Spark Multidimensional RDD partitioning - apache-spark

If I create two rdds like these:
a = sc.parallelize([[1 for j in range(3)] for i in xrange(10**9)])
b = sc.parallelize([[1 for j in xrange(10**9)] for i in range(3)])
When you think about it partitioning first one is intuitive, billion rows are partitioned around workers.
But for the second one there are 3 rows and for each row there are billion item.
My question is: For the second line, if I have 2 workers does one row goes to one worker, and the other two rows goes to the other worker?

Data distribution in Spark is limited to the top level sequence you use to create a RDD.
Depending on a configuration in the second case you'll get at most three non-empty partitions, each assigned to a single worker so in the second scenario 1-2 split is a likely outcome.
Generally speaking small number of elements, especially very large, doesn't fit well into Spark processing model.

Related

Spark dataframe distinct write is increasing the output size by almost 10 fold

I have a case where i am trying to write some results using dataframe write into S3 using the below query with input_table_1 size is 13 Gb and input_table_2 as 1 Mb
input_table_1 has columns account, membership and
input_table_2 has columns role, id , membership_id, quantity, start_date
SELECT
/*+ BROADCASTJOIN(input_table_2) */
account,
role,
id,
quantity,
cast(start_date AS string) AS start_date
FROM
input_table_1
INNER JOIN
input_table_2
ON array_contains(input_table_1.membership, input_table_2.membership_id)
where membership array contains list of member_ids
This dataset write using Spark dataframe is generating around 1.1TiB of data in S3 with around 700 billion records.
We identified that there are duplicates and used dataframe.distinct.write.parquet("s3path") to remove the duplicates . The record count is reduced to almost 1/3rd of the previous total count with around 200 billion rows but we observed that the output size in S3 is now 17.2 TiB .
I am very confused how this can happen.
I have used the following spark conf settings
spark.sql.shuffle.partitions=20000
I have tried to do a coalesce and write to s3 but it did not work.
Please suggest if this is expected and when can be done ?
There's two sides to this:
1) Physical translation of distinct in Spark
The Spark catalyst optimiser turns a distinct operation into an aggregation by means of the ReplaceDeduplicateWithAggregate rule (Note: in the execution plan distinct is named Deduplicate).
This basically means df.distinct() on all columns is translated into a groupBy on all columns with an empty aggregation:
df.groupBy(df.columns:_*).agg(Map.empty).
Spark uses a HashPartitioner when shuffling data for a groupBy on respective columns. Since the groupBy clause in your case contains all columns (well, implicitly, but it does), you're more or less randomly shuffling data to different nodes in the cluster.
Increasing spark.sql.shuffle.partitions in this case is not going to help.
Now on to the 2nd side, why does this affect the size of your parquet files so much?
2) Compression in parquet files
Parquet is a columnar format, will say your data is organised in columns rather than row by row. This allows for powerful compression if data is adequately laid-out & ordered. E.g. if a column contains the same value for a number of consecutive rows, it is enough to write that value just once and make a note of the number of repetitions (a strategy called run length encoding). But Parquet also uses various other compression strategies.
Unfortunately, data ends up pretty randomly in your case after shuffling to remove duplicates. The original partitioning of input_table_1 was much better fitted.
Solutions
There's no single answer how to solve this, but here's a few pointers I'd suggest doing next:
What's causing the duplicates? Could these be removed upstream? Or is there a problem with the join condition causing duplicates?
A simple solution is to just repartition the dataset after distinct to match the partitioning of your input data. Adding a secondary sorting (sortWithinPartition) is likely going to give you even better compression. However, this comes at the cost of an additional shuffle!
As #matt-andruff pointed out below, you can also achieve this in SQL using cluster by. Obviously, that also requires you to move the distinct keyword into your SQL statement.
Write your own deduplication algorithm as Spark Aggregator and group / shuffle the data just once in a meaningful way.

Spark -- performance impact on join with multiple columns

Currently we have to consider use case to join many columns (may be 20-30 or even more) between two dataframes to identify new rows to persist.
One dataframe can contain 200k rows and the other 40k rows but can keep growing.
we run the process in cluster, roughly 40 worker nodes..
so the question is not about can spark do it, but not paralyze the entire cluster
The question from this scenario:
How cluster performance differ based on numbers of columns to join (reshuffle etc)?
Is it practical to partition the dataframe across all the joining columns?

Spark DataFrame RangePartitioner

[New to Spark] Language - Scala
As per docs, RangePartitioner sorts and divides the elements into chunks and distributes the chunks to different machines. How would it work for below example.
Let's say we have a dataframe with 2 columns and one column (say 'A') has continuous values from 1 to 1000. There is another dataframe with same schema but the corresponding column has only 4 values 30, 250, 500, 900. (These could be any values, randomly selected from 1 to 1000)
If I partition both using RangePartitioner,
df_a.partitionByRange($"A")
df_b.partitionByRange($"A")
how will the data from both the dataframes be distributed across nodes ?
Assuming that the number of partitions is 5.
Also, if I know that second DataFrame has less number of values then will reducing number of partitions for it make any difference ?
What I am struggling to understand is that how Spark maps one partition of df_a to a partition of df_b and how it sends (if it does) both those partitions to same machine for processing.
A very detailed explanation of how RangePartitioner works internally is described here
Specific to your question, RangePartitioner samples the RDD at runtime, collects the statistics, and only then are the ranges (limits) evaluated. Note that there are 2 parameters here - ranges (logical), and partitions (physical). The number of partitions can be affected by many factors - number of input files, inherited number from parent RDD, 'spark.sql.shuffle.partitions' in case of shuffling, etc. The ranges evaluated according to the sampling. In any case, RangePartitioner ensures every range is contained in single partition.
how will the data from both the dataframes be distributed across nodes ? how Spark maps one partition of df_a to a partition of df_b
I assume you implicitly mean joining 'A' and 'B', otherwise the question does not make any sense. In that case, Spark would make sure to match partitions with ranges on both DataFrames, according to their statistics.

