Knowing in advance which bucket a Hive row will go - hadoop

When we have a bucketing defined on a certain column, hive calculates hash value for each unique value for the column and sends rows to these buckets. This might lead to skewed buckets, when hash values for multiple unique values cause them going to the same bucket. Now lets say the bucketed column is country, and the values are like:-
country = {'USA','Brazil','Findland','India','England'}
Now there is no guarantee that hashing will send all the 5 countries to different buckets (assume number of buckets are 5). Is there any way to know in advance which bucket a row with specific value for country will be sent to? I am looking for something like this:-
select know_which_bucket(country,5) from table;
It need not be hive function, I am just trying to explain what I am looking for logically, I just need info. Basically i will specify a set of values , number of buckets and want to know which bucket each of the value will go to. If someone can provide Java pointer for this, it will help too. Also, I am not necessarily looking for a programmatic way, even an online calculator will do.

I figured out, this is how you do it:-
For example, to know which bucket(file) 'USA' will go provided that number of buckets are 5:-
select pmod(hash('USA'),5);
It returns 3, so this will be stored in the file 000003_0. This way we can know for any input value and for any number of buckets.

Related

Hive count distinct UDAF2

I've read a question on SO:
I ran into a Hive query calculating a count distinct without grouping,
which runs very slow. So I was wondering how is this functionality
implemented in Hive, is there a UDAFCountDistinct for this?
And the answer:
To achieve count distinct, Hive relies on the GenericUDAFCount. There
is no UDAF specifically implemented for count distinct. Those
'distinct by' keys will be a part of the partitioning key of the
MapReduce Shuffle phase, this way they are 'distincted' quite
natually.
As per your case, it runs slowly because there will be only one
reducer to process massive detailed data. You can use a group by
before counting to get more parallelism:
select count(1) from (select id from tbl group by id) tmp;
However I don't understand a few things:
What did the answerer mean by "Those 'distinct by' keys will be a part of the partitioning key of the MapReduce Shuffle phase"? Could you explain more about it?
Why there will be only one reducer in this case?
Why the weird inner query will cause more partitions?
I'll try to explain.
Part 1:
What did the answerer mean by "Those 'distinct by' keys will be a part of the partitioning key of the MapReduce Shuffle phase"? Could you explain more about it?
The UDAF GenericUDAFCount is capable of both count and count distinct. How does it work to achieve count distinct?
Let's take the following query as an example:
select category, count(distinct brand) from market group by category;
One MapReduce Job will be launched for this query.
distinct-by keys are the expressions(columns) within count(distinct ..., in this case, brand.
partition-by keys are the fields used to calculate a hash code for a record at map phase. And then this hash value is used to decided which partition a record should go. Usually, partition-by keys lies in the group by part of a SQL query. In this case, it's category.
The actual output-key of mappers will be the composition of partition-by key and a distinct-by key. For the above case, a mapper's output key may be like (drink, Pepsi).
This design makes all rows with the same group-by key fall into the same reducer.
The value part of mappers' output doesn’t matter here.
Later at the Shuffle phase, records are sort according to the sort-by keys, which is the same as the output key.
Then at reduce phase, at each individual reducer, all records are sorted first by category then by brand. This makes it easy to get the result of the count(distinct ) aggregation. Each distinct (category, brand) pair is guaranteed to be processed only once. The aggregation has been turned into a count(*) at each group. The input key of a call to the reduce method will be one of these distinct pairs. Reducer processes keep track of the composited key. Whenever the category part changes, we know a new group has come and we start counting this group from 1.
Part 2:
Why there will be only one reducer in this case?
When calculating count distinct without group by like this:
select count(distinct brand) from market
There will be just one reducer taking all the work. Why? Because the partition-by key doesn’t exist, or we can say that all records has the same hash code. So they will fall into the same reducer.
Part 3:
Why the weird inner query will cause more partitions?
The inner query's partition-by key is the group by key, id. There’s a chance that id values are quite evenly distributed, so records are processed by many different reducers. Then after the inner query, it's safe to conclude that all the id are different from each other. So now a simple count(1) is all that's needed.
But do note that the output will launch only one reducer. Why doesn’t it suffer? Because no detailed values are needed for count(1), map-side aggregation hugely cut down the amount of data processed by reducers.
One more thing, this rewriting is not guaranteed to perform better since it introduces an extra MR stage.

