When running a CockroachDB cluster, how can I view the disk bandwidth being consumed by nodes? This can be useful to tell if disk bandwidth is a bottleneck. Also, is there any visibility into the source of the disk writes?
CockroachDB collects write metrics both from the host's operating system and internally through its own accounting of writes. In the CockroachDB DB Console, the "Hardware" dashboard includes 'Disk Write' and 'Disk Write iops' graphs. These are the metrics reported from the operating system, including write volume external to the process.
These graphs can be a great first step gain visibility into the write volume in your node. If you're concerned that your nodes are hitting their bandwidth or IOPs limits, look for plateaus. You can also drill down to a single node, view the maximum throughput usage and compare that to the documented limits for your storage medium.
If you want to drill deeper, CockroachDB records write volume of many internal operations. In the DB Console, click on "Advanced Debug" on the left menu. Then select "Custom Time Series Chart." Here you can create custom graphs pulling in metrics that aren't surfaced in some of the premade dashboards. Some of the disk-bandwidth metrics available are:
rocksdb.compacted-bytes-written: This metric records write volume for storage engine compactions. Compactions run in the background and keep the storage engine organized so that reads are fast. The more data being written to the database, the more compactions will need to write.
rocksdb.flushed-bytes: This metric records write volume for storage engine flushes. All data written to CockroachDB is first written to an append-only write ahead log in the order the data is received, and added to an in-memory 'memtable'. When enough records are accumulated in the 'memtable,' they're flushed to a sorted format. This records that amount. If flushed bytes is high, then a lot of new data is being written to storage, either from queries, jobs or internal systems.
rocksdb.ingested-bytes: This metric records write volume for bulk operations. These writes are primarily from node rebalancing, IMPORTs or RESTOREs.
sys.host.disk.write.bytes: This is the same metric from the hardware dashboard, and captures the write volume as reported by the host operating system.
timeseries.write.bytes: The metrics that CockroachDB collects are recorded within CockroachDB itself as well. This captures the volume of those writes.
Related
According to Google Cloud documentation,
Cloud Storage may increase I/O variance. In many situations, Cloud Storage has a higher I/O variance than HDFS. This can be problematic if you have consistent I/O requirements, such as an application backed by HBase or another NoSQL database.
Can someone provide an example of variance? What does it mean?
It means the rate of access is highly variable, or not consistent within a threshold.
Any cloud object storage will have higher variance compared to dedicated filesystems since they're multi-tenant
The comment, in general, is saying you wouldn't use GCS as a backend for a database (specifically HBase, Kudu, other Hadoop databases) as it'll introduce latency into these commonly low-latent systems, even though GCS can be used as the backing HDFS storage layer
You can translate I/O to reads (input) and writes (output)
When read or write rate fit in a narrow range, you can easily decide on resource planning from network bandwidth to RAM and CPU.
As I/O variance increases, you have a wider range of read and write rates and deploying an optimized infrastructure becomes harder.
as #OneCricketeer mentioned, the higher variance in cloud storage could be result of multi tenancy and deployment of a large diversity of services.
One way to mitigate this problem is to divide services into multiple I/O variance ranges (i.e: databases, object storage, file storage etc.).
In several sources on the internet, it's explained that HDFS is built to handle a greater amount of data than NoSQL technologies (Cassandra, for example). In general when we go further than 1TB we must start thinking Hadoop (HDFS) and not NoSQL.
Besides the architecture and the fact that HDFS supports batch processing and that most NoSQL technologies (e.g. Cassandra) perform random I/O, and besides the schema design differences, why can't NoSQL Solutions (again, for example Cassandra) handle as much data as HDFS?
Why can't we use a NoSQL technology as a Data Lake? Why should we only use them as hot storage solutions in a big data architecture?
why can't NoSQL Solutions (... for example Cassandra) handle as much data as HDFS?
HDFS has been designed to store massive amounts of data and support batch mode (OLAP) whereas Cassandra was designed for online transactional use-cases (OLTP).
The current recommendation for server density is 1TB/node for spinning disk and 3TB/node when using SSD.
In the Cassandra 3.x series, the storage engine has been rewritten to improve node density. Furthermore there are a few JIRA tickets to improve server density in the future.
