Possibilities of Hadoop with MSSQL Reporting - azure

I have been evaluating Hadoop on azure HDInsight to find a big data solution for our reporting application. The key part of this technology evaluation is that the I need to integrate with MSSQL Reporting Services as that is what our application already uses. We are very short on developer resources so the more I can make this into an engineering exercise the better. What I have tried so far
Use an ODBC connection from MSSQL mapped to the Hive on HDInsight.
Use an ODBC connection from MSSQL using HBASE on HDInsight.
Use SPARKQL locally on the azure HDInsight Remote desktop
What I have found is that HBASE and Hive are far slower to use with our reports. For test data I used a table with 60k rows and found that the report on MSSQL ran in less than 10 seconds. I ran the query on the hive query console and on the ODBC connection and found that it took over a minute to execute. Spark was faster (30 seconds) but there is no way to connect to it externally since ports cannot be opened on the HDInsight cluster.
Big data and Hadoop are all new to me. My question is, am I looking for Hadoop to do something it is not designed to do and are there ways to make this faster?I have considered caching results and periodically refreshing them, but it sounds like a management nightmare. Kylin looks promising but we are pretty married to windows azure, so I am not sure that is a viable solution.

Look at this documentation on optimizing Hive queries: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/hdinsight-hadoop-optimize-hive-query/
Specifically look at ORC and using Tez. I would create a cluster that has Tez on by default and then store your data in ORC format. Your queries should be much more performant then.

If going through Spark is fast enough, you should consider using the Microsoft Spark ODBC driver. I am using it and the performance is not comparable to what you'll get with MSSQL, other RDBMS or something like ElasticSearch but it does work pretty reliably.

Related

Spark as execution engine or spark as an application?

Which option is better to use, spark as an execution engine on hive or accessing hive tables using spark SQL? And Why?
A few assumptions here are:
Reason to opt for SQL is to stay user friendly, e.g. if you have business users trying to access data.
Hive is in consideration because it provides an SQL like interface and persistence of data
If that is true, Spark-SQL is perhaps the better way forward. It is better integrated within Spark and as an integral part of Spark, it will provide more features (one example is structured streaming). You will still get user friendliness and an SQL like interface to Spark so you will get full benefits. But you will need to manage your system only from Spark's point of view. Hive installation and management will still be there but from a single perspective.
Using Hive with Spark as execution engine will keep you limited based upon how good a translation Hive's libraries are able to do to convert your HQL to Spark. They may do a pretty good job but you will still loose the advanced features of Spark SQL. And new features may take longer to get integrated in Hive compared to Spark SQL.
Also, with Hive exposed to end users, some advanced users or data engineering teams may want access to Spark. This will cause you to manage two tools. System management may get more tedious compared to only using Spark-SQL in this scenario as Spark SQL has the potential to serve both non-technical and advanced users and even if advanced users use pyspark, spark-shell or more, they will still be integrated within the same toolset.

How to link Virtuoso distributed version to Hadoop

I Have a cluster of 4 nodes, I installed Hadoop+ Spark (GraphX)...
Now I have to process a big RDF dataset,
my question is : Can I install Virtuoso on the cluster so to store this RDF datasets and to be able to execute SPARQL distributed queries?
To the best of your knowledge, I need a web endpoint to allow users putting their SPARQL Queries.
in other words: is Virtuoso a good solution that works in a hadoop cluster, and can use SPARK to execute the distributed queries?
The Apache Spark website indicates that Spark SQL can be used to query across JDBC and JSON data sources --
DataFrames and SQL provide a common way to access a variety of data sources, including Hive, Avro, Parquet, ORC, JSON, and JDBC. You can even join data across these sources.
Virtuoso (both Open Source and Enterprise Edition) can deliver SPARQL results as JSON serializations, so that is an option.
We (OpenLink Software) also provide JDBC drivers for Virtuoso (again, both Open Source and Enterprise Edition), so that is also an option.
We are not Apache Spark experts, so we cannot provide much guidance for getting these working beyond assisting with Virtuoso JDBC URLs and/or retrieving SPARQL query results in JSON serialization.
In the other direction, Virtuoso (Enterprise Edition; not Open Source Edition) can be used to query against external ODBC data sources, and there are ODBC drivers available for Hadoop/SPARK data sources, so this is also an option.
We are not Apache Spark experts, so we cannot provide much guidance for getting their drivers working, but once you have a functional ODBC DSN on the Virtuoso host, we can assist in getting Virtuoso connected to and querying against it.
Are you seeking to upload RDF datasets from your Hadoop Cluster using SPARK jobs? If so, you can use JDBC and the connection to Virtuoso.
I stumbled upon a Dzone doc that covers SPARK and JDBC which once understood you can apply to Virtuoso via its ability to process SPARQL queries via SQL connections.
I hope that helps, if not, we can discuss further.