Bind variables results in full table scan in Oracle

Checking the query cost on a table with 1 million records results in full table scan while the same query in oracle with actual values results in significant lesser cost.
Is this expected behaviour from Oracle ?
Is there a way to tell Oracle not to scan the full table ?
The query is scanning the full table when bind variables are used:
The query cost reduces significantly with actual variables:
This is a pagination query. You want to retrieve a handful of records from the table, filtering on their position in the filtered set. Your projection includes all the columns of the table, so you need to query the table to get the whole row. The question is, why do the two query variants have different plans?
Let's consider the second query. You are passing hard values for the offsets, so the optimizer knows that you want the eleven most recent rows in the sorted set. The set is sorted by an indexed column. The most important element is that the optimizer knows you want 11 rows. 11 is a very small sliver of one million, so using an indexed read to get the required rows is an efficient way of doing things. The path starts at the far end of the index, reads the last eleven entries and retrieves the rows.
Now, your first query has bind variables for the starting and finishing offsets and also for the number of rows to be returned. This is crucial: the optimizer doesn't know whether you want to return eleven rows or eleven thousand rows. So it opts for a very high cardinality. The reason for this is that index reads perform very badly for retrieving large numbers of rows. Full table scans are the best way of handling big slices of our tables.
Is this expected behaviour from Oracle ?
Now you understand this you will can see that the answer to this question is yes. The optimizer makes the best decision it can with the information we give it. When we provide hard values it can be very clever. When we provide vague data it has to guess; sometimes its guesses aren't the ones we expected.
Bind variables are very useful for running the same query with different values when the expected result set is similar. But using bind variables to specify ranges means the result sets can potentially vary tremendously in size.
Is there a way to tell Oracle not to scan the full table ?
If you can fix the pagesize, thus removing the :a2 parameter, that would allow the optimizer to produce a much more accurate plan. Alternatively, if you need to vary the pagesize within a small range (say 10 - 100) then you could try a /*+ cardinality (100) */ hint in the query; provided the cardinality value is within the right order of magnitude it doesn't have to be the precise value.
As with all performance questions, the devil is in the specifics. So you need to benchmark various performance changes and choose the best fit for your particular use case(s).

Hive distribute by vs without distribute by

This may sound basic but the question haunts me for a while.
Lets say i have the following query
SELECT s.ymd, s.symbol, s.price_close FROM stocks s
SORT BY s.symbol ASC;
In this case, if the data has good spread on the symbol column then it makes sense to distribute based on the symbol column so that all reducers get good share of the data; Changing the query to the following would give a better performance
SELECT s.ymd, s.symbol, s.price_close FROM stocks s
DISTRIBUTE BY s.symbol
SORT BY s.symbol ASC, s.ymd ASC;
What is the effect if i don't specify the distribute by clause? What is the default map output key column chosen in the first query i.e. what is the column that its distributed on?
I found the answer myself. With sort by, the output key from the mapper is not the column on which sort by is applied. The key could be the file offset of the record.
The output from reducers is sorted per reducer but the same sort by column value can appear in the output of more than one reducers. This means that there is an overlap among the output of the reducers. Distribute by ensures that the data is split among the reducers based on the distribute by column and so by ensuring that the same column value go to the same reducer and so the same out file.
Details are available. I think this is the answer you are looking for.
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Hive/LanguageManual+SortBy

Bad performance when writing log data to Cassandra with timeuuid as a column name