There is a limit right now for server density in Cassandra because of:
repair. With an eventually consistent DB, repair is mandatory to re-sync data in case of failures. The more data you have on one server, the longer it takes to repair (more precisely to compute the Merkle tree, a binary tree of digests). But the issue of repair is mostly solved with incremental repair introduced in Cassandra 2.1
compaction. With an LSM tree data structure, any mutation results in a new write on disk so compaction is necessary to get rid of deprecated data or deleted data. The more data you have on 1 node, the longer is the compaction. There are also some solutions to address this issue, mainly the new DateTieredCompactionStrategy that has some tuning knobs to stop compacting data after a time threshold. There are few people using DateTiered compaction in production with density up to 10TB/node
node rebuild. Imagine one node crashes and is completely lost, you'll need to rebuild it by streaming data from other replicas. The higher the node density, the longer it takes to rebuild the node
load distribution. The more data you have on a node, the greater the load average (high disk I/O and high CPU usage). This will greatly impact the node latency for real time requests. Whereas a difference of 100ms is negligible for a batch scenario that takes 10h to complete, it is critical for a real time database/application subject to a tight SLA
I really do not understand the actual reason behind hadoop scaling better than RDBMS . Can anyone please explain at a granular level ? Has this got something to do with underlying datastructures & algorithms
RDBMS have challenges in handling huge data volumes of Terabytes & Peta bytes. Even if you have Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Disks (RAID) & data shredding, it does not scale well for huge volume of data. You require very expensive hardware.
EDIT:
To answer, why RDBMS cannot scale, have a look at Overheads of RBDMS.
Logging. Assembling log records and tracking down all changes
in database structures slows performance. Logging may not be
necessary if recoverability is not a requirement or if recoverability
is provided through other means (e.g., other sites on the network).
Locking. Traditional two-phase locking poses a sizeable overhead
since all accesses to database structures are governed by a
separate entity, the Lock Manager.
Latching. In a multi-threaded database, many data structures
have to be latched before they can be accessed. Removing this
feature and going to a single-threaded approach has a noticeable
performance impact.
Buffer management. A main memory database system does not
need to access pages through a buffer pool, eliminating a level of
indirection on every record access.
How Hadoop handles?:
Hadoop is a free, Java-based programming framework that supports the processing of large data sets in a distributed computing environment, which can run on commodity hardware. It is useful for storing & retrieval of huge volumes of data.
This scalability & efficiency are possible with Hadoop implementation of storage mechanism (HDFS) & processing jobs (YARN Map reduce jobs). Apart from scalability, Hadoop provides high availability of stored data.
Scalability, High Availability, Processing of huge volumes of data (Strucutred data, Unstructured data, Semi structured data) with flexibility are key to success of Hadoop.
Data is stored on thousands of nodes & processing is done on the node where data is stored (most of the times) through Map Reduce jobs. Data Locality on processing front is one key area of success of Hadoop.
This has been achieved with Name Node, Data Node & Resource Manager.
To understand how Hadoop achieve this, you should must visit these links : HDFS Architecture , YARN Architecture and HDFS Federation
Still RDBMS is good for multiple write/read/updates and consistent ACID transactions on Giga bytes of data. But not good for processing of Tera bytes & Peta bytes of data. NoSQL with two of Consistency ,Availability Partitioning attributes of CAP theory is good in some of use cases.
But Hadoop is not meant for real time transaction support with ACID properties. It is good for Business intelligence reporting with batch processing - "Write once, multiple read" paradigm.
From slideshare.net
Have a look at one more related SE question :
NoSql vs Relational database
First, hadoop IS NOT a DB replacement.
RDBMS scale vertical and hadoop scale horizontal.
This means that to scale twice a RDBMS you need to have hardware with the double memory, double storage and double cpu. That is very expensive and has limits. There isn't a server with 10TB of ram for example. With hadoop is different, you don't need expensive edge technology, instead of that you can use several commodity servers working together to simulate a bigger server (with some limitations). You can have a cluster with 10 Tb of ram distributed in several nodes.
Other advantage is that instead to have to buy a new more powerful server and drop the old one, to scale distributed systems only require to add new nodes into the cluster.
