use spark to scan multiple cassandra tables using spark-cassandra-connector - apache-spark

I have a problem of how to use spark to manipulate/iterate/scan multiple tables of cassandra. Our project uses spark&spark-cassandra-connector connecting to cassandra to scan multiple tables , try to match related value in different tables and if matched, take the extra action such as table inserting. The use case is like below:
sc.cassandraTable(KEYSPACE, "table1").foreach(
row => {
val company_url = row.getString("company_url")
sc.cassandraTable(keyspace, "table2").foreach(
val url = row.getString("url")
val value = row.getString("value")
if (company_url == url) {
sc.saveToCassandra(KEYSPACE, "target", SomeColumns(url, value))
}
)
})
The problems are
As spark RDD is not serializable, the nested search will fail cause sc.cassandraTable returns a RDD. The only way I know to work around is to use sc.broadcast(sometable.collect()). But if the sometable is huge, the collect will consume all the memory. And also, if in the use case, several tables use the broadcast, it will drain the memory.
Instead of broadcast, can RDD.persist handle the case? In my case, I use sc.cassandraTable to read all tables in RDD and persist back to disk, then retrieve the data back for processing. If it works, how can I guarantee the rdd read is done by chunks?
Other than spark, is there any other tool (like hadoop etc.??) which can handle the case gracefully?

It looks like you are actually trying to do a series of Inner Joins. See the
joinWithCassandraTable Method
This allows you to use the elements of One RDD to do a direct query on a Cassandra Table. Depending on the fraction of data you are reading from Cassandra this may be your best bet. If the fraction is too large though you are better off reading the two table separately and then using the RDD.join method to line up rows.
If all else fails you can always manually use the CassandraConnector Object to directly access the Java Driver and do raw requests with that from a distributed context.

Related

Batch processing job (Spark) with lookup table that's too big to fit into memory

I'm trying to write a batch job to process a couple of hundreds of terabytes that currently sit in an HBase database (in an EMR cluster in AWS), all in a single large table. For every row I'm processing, I need to get additional data from a lookup table (a simple integer to string mapping) that is in a second HBase table. We'd be doing 5-10 lookups per row.
My current implementation uses a Spark job that's distributing partitions of the input table to its workers, in the following shape:
Configuration hBaseConfig = newHBaseConfig();
hBaseConfig.set(TableInputFormat.SCAN, convertScanToString(scan));
hBaseConfig.set(TableInputFormat.INPUT_TABLE, tableName);
JavaPairRDD<ImmutableBytesWritable, Result> table = sparkContext.newAPIHadoopRDD(hBaseConfig, TableInputFormat.class, ImmutableBytesWritable.class, Result.class);
table.map(val -> {
// some preprocessing
}).foreachPartition(p -> {
p.forEachRemaining(row -> {
// code that does the lookup
});
});
The problem is that the lookup table is too big to fit in the workers' memory. They all need access to all parts of the lookup table, but their access pattern would significantly benefit from a cache.
Am I right in thinking that I cannot use a simple map as a broadcast variable because it'd need to fit into memory?
Spark uses a shared nothing architecture, so I imagine there won't be an easy way to share a cache across all workers, but can we build a simple LRU cache for every individual worker?
How would I implement such a local worker cache that gets the data from the lookup table in HBase on a cache miss? Can I somehow distribute a reference to the second table to all workers?
I'm not set on my choice of technology, apart from HBase as the data source. Is there a framework other than Spark which could be a better fit for my use case?
You have a few of options for dealing with this requirement:
1- Use RDD or Dataset joins
You can load both of your HBase tables as Spark RDD or Datasets and then do a join on your lookup key.
Spark will split both RDD into partitions and shuffle content around so that rows with the same keys end up on the same executors.
By managing the number of number of partitions within spark you should be able to join 2 tables on any arbitrary sizes.
2- Broadcast a resolver instance
Instead of broadcasting a map, you can broadcast a resolver instance that does a HBase lookup and temporary LRU cache. Each executor will get a copy of this instance and can manage its own cache and you can invoke them within for foreachPartition() code.
Beware, the resolver instance needs to implement Serializable so you will have to declare the cache, HBase connections and HBase Configuration properties as transient to be initialized on each executor.
I run such a setup in Scala on one of the projects I maintain: it works and can be more efficient than the straight Spark join if you know your access patterns and manage you cache efficiently
3- Use the HBase Spark connector to implement your lookup logic
Apache HBase has recently incorporated improved HBase Spark connectors
The documentation is pretty sparse right now, you need to look at the JIRA tickets and the documentation of the previous incarnation of these tools
Cloudera's SparkOnHBase but the last unit test in the test suite looks pretty much like what you want
I have no experience with this API though.

