Saving in parquet format from multiple spark workers - apache-spark

I have a job that needs to save the result in parquet/avro format from all the worker nodes. Can I do a separate parquet file for each of the individual partition and read all the resulting files as a single table? Or is there a better way of going about this?
Input is divided into 96 partitions and result needs to be saved on HDFS. When I tried to save it as a file it created over a million small files.

You can do a repartition (or coalesce if you always want fewer partitions) to the desired number of partitions just before you call write. Your data will then be written into the same number of files. When you want to read in the data, you simply point to the folder with the files rather than to a specific file. Like this:
sqlContext.read.parquet("s3://my-bucket/path/to/files/")

Related

Is one parquet files under the parquet folder a partition?

I saved my dataframe as parquet format
df.write.parquet('/my/path')
When checking on HDFS, I can see that there is 10 part-xxx.snappy.parquet files under the parquet directory /my/path
My question is: is one part-xxx.snappy.parquet file correspond to a partition of my dataframe ?
Yes, part-** files are created based on number of partitions in the dataframe while writing to HDFS.
To check number of partitions in the dataframe:
df.rdd.getNumPartitions()
To control number of files writing to filesystem we can use .repartition (or) .coalesce() (or) dynamically based on our requirement.
Yes, this creates one file per Spark-partition.
Note, that you can also partition files by some attribute:
df.write.partitionBy("key").parquet("/my/path")
in such case Spark is going to create up to Spark-partition number of files for each parquet-partition. Common way to reduce number of files in such case is to repartition data by key before writing (this effectively creates one file per partition).

is it possible in spark to read large s3 csv files in parallel?

Typically spark files are saved in multiple parts, allowing each worker to read different files.
is there a similar solution when working on a single files?
s3 provides the select API that should allow this kind of behaviour.
spark appears to support this API (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/emr/latest/ReleaseGuide/emr-spark-s3select.html), but this appears to relate only for optimising queries, not for parallelising reading
S3 Select is unrelated to your use case.
S3 Select: have SQL select and project done in the S3 store, so that the client gets the prefiltered data. Result is returned as CSV with the header stripped, or JSON. You cannot then have >1 worker target this. (you could try, but each worker would have to read in and discard all the data in the runup to its offset, and predicting the ranges each worker can process is essentially impossible)
You: have > 1 worker process different parts of a file which has been partitioned
Partitioning large files into smaller parts for parallel processing is exactly what Spark (and mapreduce, hive etc) do for any format where it makes sense.
CSV files are easily partitioned provided they are compressed with a splittable compression format (none, snappy -but not gzip)
All that's needed is to tell spark what the split threshold is. For S3a, set the value fs.s3a.block.size to a value which it can then split up on, then your queries against CSV, Avro, ORC, Parquet and similar will all be split up amongst workers.
Unless your workers are doing a lot of computation per row, there's a minimum block size before it's even worth doing this. Experiment.
Edit: this is now out of date and depends on the type of CSV. Some CSV's allow new lines within columns. These are un splitable. CSVs that do not an guarantee that a newlines only represent a new row can be split
FYI csv's are inherently single threaded. There is no extra information in a csv file that tells the reader where any row starts without reading the whole file from the start.
If you want multiple readers on the same file use a format like Parquet which has row groups with an explicitly defined start position defined in the footer that can be read by independent readers. When spark goes to read the parquet file it will split out row groups into separate tasks. Ultimately having appropriately sized files is very important for spark performance.

Process multiple small files of total size 100GB in HDFS

I have a requirement in my project to process multiple .txt message files using PySpark. The files are moved from local dir to HDFS path (hdfs://messageDir/..) using batches and for every batch, i could see a few thousand .txt files and their total size is around 100GB. Almost all of the files are less than 1 MB.
May i know how HDFS stores these files and perform splits? Because every file is less than 1 MB (less than HDFS block size of 64/128MB), I dont think any split would happen but the files will be replicated and stored in 3 different data nodes.
When i use Spark to read all the files inside the HDFS directory (hdfs://messageDir/..) using wild card matching like *.txt as below:-
rdd = sc.textFile('hdfs://messageDir/*.txt')
How does Spark read the files and perform Partition because HDFS doesn't have any partition for these small files.
What if my file size increases over a period of time and get 1TB volume of small files for every batch? Can someone tell me how this can be handled?
I think you are mixing things up a little.
You have files sitting in HDFS. Here, Blocksize is the important factor. Depending on your configuration, a block normally has 64MB or 128MB. Thus, each of your 1MB files, take up 64MB in HDFS. This is aweful lot of unused space. Can you concat these TXT-files together? Otherwise you will run out of HDFS blocks, really quick. HDFS is not made to store a large amount of small files.
Spark can read files from HDFS, Local, MySQL. It cannot control the storage principles used there. As Spark uses RDDs, they are partitioned to get part of the data to the workers. The number of partitions can be checked and controlled (using repartition). For HDFS reading, this number is defined by the number of files and blocks.
Here is a nice explanation on how SparkContext.textFile() handles Partitioning and Splits on HDFS: How does Spark partition(ing) work on files in HDFS?
You can read from spark even files are small. Problem is HDFS. Usually HDFS block size is really large(64MB, 128MB, or more bigger), so many small files make name node overhead.
If you want to make more bigger file, you need to optimize reducer. Number of write files is determined by how many reducer will write. You can use coalesce or repartition method to control it.
Another way is make one more step that merge files. I wrote spark application code that coalesce. I put target record size of each file, and application get total number of records, then how much number of coalesce can be estimated.
You can use Hive or otherwise.

