why spark still slow than mysql? - apache-spark

I am trying to work with Apache spark with data source MySQL. I have a cluster having 1 master and 1 slave node and both have 8 GB ram and 2 cores I am submitting my SQL query to spark using spark-shell and that table having 6402821 this many rows. I am performing a group by onto that table. and time taken by MySQL is 5.2secs and using spark when I am performing query the time is 21Secs. why is this happening?
i am also setting some configurations like partitionColumn, upperBound, lowerBound, and numofPartitions but still no change.
I have also tried with executing the query using 1,2,4 cores but the time taken by the spark is same 21Secs.
is this problem occurs because of my MySQL database is on a single machine and
all spark nodes try to query on data onto that single machine?
Can any one help me to solve this issue?
the database having a table called demo_call_stats on which i am trying to query is:
val jdbcDF = spark.read.format("jdbc").options( Map("url" -> "jdbc:mysql://192.168.0.31:3306/cmanalytics?user=root&password=","zeroDateTimeBehaviour"->"convertToNull", "dbtable" -> "cmanalytics.demo_call_stats", "fetchSize" -> "10000", "partitionColumn" -> "newpartition", "lowerBound" -> "0", "upperBound" -> "4", "numPartitions" -> "4")).load()
jdbcDF.createOrReplaceTempView("call_stats")
val sqlDF = sql("select Count(*), classification_id from call_stats where campaign_id = 77 group by classification_id")
sqlDF.show()
Any help will be most appreciated.
Thanks

There is a couple of things you should understand here:
Despite what you might have heard, Spark isn't 'faster than MySQL', simply because this kind of generality doesn't mean anything.
Spark is faster than MySQL for some queries, and MySQL is faster than Spark for others.
Generally speaking, MySQL is a relational database, meaning it has been conceived to serve
as a back-end for an application. It is optimized to access records efficiently as long as they are indexed.
When thinking about databases, I like to think of them as a library with one librarian to help you get the books you want
(I am speaking about a very old school library here, without any computer to help the librarian).
If you ask your librarian:
"I want to know how many books you have that are about Geopolitics",
the librarian can go to the Geopolitics shelf and count the number of books on that shelf.
If you ask your librarian:
"I want to know how many books you have that have at least 500 pages",
the librarian will have to look at every single book in the library to answer your query.
In SQL this is called a full table scans.
Of course you can have several librarians (processors) working on the query to go faster,
but you cannot have more than a few of them (let's say up to 16) inside your library (computer).
Now, Spark has been designed to handle large volume of data, namely libraries that are so big
that they won't fit into a single buildings, and even if it does, they will be so many that
even 16 librarians will take days to look at them all to answer your second query.
What makes Spark faster than MySQL is just this: if you put your books in several buildings,
you can have 16 librarians per building working on your answer.
You can also handle a larger number of books.
Also, since Spark is mostly made to answer the second type of queries rather than queries like "Please bring me 'The Portrait of Dorian Gray', by Oscar Wilde", it means that Spark doesn't care, at least by default, to sort your books in any particular way.
This means that if you want to find that particular book with spark, your librarians will have
to go through the entire library to find it.
Of course, Spark uses many other type of optimizations to perform some queries more efficiently,
but indexation is not one of them (if you are familiar with the notion of Primary Key in mySQL, there are no such thing in Spark).
Other optimizations include storage format like Parquet and ORC that allow you to read only the columns that are useful
to answer your queries, and compression (e.g. Snappy), which are aimed at increasing the number of books you can fit
in your library without having to push the walls.
I hope this metaphor helped you, but please bear in mind that this is just a metaphor and
doesn't fit reality perfectly.
Now, to get back to your question specific details:
Assuming campaign_id is your primary key or you created an index on this column, MySQL will only have
to read the rows for which campaign_id = 77.
On the other hand, Spark will have to ask for mySQL to send all the rows in that table to Spark.
If Spark is clever, it will only ask for the one with campaign_id = 77, and maybe it will send multiple queries to mySQL to get ranges in parallel.
But this means that all the data that MySQL could just read and aggregate will have to be serialized, sent to Spark, and be aggregated by Spark.
I hope you see why this should take longer.
If you want Spark to answer your queries faster than MySQL, you should try copying your table in another format like this.
// replace this line :
// jdbcDF.createOrReplaceTempView("call_stats")
// with :
jdbcDF.write.format("orc").saveAsTable("call_stats")
Another thing you could try is caching your data like this:
jdbcDF.cache().createOrReplaceTempView("call_stats")
Caching won't be bring any improvement for the first query as it will cache the data while performing it, but if you continue querying the same view, it might be faster.
But as I explained above, this doesn't mean Spark will be faster than mySQL for everything.
For small data and local deployements, you can also get a perf improvement by changing this configuration
parameter: spark.sql.shuffle.partitions=4 which is 200 by default.
Hope this helps.