Following the pointers in an ebay tech blog and a datastax developers blog, I model some event log data in Cassandra 1.2. As a partition key, I use “ddmmyyhh|bucket”, where bucket is any number between 0 and the number of nodes in the cluster.
The Data model
cqlsh:Log> CREATE TABLE transactions (yymmddhh varchar, bucket int,
rId int, created timeuuid, data map, PRIMARY
KEY((yymmddhh, bucket), created) );
(rId identifies the resource that fired the event.)
(map is are key value pairs derived from a JSON; keys change, but not much)
I assume that this translates into a composite primary/row key with X buckets per hours.
My column names are than timeuuids. Querying this data model works as expected (I can query time ranges.)
The problem is the performance: the time to insert a new row increases continuously.
So I am doing s.th. wrong, but can't pinpoint the problem.
When I use the timeuuid as a part of the row key, the performance remains stable on a high level, but this would prevent me from querying it (a query without the row key of course throws an error message about "filtering").
Any help? Thanks!
UPDATE
Switching from the map data-type to a predefined column names alleviates the problem. Insert times now seem to remain at around <0.005s per insert.
The core question remains:
How is my usage of the "map" datatype in efficient? And what would be an efficient way for thousands of inserts with only slight variation in the keys.
My keys I use data into the map mostly remain the same. I understood the datastax documentation (can't post link due to reputation limitations, sorry, but easy to find) to say that each key creates an additional column -- or does it create one new column per "map"?? That would be... hard to believe to me.
I suggest you model your rows a little differently. The collections aren't very good to use in cases where you might end up with too many elements in them. The reason is a limitation in the Cassandra binary protocol which uses two bytes to represent the number of elements in a collection. This means that if your collection has more than 2^16 elements in it the size field will overflow and even though the server sends all of the elements back to the client, the client only sees the N % 2^16 first elements (so if you have 2^16 + 3 elements it will look to the client as if there are only 3 elements).
If there is no risk of getting that many elements into your collections, you can ignore this advice. I would not think that using collections gives you worse performance, I'm not really sure how that would happen.
CQL3 collections are basically just a hack on top of the storage model (and I don't mean hack in any negative sense), you can make a MAP-like row that is not constrained by the above limitation yourself:
CREATE TABLE transactions (
yymmddhh VARCHAR,
bucket INT,
created TIMEUUID,
rId INT,
key VARCHAR,
value VARCHAR,
PRIMARY KEY ((yymmddhh, bucket), created, rId, key)
)
(Notice that I moved rId and the map key into the primary key, I don't know what rId is, but I assume that this would be correct)
This has two drawbacks over using a MAP: it requires you to reassemble the map when you query the data (you would get back a row per map entry), and it uses a litte more space since C* will insert a few extra columns, but the upside is that there is no problem with getting too big collections.
In the end it depends a lot on how you want to query your data. Don't optimize for insertions, optimize for reads. For example: if you don't need to read back the whole map every time, but usually just read one or two keys from it, put the key in the partition/row key instead and have a separate partition/row per key (this assumes that the set of keys will be fixed so you know what to query for, so as I said: it depends a lot on how you want to query your data).
You also mentioned in a comment that the performance improved when you increased the number of buckets from three (0-2) to 300 (0-299). The reason for this is that you spread the load much more evenly thoughout the cluster. When you have a partition/row key that is based on time, like your yymmddhh, there will always be a hot partition where all writes go (it moves throughout the day, but at any given moment it will hit only one node). You correctly added a smoothing factor with the bucket column/cell, but with only three values the likelyhood of at least two ending up on the same physical node are too high. With three hundred you will have a much better spread.
use yymmddhh as rowkey and bucket+timeUUID as column name,where each bucket have 20 or fix no of records,buckets can be managed using counter cloumn family

multicolumn index column order

I've be told and read it everywhere (but no one dared to explain why) that when composing an index on multiple columns I should put the most selective column first, for performance reasons.
Why is that?
Is it a myth?
I should put the most selective column first
According to Tom, column selectivity has no performance impact for queries that use all the columns in the index (it does affect Oracle's ability to compress the index).
it is not the first thing, it is not the most important thing. sure, it is something to consider but it is relatively far down there in the grand scheme of things.
In certain strange, very peculiar and abnormal cases (like the above with really utterly skewed data), the selectivity could easily matter HOWEVER, they are
a) pretty rare
b) truly dependent on the values used at runtime, as all skewed queries are
so in general, look at the questions you have, try to minimize the indexes you need based on that.
The number of distinct values in a column in a concatenated index is not relevant when considering
the position in the index.
However, these considerations should come second when deciding on index column order. More importantly is to ensure that the index can be useful to many queries, so the column order has to reflect the use of those columns (or the lack thereof) in the where clauses of your queries (for the reason illustrated by AndreKR).
HOW YOU USE the index -- that is what is relevant when deciding.
All other things being equal, I would still put the most selective column first. It just feels right...
Update: Another quote from Tom (thanks to milan for finding it).
In Oracle 5 (yes, version 5!), there was an argument for placing the most selective columns first
in an index.
Since then, it is not true that putting the most discriminating entries first in the index
will make the index smaller or more efficient. It seems like it will, but it will not.
With index
key compression, there is a compelling argument to go the other way since it can make the index
smaller. However, it should be driven by how you use the index, as previously stated.
You can omit columns from right to left when using an index, i.e. when you have an index on col_a, col_b you can use it in WHERE col_a = x but you can not use it in WHERE col_b = x.
Imagine to have a telephone book that is sorted by the first names and then by the last names.
At least in Europe and US first names have a much lower selectivity than last names, so looking up the first name wouldn't narrow the result set much, so there would still be many pages to check for the correct last name.
The ordering of the columns in the index should be determined by your queries and not be any selectivity considerations. If you have an index on (a,b,c), and most of your single column queries are against column c, followed by a, then put them in the order of c,a,b in the index definition for the best efficiency. Oracle prefers to use the leading edge of the index for the query, but can use other columns in the index in a less efficient access path known as skip-scan.
The more selective is your index, the fastest is the research.
Simply imagine a phonebook: you can find someone mostly fast by lastname. But if you have a lot of people with the same lastname, you will last more time on looking for the person by looking at the firstname everytime.
So you have to give the most selective columns firstly to avoid as much as possible this problem.
Additionally, you should then make sure that your queries are using correctly these "selectivity criterias".

Resources