How to optimize Hive queires with external table and serde - hadoop

Question

Part 1: my enviroment
I have following files uploaded to Hadoop:
The are plain text
Each line contains JSON like:
{code:[int], customerId:[string], data:{[something more here]}}
code are numbers from 1 to 3000,
customerId are total up to 4 millions, daily up to 0.5 millon
All files are gzip
In hive I created external table with custom JSON serde (let's call it CUSTOMER_DATA)
All files from each date is stored in separate directory - and I use it as partitions in Hive tables
Most queries which I do are filtering by date, code and customerId. I have also a second file with format (let's call it CUSTOMER_ATTRIBUTES]:
[customerId] [attribute_1] [attribute_2] ... [attribute_n]
which contains data for all my customers, so rows are up to 4 millions.
I query and filter my data in following way:
Filtering by date - partitions do the job here using WHERE partitionDate IN (20141020,20141020)
Filtering by code using statement like for example `WHERE code IN (1,4,5,33,6784)
Joining table CUSTOMER_ATTRIBUTES with CUSTOMER_DATA with condition query like
SELECT customerId
FROM CUSTOMER_DATA
JOIN CUSTOMER_ATTRIBUTES ON (CUSTOMER_ATTRIBUTES.customerId=CUSTOMER_DATA.customerId)
WHERE CUSTOMER_ATTRIBUTES.attribute_1=[something]
Part 2: question
Is there any efficient way how can I optimize my queries. I read about indexes and buckets by I don't know if I can use them with external tables and if they will optimize my queries.

Answer 1

Performance on search:
Internal or External table does not make a difference as far as performance is considered. You can build indexes on both. Either ways building indexes on large data sets is counter intuitive.
Bucketing the data on your searching columns would give a lot of performance gains. But whether you can bucket you data or not depends on your use case.
You can consider more partitioning (if possible) to get more gains if you can on code/customer id. Hopefully you don't have to many unique code or customer id.
Rather than trying these things out on your Textual Json formatted data, I would strongly suggest you to move away from JSON test data. Parsing JSON(Text) is a big performance killer.
These days there are a lot of file format which work pretty good. If cant change the component which produces the data, you use a series of queries and tables to convert to other file formats. This will be one time job for each partition data. After that your search queries will run faster on newer file formats.
for eg. RCFile format is support by hive. If you pull out code, customerid as separate columns in RCFILE then the query engine can completely skip data col for not matching code in (1,4,5,33,6784) , reducing IO heavily.
Also storing data in RCFile ie columnar storage will help your joins. With RCFile when you run a query with join the hive execution engine will only read in required columns, again significantly reducing IO. On top of this if you bucketted your columns which are a part of JOIN keys it will lead to more performance gains.
If you need to have JSON due to nesting nature of data then I would suggesting you look at Parquet
It will give you performance gains of RCFile + binary (avro, thrift etc)
At my work we had 2 columns of heavily nested JSON data. We tried storing this as compressed text and sequence file format. We then broke up the complex nested JSON columns to lesser nested multiple columns and pulled out some frequently searched keys into other columns. We stored this as RCfile and performance gains we observed on searching were huge.
Rightnow with more burst in data we need to improve more. After trying a few more things and talking to Cloudera guys there is only one big area to improve. Move away from JSON parsing. Parquet seems to be ideal candidate for this.

Answer 2

Yes you can use Indexes with External Tables. Index do optimize the search Queries.
CREATE INDEX your_index_name ON TABLE your_table_name(field_you_want_to_index) AS 'COMPACT' WITH DEFERRED REBUILD;
indexing takes a lot of time for a huge dataset, so we can do a deferred rebuild, i.e after production hours :)
ALTER INDEX your_index_name ON your_table_name REBUILD;
you can even rebuild a specific partition.
ALTER INDEX your_index_name ON your_table_name PARTITION(your_field = 'any_thing') REBUILD;
when you JOIN two tables BUCKETING is the best option to go with, does alot of optimization.