Related

Incremental and parallelism read from RDBMS in Spark using JDBC

I'm working on a project that involves reading data from RDBMS using JDBC and I succeeded reading the data. This is something I will be doing fairly constantly, weekly. So I've been trying to come up with a way to ensure that after the initial read, subsequent ones should only pull updated records instead of pulling the entire data from the table.
I can do this with sqoop incremental import by specifying the three parameters (--check-column, --incremental last-modified/append and --last-value). However, I dont want to use sqoop for this. Is there a way I can replicate same in Spark with Scala?
Secondly, some of the tables do not have unique column which can be used as partitionColumn, so I thought of using a row-number function to add a unique column to these table and then get the MIN and MAX of the unique column as lowerBound and upperBound respectively. My challenge now is how to dynamically parse these values into the read statement like below:
val queryNum = "select a1.*, row_number() over (order by sales) as row_nums from (select * from schema.table) a1"
val df = spark.read.format("jdbc").
option("driver", driver).
option("url",url ).
option("partitionColumn",row_nums).
option("lowerBound", min(row_nums)).
option("upperBound", max(row_nums)).
option("numPartitions", some value).
option("fetchsize",some value).
option("dbtable", queryNum).
option("user", user).
option("password",password).
load()
I know the above code is not right and might be missing a whole lot of processes but I guess it'll give a general overview of what I'm trying to achieve here.
It's surprisingly complicated to handle incremental JDBC reads in Spark. IMHO, it severely limits the ease of building many applications and may not be worth your trouble if Sqoop is doing the job.
However, it is doable. See this thread for an example using the dbtable option:
Apache Spark selects all rows
To keep this job idempotent, you'll need to read in the max row of your prior output either directly from loading all data files or via a log file that you write out each time. If your data files are massive you may need to use the log file, if smaller you could potentially load.

Getting data OUT of Cassandra?

How can I export data, over a period of time (like hourly or daily) or updated records from a Cassandra database? It seems like using an index with a date field might work, but I definitely get timeouts in my cqlsh when I try that by hand, so I'm concerned that it's not reliable to do that.
If that's not the right way, then how do people get their data out of Cassandra and into a traditional database (for analysis, querying with JOINs, etc..)? It's not a java shop, so using Spark is non-trivial (and we don't want to change our whole system to use Spark instead of cassandra directly). Do I have to read sstables and try to keep track of them that way? Is there a way to say "get me all records affected after point in time X" or "get me all changes after timestamp X" or something similar?
It looks like Cassandra is really awesome at rapidly reading and writing individual records, but beyond that Cassandra seems to not be the right tool if you want to pull its data into anything else for analysis or warehousing or querying...
Spark is the most typical to do exactly that (as you say). It does it efficiently and is used often so pretty reliable. Cassandra is not really designed for OLAP workloads but things like spark connector help bridge the gap. DataStax Enterprise might have some more options available to you but I am not sure their current offerings.
You can still just query and page through the whole data set with normal CQL queries, its just not as fast. You can even use ALLOW FILTERING just be wary as its very expensive and can impact your cluster (creating a separate dc for the workload and using LOCOL_CL queries against it helps). You will probably also in that scenario add a < token() and > token() to the where clause to split up the query and prevent too much work on any one coordinator. Organizing your data so that this query is more efficient would be strongly recommended (ie if doing time slices, put things in a partition bucketed by time and clustering key timeuuids so its sequential read for each part of time).
Kinda cheesy sounding but the CSV dump from cqlsh is actually fast and might work for you if your data set is small enough.
I would not recommend going to the sstables directly unless you are familiar with internals and using hadoop or spark.

What is your approach for querying Cassandra with Spark (in R or Python)?

I am working with about a TB of data stored in Cassandra and trying to query it using Spark and R (could be Python).
My preference for querying the data would be to abstract the Cassandra table I'm querying from as a Spark RDD (using sparklyr and the spark-cassandra-connector with spark-sql) and simply doing an inner join on the column of interest (it is a partition key column). The company I'm working with says that this approach is a bad idea as it will translate into an IN clause in CQL and thus cause a big slow-down.
Instead I'm using their preferred method: write a closure that will extract the data for a single id in the partition key using a jdbc connection and then apply that closure 200k times for each id I'm interested in. I use spark_apply to apply that closure in parallel for each executor. I also set my spark.executor.cores to 1 so I get a lot of parellelization.
I'm having a lot of trouble with this approach and am wondering what the best practice is. Is it true that Spark SQL does not account for the slowdown associated with pulling multiple ids from a partition key column (IN operator)?
A few points here:
Working with Spark-SQL is not always the most performant option, the
optimized might not always as good of a job than a job you write
yourself
Check the logs carefully during your work, always check how your high-level queries are translated to CQL queries. In particular, make sure you avoid a full table scan if you can.
If you joining on the partition key, you should look into leveraging the methods: repartitionByCassandraReblica, and joinWithCassandraTable. Have a look at the official doc here: https://github.com/datastax/spark-cassandra-connector/blob/master/doc/2_loading.md and Tip4 of this blog post: https://www.instaclustr.com/cassandra-connector-for-spark-5-tips-for-success/
Finale note, it's quite common to have 2 Cassandra data center when using Spark. The first one serves regular read / write, the second one is used for running Spark. It's a separation of concern best practice (at the cost of an additional DC of course).
Hope it helps!