PySpark: Writing input files to separate output files without repartitioning

I have a sequence of very large daily gzipped files. I'm trying to use PySpark to re-save all the files in S3 in Parquet format for later use.
If for a single file (in example, 2012-06-01) I do:
dataframe = spark.read.csv('s3://mybucket/input/20120601.gz', schema=my_schema, header=True)
dataframe.write.parquet('s3://mybucket/output/20120601')
it works, but since gzip isn't splittable it runs on a single host and I get no benefit of using the cluster.
I tried reading in a chunk of files at once, and using partitionBy to write the output to daily files like this (in example, reading in a month):
dataframe = spark.read.csv('s3://mybucket/input/201206*.gz', schema=my_schema, header=True)
dataframe.write.partitionBy('dayColumn').parquet('s3://mybucket/output/')
This time, individual files are read in different executors like I want, but the executors later die and the process fails. I believe since the files are so large, and the partitionBy is somehow using unnecessary resources (a shuffle?) it's crashing the tasks.
I don't actually need to re-partition my dataframe since this is just a 1:1 mapping. Is there anyway to make each individual task write to a separate, explicitly named parquet output file?
I was thinking something like
def write_file(date):
# get input/output locations from date
dataframe = spark.read.csv(input_location, schema=my_schema, header=True)
dataframe.write.parquet(output_location)
spark.sparkContext.parallelize(my_dates).for_each(write_file)
except this doesn't work since you can't broadcast the spark session to the cluster. Any suggestions?
Writing input files to separate output files without repartitioning
TL;DR This is what your code is already doing.
partitionBy is causing a unnecessary shuffle
No. DataFrameWriter.partitionBy doesn't shuffle at all.
it works, but since gzip isn't splittable
You can:
Drop compression completely - Parquet uses internal compression.
Use splittable compression like bzip2.
Unpack the files to a temporary storage before submitting the job.
If you are concerned about resources used by partitionBy (it might open larger number of files for each executor thread) you can actually shuffle to improve performance - DataFrame partitionBy to a single Parquet file (per partition). Single file is probably to much but
dataframe \
.repartition(n, 'dayColumn', 'someOtherColumn') \
.write.partitionBy('dayColumn') \
.save(...)
where someOtherColumn can be chosen to get reasonable cardinality, should improve things.

Need less parquet files

I am doing the following process
rdd.toDF.write.mode(SaveMode.Append).partitionBy("Some Column").parquet(output_path)
However, under each partition, there are too many parquet files and each of them, the size is very small, that will makes my following steps become very slow to load all the parquet files. Is there a better way that under each partition, make less parquet files and increase the single parquet file size?
You can repartition before save:
rdd.toDF.repartition("Some Column").write.mode(SaveMode.Append).partitionBy("Some Column")
I used to have this problem.
Actually you can't control the partition of files because it depends on the executor doing.
The way to work around it is using method coalesce to make a shuffle and you can make how many partition you want but it's not efficient way you also need to set driver memory enough to handle this operation.
df = df.coalesce(numPartitions).write.partitionBy(""yyyyy").parquet("xxxx")
I also faced this issue. The problem is if you use coalesce each partition gets same number of parquet files. Now different partitions have different size so ideally I need different coalesce for each partition.
It's going to be really quite expensive if you open a lot of small files. Let's say you open 1k files and each filesize are far from the value of your parquet.block.size.
Here are my suggestions:
Create a job that will first merge your input parquet files to have smaller number of files where their sizes are near or equal to parquet.block.size. The default block size for 128Mb, though it's configurable by updating parquet.block.size. Spark would love if your parquet file is near before or equal the value of your parquet.block.size. The block size is the size of a row group being buffered in memory.
Or update your spark job to just read limited number of files
Or if you have a big machine and/or resources, just do the right tuning.
Hive query has a way to merge small files into larger one. This is not available in spark sql. Also, reducing spark.sql.shuffle.partitions wont help with Dataframe API.
I tried below solution and it generated lesser number of parquet files(from 800 parquet files to 29).
Suppose the data is loaded to a dataframe df
Create a temporary table in hive.
df.createOrReplaceTempView("tempTable")
spark.sql("CREATE TABLE test_temp LIKE test")
spark.sql("INSERT INTO TABLE test_temp SELECT * FROM tempTable")
The test_temp will contain small parquet files.
Populate final hive table from temporary table
spark.sql("INSERT INTO test SELECT * FROM test_temp")
The final table will contain lesser files. Drop temporary table after populating final table.

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