match your workload, or keep it at 1 depending on your actual database usage. This should provide a more realistic scenario. Also it's important to run much longer than just 100 total operations to really get a sense of your system's capabilities. Some of the biggest difficulties come when the size of the dataset increases beyond the amount of RAM in the machine.

Resources