Consistent view of data in SPARK Data Frame

Considering lazy evaluation, actions, etc. my understanding is from others, that:
if I make repeated access to a dataframe,
that was built from, say, a Hive table,
that (the Hive table) is subject to mutation,
then this changed data will show up on every dataframe operation that is issued subsequently.
How can I get a consistent dataframe then a la ORACLE's read consistency model, other than copying to a separate non-mutable Hive table?
I am assuming that a TempView will solve the problem, or is that not so? Actually I think not. Performance issues.
Ideally I would like the dataframe will all records persisted, but may be that is not how it works with the lazy protocol.
How can I get a consistent dataframe then a la ORACLE's read consistency model, other than copying to a separate non-mutable Hive table?
There is simply no such option.
Naively one could suggest cache and forced evaluation:
val df: DataFrame = ???
df.cache // Default StorageLevel - MEMORY_AND_DISK
df.foreach(_ => ())
but it just doesn't provide required guarantees, especially in case of node failures. You could increase reliability by setting StorageLevel to MEMORY_AND_DISK_2, but it still can result in silent correctness errors.
So to be blunt - Spark is not a database, don't try to treat it like a one. if you already use Hive, and mutable state, then skip Spark and use Hive's ACID and transaction options.

What is the fastest way to get a large number of time ranges using Apache Spark?

I have about 100 GB of time series data in Hadoop. I'd like to use Spark to grab all data from 1000 different time ranges.
I have tried this using Apache Hive by creating an extremely long SQL statement that has about 1000 'OR BETWEEN X AND Y OR BETWEEN Q AND R' statements.
I have also tried using Spark. In this technique I've created a dataframe that has the time ranges in question and loaded that into spark with:
spark_session.CreateDataFrame()
and
df.registerTempTable()
With this, I'm doing a join with the newly created timestamp dataframe and the larger set of timestamped data.
This query is taking an extremely long time and I'm wondering if there's a more efficient way to do this.
Especially if the data is not partitioned or ordered in any special way, you or Spark need to scan it all no matter what.
I would define a predicate given the set of time ranges:
import scala.collection.immutable.Range
val ranges: List[Range] = ??? // load your ranges here
def matches(timestamp: Int): Boolean = {
// This is not efficient, a better data structure than a List
// should be used, but this is just an example
ranges.contains(_.contains(timestamp))
}
val data: RDD[(Int, T)] = ??? // load the data in an RDD
val filtered = data.filter(x => matches(x.first))
You can do the same with DataFrame/DataSet and UDFs.
This works well if the set of ranges is provided in the driver. If instead it comes from a table, like the 100G data, first collect it back in the driver, if not too big.
Your Spark job goes through 100GB dataset to select relevant data.
I don’t think there is big difference between using SQL or data frame api, as under the hood the full scan happening anyway.
I would consider re-structuring your data, so it is optimised for specific queries.
In your cases partitioning by time can give quite significant improvement (for ex. HIVE table with partitioning).
If you perform search using the same field, that has been used for partitioning - Spark job will only look into relevant partitions.

How to paralellize RDD work when using cassandra spark connector for data aggration?

Here is the sample senario, we have real time data record in cassandra, and we want to aggregate the data in different time ranges. What I write code like below:
val timeRanges = getTimeRanges(report)
timeRanges.foreach { timeRange =>
val (timestampStart, timestampEnd) = timeRange
val query = _sc.get.cassandraTable(report.keyspace, utilities.Helper.makeStringValid(report.scope)).
where(s"TIMESTAMP > ?", timestampStart).
where(s"VALID_TIMESTAMP <= ?", timestampEnd)
......do the aggregation work....
what the issue of the code is that for every time range, the aggregation work is running not in parallized. My question is how can I parallized the aggregation work? Since RDD can't run in another RDD or Future? Is there any way to parallize the work, or we can't using spark connector here?
Use the joinWithCassandraTable function. This allows you to use the data from one RDD to access C* and pull records just like in your example.
https://github.com/datastax/spark-cassandra-connector/blob/master/doc/2_loading.md#performing-efficient-joins-with-cassandra-tables-since-12
joinWithCassandraTable utilizes the java driver to execute a single
query for every partition required by the source RDD so no un-needed
data will be requested or serialized. This means a join between any
RDD and a Cassandra Table can be preformed without doing a full table
scan. When preformed between two Cassandra Tables which share the
same partition key this will not require movement of data between
machines. In all cases this method will use the source RDD's
partitioning and placement for data locality.
Finally , we using union to join each RDD and makes them parallized.

Spark Cassandra Iterative Query

I am applying the following through the Spark Cassandra Connector:
val links = sc.textFile("linksIDs.txt")
links.map( link_id =>
{
val link_speed_records = sc.cassandraTable[Double]("freeway","records").select("speed").where("link_id=?",link_id)
average = link_speed_records.mean().toDouble
})
I would like to ask if there is way to apply the above sequence of queries more efficiently given that the only parameter I always change is the 'link_id'.
The 'link_id' value is the only Partition Key of my Cassandra 'records' table.
I am using Cassandra v.2.0.13, Spark v.1.2.1 and Spark-Cassandra Connector v.1.2.1
I was thinking if it is possible to open a Cassandra Session in order to apply those queries and still get the 'link_speed_records' as a SparkRDD.
Use the joinWithCassandra Method to use an RDD of keys to pull data out of a Cassandra Table. The method given in the question will be extremely expensive comparatively and also not function well as a parallelizable request.
https://github.com/datastax/spark-cassandra-connector/blob/master/doc/2_loading.md#performing-efficient-joins-with-cassandra-tables-since-12

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