Spark goodness with Cassandra?

I've been reading about Apache Cassandra lately to learn how it works and how to use it for IoT projects, especially in the need of time series based database..
However, I started to notice that Apache Spark is often mentioned when people talk about Cassandra too.
The question is, as long as I can use Cassandra cluster of nodes to serve my app, to store and read data, why would I need Apache Spark? any useful use-cases are appreciated!
The answer is broad but summarizing ... Cassandra is highly scalable and there are lot of scenarios where it fits but CQL sintax has some limitations if you don't have your schema ready for some queries.
If you want to make use of your data without restrictions and doing analytical workloads with your cassandra data or join with other tables Spark is the most appropriate complement. Spark has a tight integration with Cassandra.
I recommend you to check this slides: http://www.slideshare.net/patrickmcfadin/apache-cassandra-and-spark-you-got-the-the-lighter-lets-start-the-fire?qid=48e2528c-a03c-49b4-879e-45599b2aff34&v=&b=&from_search=5
Cassandra is for storing data where as Spark is for performing some computation on top of it. Analogy with Hadoop: Cassandra is like HDFS where as Spark is like Map Reduce.
Especially with computations, when using DataStax Cassandra connector, data locality can be exploited. If you need to do some computation which modifies a row (but doesn't really depend on anything else), then that operation is optimized to run locally on each machine in cluster without any data movement in network.
Same goes with a lot of other Spark workload, the actions(some function which modifies the data) are done locally and only result is sent to client. As far as I know, when you want to do analytics on top of data stored in Cassandra, Spark is well supported and popular choice. If you don't need to do any operations on the data, still you can use Spark for other purposes like I mentioned below.
Spark streaming can be used to ingest or export data from Cassandra ( I used it a lot personally). The same data import/export can be achieved with small hand-written JDBC agents but Spark streaming code I wrote for ingesting 10GB data from Cassandra contains less than 20 lines of code with multi machine-multi threading built-in and an admin UI where I can see the job progress.
With Spark+Zeppelin, we can visualize Cassandra data using Spark, we can build beautiful UIs with little Spark code where users can even enter input and see the result as graph/table etc.
Note: Actually, visualization can be better with Kibana/ElasticSearch or Solr/Banana when used with Cassandra but they are very hard to setup and indexing has it's own issues to deal with.
There are a lot of other use cases, but personally I used Spark as a Swiss army knife for multiple tasks.
Apache cassandra is have feature like fast read and write so you can use it with the apache spark streaming to write your data directly into cassandra without legacy.
For use case you can consider any video application to upload video with the help of streaming and directly store it into cassandra blob.

What specific benefits can we get by using SparkSQL to access Hive tables compared to using JDBC to read tables from SQL server?

I just got this question while designing the storage part for a Hadoop-based platform. If we want to have data scientists to have access to the tables which have already been stored in a relational database (e.g.SQL-server of a Azure Virtual Machine), then will there be any particular benefits if we import the tables from SQL-server to HDFS (e.g. WASB) and create Hive tables on top of them?
In other words, since Spark allows users to read data from other databases using JDBC,is there any performance improvement if we persist the tables from the database in appropriate format (avro, parquet etc.) in HDFS and use SparkSQL to access them using HQL?
I am sorry if this question has been asked, I have done some research but could not get a comparison between the two methodologies.
I think there will be a big performance improvement as the data is local (assuming Spark is running on same Hadoop cluster where the data is stored on HDFS). Using JDBC if the actions/processing performed is interactive then user has to wait for the data to be loaded through JDBC from another machine (N/W latency and IO throughput) whereas if that is done upfront then user (data scientist) can concentrate on performing the actions straight away.