pyspark: Efficiently have partitionBy write to same number of total partitions as original table

I had a question that is related to pyspark's repartitionBy() function which I originally posted in a comment on this question. I was asked to post it as a separate question, so here it is:
I understand that df.partitionBy(COL) will write all the rows with each value of COL to their own folder, and that each folder will (assuming the rows were previously distributed across all the partitions by some other key) have roughly the same number of files as were previously in the entire table. I find this behavior annoying. If I have a large table with 500 partitions, and I use partitionBy(COL) on some attribute columns, I now have for example 100 folders which each contain 500 (now very small) files.
What I would like is the partitionBy(COL) behavior, but with roughly the same file size and number of files as I had originally.
As demonstration, the previous question shares a toy example where you have a table with 10 partitions and do partitionBy(dayOfWeek) and now you have 70 files because there are 10 in each folder. I would want ~10 files, one for each day, and maybe 2 or 3 for days that have more data.
Can this be easily accomplished? Something like df.write().repartition(COL).partitionBy(COL) seems like it might work, but I worry that (in the case of a very large table which is about to be partitioned into many folders) having to first combine it to some small number of partitions before doing the partitionBy(COL) seems like a bad idea.
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!
You've got several options. In my code below I'll assume you want to write in parquet, but of course you can change that.
(1) df.repartition(numPartitions, *cols).write.partitionBy(*cols).parquet(writePath)
This will first use hash-based partitioning to ensure that a limited number of values from COL make their way into each partition. Depending on the value you choose for numPartitions, some partitions may be empty while others may be crowded with values -- for anyone not sure why, read this. Then, when you call partitionBy on the DataFrameWriter, each unique value in each partition will be placed in its own individual file.
Warning: this approach can lead to lopsided partition sizes and lopsided task execution times. This happens when values in your column are associated with many rows (e.g., a city column -- the file for New York City might have lots of rows), whereas other values are less numerous (e.g., values for small towns).
(2) df.sort(sortCols).write.parquet(writePath)
This options works great when you want (1) the files you write to be of nearly equal sizes (2) exact control over the number of files written. This approach first globally sorts your data and then finds splits that break up the data into k evenly-sized partitions, where k is specified in the spark config spark.sql.shuffle.partitions. This means that all values with the same values of your sort key are adjacent to each other, but sometimes they'll span a split, and be in different files. This, if your use-case requires all rows with the same key to be in the same partition, then don't use this approach.
There are two extra bonuses: (1) by sorting your data its size on disk can often be reduced (e.g., sorting all events by user_id and then by time will lead to lots of repetition in column values, which aids compression) and (2) if you write to a file format the supports it (like Parquet) then subsequent readers can read data in optimally by using predicate push-down, because the parquet writer will write the MAX and MIN values of each column in the metadata, allowing the reader to skip rows if the query specifies values outside of the partition's (min, max) range.
Note that sorting in Spark is more expensive than just repartitioning and requires an extra stage. Behind the scenes Spark will first determine the splits in one stage, and then shuffle the data into those splits in another stage.
(3) df.rdd.partitionBy(customPartitioner).toDF().write.parquet(writePath)
If you're using spark on Scala, then you can write a customer partitioner, which can get over the annoying gotchas of the hash-based partitioner. Not an option in pySpark, unfortunately. If you really want to write a custom partitioner in pySpark, I've found this is possible, albeit a bit awkward, by using rdd.repartitionAndSortWithinPartitions:
df.rdd \
.keyBy(sort_key_function) \ # Convert to key-value pairs
.repartitionAndSortWithinPartitions(numPartitions=N_WRITE_PARTITIONS,
partitionFunc=part_func) \
.values() # get rid of keys \
.toDF().write.parquet(writePath)
Maybe someone else knows an easier way to use a custom partitioner on a dataframe in pyspark?
df.repartition(COL).write().partitionBy(COL)
will write out one file per partition. This will not work well if one of your partition contains a lot of data. e.g. if one partition contains 100GB of data, Spark will try to write out a 100GB file and your job will probably blow up.
df.repartition(2, COL).write().partitionBy(COL)
will write out a maximum of two files per partition, as described in this answer. This approach works well for datasets that are not very skewed (because the optimal number of files per partition is roughly the same for all partitions).
This answer explains how to write out more files for the partitions that have a lot of data and fewer files for the small partitions.

How does Sparks RDD.randomSplit actually split the RDD

So assume ive got an rdd with 3000 rows. The 2000 first rows are of class 1 and the 1000 last rows are of class2.
The RDD is partitioned across 100 partitions.
When calling RDD.randomSplit(0.8,0.2)
Does the function also shuffle the rdd? Our does the splitting simply sample 20% continuously of the rdd? Or does it select 20% of the partitions randomly?
Ideally does the resulting split have the same class distribution as the original RDD. (i.e. 2:1)
Thanks
For each range defined by weights array there is a separate mapPartitionsWithIndex transformation which preserves partitioning.
Each partition is sampled using a set of BernoulliCellSamplers. For each split it iterates over the elements of a given partition and selects item if value of the next random Double is in a given range defined by normalized weights. All samplers for a given partition use the same RNG seed. It means it:
doesn't shuffle a RDD
doesn't take continuous blocks other than by chance
takes a random sample from each partition
takes non-overlapping samples
require n-splits passes over data

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