The one issue if have with the description above is that paralleled RDBMS required expensive hardware. Teridata and Netezza need special hardware. Greenplum and Vertica can be put on commodity hardware. (Now I will admit I am biased, like everyone else.) I have seen Greenplum scan petabytes of information daily. (Walmart was up to 2.5 petabytes last I hard.) I dealt with both Hawq and Impala. They both require about 30% more hardware to do the same job on structured data. Hbase is less efficient.
There is no magic silver spoon. It has been my experience that both structured and unstructured have their place. Hadoop is great for ingesting large amounts of data and scanning through it a small amount of times. We use it as part of our load procedures. RDBMS is grate at scanning the same data over and over with highly complex queries.
You always have to structure the data to make use of it. That structuring takes time somewhere. You ether structure before you put it in to an RDBMS or at query time .
In RDBMS , data is structured , rather it is indexed.
Retrieval of data of any particular 'nth' column is loading the entire database and then selecting the 'nth' column.
where as in Hadoop, say Hive, we load the only the particular column from the entire data set.
More so over the data loading is also done by Map reduce programs which is done in a distributed structure which reduce the overall time.
Hence, two advantages of using Hadoop and its tools.
I will be creating a 5 node mongodb cluster. It will be more read heavy than write and had a question which design would bring better performance. These nodes will be dedicated to only mongodb. For the sake of an example, say each node will have 64GB of ram.
From the mongodb docs it states:
MongoDB automatically uses all free memory on the machine as its cache
Does this mean as long as my data is smaller than the available ram it will be like having an in-memory database?
I also read that it is possible to implement mongodb purely in memory
http://edgystuff.tumblr.com/post/49304254688/how-to-use-mongodb-as-a-pure-in-memory-db-redis
If my data was quite dynamic (can range from 50gb to 75gb every few hours), would it be theoretically be better performing to design mongodb in a way which allows mongodb to manage itself with its cache (default setup of mongo), or to put the mongodb into memory initially and if the data grows over the size of ram use swap space (SSD)?
MongoDB default storage engine maps the files in memory. It provides an efficient way to access the data, while avoiding double caching (i.e. MongoDB cache is actually the page cache of the OS).
Does this mean as long as my data is smaller than the available ram it will be like having an in-memory database?
For read traffic, yes. For write traffic, it is different, since MongoDB may have to journalize the write operation (depending on the configuration), and maintain the oplog.
Is it better to run MongoDB from memory only (leveraging tmpfs)?
For read traffic, it should not be better. Putting the files on tmpfs will also avoid double caching (which is good), but the data can still be paged out. Using a regular filesystem instead will be as fast once the data have been paged in.
For write traffic, it is faster, provided the journal and oplog are also put on tmpfs. Note that in that case, a system crash will result in a total data loss. Usually, the performance gain does not worth the risk.
I have been doing some reading on real time processing using hadoop and stumbled upon this http://www.scaleoutsoftware.com/hserver/
From what the documentation says, it looks like they implemented an in memory data grid using the hadoop worker/slave nodes. I have couple of questions here
From my understanding, if i have a data of size 100 GB, i would atleast need 100GB of ram across all nodes on my cluster just for the data + additional ram for task tracker, data node daemons + additional ram for the hServer service that would run on all these nodes. Is my understanding correct?
The software claims they can do real-time data processing by improving the latency issues in hadoop. Is it because, it allows us to write data to the in-memory grid instead of HDFS?
I am new to Big Data technologies. Apologize if some of the questions are naive.
[Full disclosure: I work at ScaleOut Software, the company which created ScaleOut hServer.]
In-memory data grids create a replica for every object to ensure high availability in case of failures.The aggregate amount of memory that is required is the memory used to store the objects with the addition of the memory used to store object replicas. In your example, you will need 200 GB of total memory: 100 GB for objects and 100 GB for replicas. For example, in a four-server cluster, each server needs 50 GB of memory available to the ScaleOut hServer service.
With the current release, ScaleOut hServer takes the first step in enabling real-time analytics by speeding up data access. It does this in two ways, which are implemented using different input/output formats. The first mode of operation uses the grid as a cache for HDFS, and the second uses the grid as the primary storage for a data set, providing support for fast-changing, memory-based data. Accessing data using an in-memory data grid reduces latency by eliminating disk I/O and minimizing network overhead. Also, caching HDFS data provides an additional performance boost by storing keys and values generated by the record reader instead of raw HDFS files in the grid.