Cassandra data model too many table

I have a single structured row as input with write rate of 10K per seconds. Each row has 20 columns. Some queries should be answered on these inputs. Because most of the queries needs different WHERE, GROUP BY or ORDER BY, The final data model ended up like this:
primary key for table of query1 : ((column1,column2),column3,column4)
primary key for table of query2 : ((column3,column4),column2,column1)
and so on
I am aware of the limit in number of tables in Cassandra data model (200 is warning and 500 would fail)
Because for every input row I should do an insert in every table, the final write per seconds became big * big data!:
writes per seconds = 10K (input)
* number of tables (queries)
* replication factor
The main question: am I on the right path? Is it normal to have a table for every query even when the input rate is already so high?
Shouldn't I use something like spark or hadoop instead of relying on bare datamodel? Or event Hbase instead of Cassandra?
It could be that Elassandra would resolve your problem.
The query system is quite different from CQL, but the duplication for indexing would automatically be managed by Elassandra on the backend. All the columns of one table will be indexed so the Elasticsearch part of Elassandra can be used with the REST API to query anything you'd like.
In one of my tests, I pushed a huge amount of data to an Elassandra database (8Gb) going non-stop and I never timed out. Also the search engine remained ready pretty much the whole time. More or less what you are talking about. The docs says that it takes 5 to 10 seconds for newly added data to become available in the Elassandra indexes. I guess it will somewhat depend on your installation, but I think that's more than enough speed for most applications.
The use of Elassandra may sound a bit hairy at first, but once in place, it's incredible how fast you can find results. It includes incredible (powerful) WHERE for sure. The GROUP BY is a bit difficult to put in place. The ORDER BY is simple enough, however, when (re-)ordering you lose on speed... Something to keep in mind. On my tests, though, even the ORDER BY equivalents was very fast.

Is it bad to use INDEX in Cassandra if performance is not important?

Background
We have recently started a "Big Data" project where we want to track what users are doing with our product - how often they are logging in, which features they are clicking on, etc - your basic user analytics stuff. We still don't know exactly what questions we will be asking, but most of it will be "how often did X occur over the last Y months?" type of thing, so we started storing the data sooner rather than later thinking we can always migrate, re-shape etc when we need to but if we don't store it it is gone forever.
We are now looking at what sorts of questions we can ask. In a typical RDBMS, this stage would consist of slicing and dicing the data in many different dimensions, exporting to Excel, producing graphs, looking for trends etc - it seems that for Cassandra, this is rather difficult to do.
Currently we are using Apache Spark, and submitting Spark SQL jobs to slice and dice the data. This actually works really well, and we are getting the data we need, but it is rather cumbersome as there doesn't seem to be any native API for Spark that we can connect to from our workstations, so we are stuck using the spark-submit script and a Spark app that wraps some SQL from the command line and outputs to a file which we then have to read.
The question
In a table (or Column Family) with ~30 columns running on 3 nodes with RF 2, how bad would it be to add an INDEX to every non-PK column, so that we could simply query it using CQL across any column? Would there be a horrendous impact on the performance of writes? Would there be a large increase in disk space usage?
The other option I have been investigating is using Triggers, so that for each row inserted, we populated another handful of tables (essentially, custom secondary index tables) - is this a more acceptable approach? Does anyone have any experience of the performance impact of Triggers?
Impact of adding more indexes:
This really depends on your data structure, distribution and how you access it; you were right before when you compared this process to RDMS. For Cassandra, it's best to define your queries first and then build the data model.
These guys have a nice write-up on the performance impacts of secondary indexes:
https://pantheon.io/blog/cassandra-scale-problem-secondary-indexes
The main impact (from the post) is that secondary indexes are local to each node, so to satisfy a query by indexed value, each node has to query its own records to build the final result set (as opposed to a primary key query where it is known exactly which node needs to be quired). So there's not just an impact on writes, but on read performance as well.
In terms of working out the performance on your data model, I'd recommend using the cassandra-stress tool; you can combine it with a data modeler tool that Datastax have built, to quickly generate profile yamls:
http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/data-modeler
For example, I ran the basic stress profile without and then with secondary indexes on the default table, and the "with indexes" batch of writes took a little over 40% longer to complete. There was also an increase in GC operations / duration etc.

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