Spark Sql JDBC Support

Currently we are building a reporting platform as a data store we used Shark. Since the development of Shark is stopped so we are in the phase of evaluating Spark SQL. Based on the use cases we have we had few questions.
1) We have data from various sources( MySQL, Oracle, Cassandra, Mongo). We would like to know how can we get this data into Spark SQL? Does there exist any utility which we can use? Does this utility support continuous refresh of data (sync of new add/update/delete on data store to Spark SQL?
2) Is the a way to create multiple database in Spark SQL?
3) For Reporting UI we use Jasper, we would like to connect from Jasper to Spark SQL. When we did our initial search we got to know currently there is no support for consumer to connect Spark SQL through JDBC, but in future releases you would like the add the same. We would like to know by when Spark SQL would have a stable release which would have JDBC Support? Meanwhile we took the source code from https://github.com/amplab/shark/tree/sparkSql but we had some difficulty in setting it up locally and evaluating it . It would be great if you can help us with setup instructions.(I can share the issue we are facing please let me know where can I post the error logs)
4) We would also require a SQL prompt where we can execute queries, currently Spark Shell provides SCALA prompt where SCALA code can be executed, from SCALA code we can fire SQL queries. Like Shark we would like to have SQL prompt in Spark SQL. When we did our search we found that in future release of Spark this would be added. It would be great if you can tell us which release of Spark would address the same.
as for
3) Spark 1.1 provides better support for SparkSQL ThriftServer interface, which you may want to use for JDBC interfacing. Hive JDBC clients that support v. 0.12.0 are able to connect and interface with such server.
4) Spark 1.1 also provides a SparkSQL CLI interface that can be used for entering queries. In the same fashion that Hive CLI or Impala Shell.
Please, provide more details about what you are trying to achieve for 1 and 2.
I can answer (1):
Apache Sqoop was made specifically to solve this problem for the relational databases. The tool was made for HDFS, HBase, and Hive -- as such it can be used to make data available to Spark, via HDFS and the Hive metastore.
http://sqoop.apache.org/
I believe Cassandra is available to SparkContext via this connector from DataStax: https://github.com/datastax/spark-cassandra-connector -- which I have never used.
I'm not aware of any connector for MongoDB.
1) We have data from various sources( MySQL, Oracle, Cassandra, Mongo)
You have to use different driver for each case. For cassandra there is datastax driver (but i encountered some compatibility problems with SparkSQL). For any SQL system you can use JdbcRDD. The usage is straightforward, look at the scala example:
test("basic functionality") {
sc = new SparkContext("local", "test")
val rdd = new JdbcRDD(
sc,
() => { DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:derby:target/JdbcRDDSuiteDb") },
"SELECT DATA FROM FOO WHERE ? <= ID AND ID <= ?",
1, 100, 3,
(r: ResultSet) => { r.getInt(1) } ).cache()
assert(rdd.count === 100)
assert(rdd.reduce(_+_) === 10100)
}
But notion that it's just an RDD, so you should work with this data through map-reduce api, not in SQLContext.
Does there exist any utility which we can use?
There is Apache Sqoop project but it's in active development state. The current stable version even doesn't save files in parquet format.
Spark SQL is a capability of the Spark framework. It shouldn't be compared to Shark because Shark is a service. (Recall that with Shark, you run a ThriftServer that you can then connect to from your Thrift app or even ODBC.)
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "get this data into Spark SQL"?
There are a couple of Spark - MongoDB connectors:
- the mongodb connector for hadoop (which doesn't actually need Hadoop at all!) https://databricks.com/blog/2015/03/20/using-mongodb-with-spark.html
the Stratio mongodb connector https://github.com/Stratio/spark-mongodb
If your data is huge and need to perform a lot of transformations then Spark SQL can be used for ETL purpose, else presto could solve all your problems. Addressing your queries one by one:
As your data is in MySQL, Oracle, Cassandra, Mongo all these can be integrated in Presto as it has connectors https://prestodb.github.io/docs/current/connector.html for all these databases.
Once you install Presto in cluster mode you can query all these databases together in one platform, which also provides to join a table from Cassandra and other tables from Mongo, this flexibility is unparalleled.
Presto can be used to connect to Apache Superset https://superset.incubator.apache.org/ which is open source and provides all sets Dashboarding. Also Presto can be connected to Tableau.
You can install MySQL workbench with presto connecting details which helps in providing a UI for all your databases at one place.

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