Adding parquet-avro support to scalding - hadoop

How can I create a Scalding Source that will handle conversions between avro and parquet.
The solution should:
1. Read from parquet format and convert to avro memory representation
2. Write avro objects into a parquet file
Note: I noticed Cascading has a module for leveraging thrift and parquet. It occurs to me that this would be a good place to start looking. I also opened a thread on google-groups/scalding-dev

Try our latest changes in this fork -
https://github.com/epishkin/scalding/tree/parquet_avro/scalding-parquet

Related

Does all of three: Presto, hive and impala support Avro data format?

I am clear about the Serde available in Hive to support Avro schema for data formats. Comfortable in using avro with hive.
AvroSerDe
for say, I have found this issue against presto.
https://github.com/prestodb/presto/issues/5009
I need to choose components for fast execution cycle. Presto and impala provide much smaller execution cycle.
So, Anyone please let me clarify that which would be better in different data formats.
Primarily, I am looking for avro support with Presto now.
However, lets consider following data formats stored on HDFS:
Avro format
Parquet format
Orc format
Which is the best to use with high performance on different data formats.
?? please suggest.
Impala can read Avro data but can not write it. Please refer to this documentaion page describing the file formats supported by Impala.
Hive supports both reading and writing Avro files.
Presto's Hive Connector supports Avro as well. Thanks to David Phillips for pointing out this documentaion page.
There are different benchmarks on the internet about performance, but I would not like to link to a specific one as results heavily depend on the exact use case benchmarked.

How do i use Sqoop to save data in a parquet-avro file format?

I need to move my data from a relational database to HDFS but i would like to save the data to a parquet-avro file format. Looking at the sqoop documentation it seems like my options are --as-parquetfile or --as-avrodatafile, but not a mix of both. From my understanding of this blog/picture below, the way parquet-avro works is that it is a parquet file with the avro schema embedded and a converter to convert and save an avro object to a parquet file and vise versa.
My initial assumption is that if i use the sqoop option --as-parquetfile then the data being saved to the parquet file will be missing the avro schema and the converter won't work. However upon looking at the sqoop code that saves the data to a parquet file format it does seem to be using a util related to avro but i'm not sure what's going on. Could someone clarify? If i cannot do this with sqoop, what other options do i have?
parquet-avro is mainly a convenience layer so that you can read/write data that is stored in Apache Parquet into Avro object. When you read the Parquet again with parquet-avro, the Avro schema is inferred from the Parquet schema (alternatively you should be able to specify an explicit Avro schema). Thus you should be fine with --as-parquetfile.

appending to ORC file

I'm new to Big data and related technologies, so I'm unsure if we can append data to the existing ORC file. I'm writing the ORC file using Java API and when I close the Writer, I'm unable to open the file again to write new content to it, basically to append new data.
Is there a way I can append data to the existing ORC file, either using Java Api or Hive or any other means?
One more clarification, when saving Java util.Date object into ORC file, ORC type is stored as:
struct<timestamp:struct<fasttime:bigint,cdate:struct<cachedyear:int,cachedfixeddatejan1:bigint,cachedfixeddatenextjan1:bigint>>,
and for java BigDecimal it's:
<margin:struct<intval:struct<signum:int,mag:struct<>,bitcount:int,bitlength:int,lowestsetbit:int,firstnonzerointnum:int>
Are these correct and is there any info on this?
Update 2017
Yes now you can! Hive provides a new support for ACID, but you can append data to your table using Append Mode mode("append") with Spark
Below an example
Seq((10, 20)).toDF("a", "b").write.mode("overwrite").saveAsTable("tab1")
Seq((20, 30)).toDF("a", "b").write.mode("append").saveAsTable("tab1")
sql("select * from tab1").show
Or a more complete exmple with ORC here; below an extract:
val command = spark.read.format("jdbc").option("url" .... ).load()
command.write.mode("append").format("orc").option("orc.compression","gzip").save("command.orc")
No, you cannot append directly to an ORC file. Nor to a Parquet file. Nor to any columnar format with a complex internal structure with metadata interleaved with data.
Quoting the official "Apache Parquet" site...
Metadata is written after the data to allow for single pass writing.
Then quoting the official "Apache ORC" site...
Since HDFS does not support changing the data in a file after it is
written, ORC stores the top level index at the end of the file (...)
The file’s tail consists of 3 parts; the file metadata, file footer
and postscript.
Well, technically, nowadays you can append to an HDFS file; you can even truncate it. But these tricks are only useful for some edge cases (e.g. Flume feeding messages into an HDFS "log file", micro-batch-wise, with fflush from time to time).
For Hive transaction support they use a different trick: creating a new ORC file on each transaction (i.e. micro-batch) with periodic compaction jobs running in the background, à la HBase.
Yes this is possible through Hive in which you can basically 'concatenate' newer data. From hive official documentation https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Hive/Hive+Transactions#HiveTransactions-WhatisACIDandwhyshouldyouuseit?

how to read parquet schema in non mapreduce java program

Is there a way to direct read Parquet file column names by getting metadata without mapreduce. Please give some example. I am using snappy as compression codec.
You can use either ParquetFileReader or use existing tool https://github.com/Parquet/parquet-mr/tree/master/parquet-tools for reading parquet file using command line.

Is there a simple way to migrate from SequenceFiles to Avro?

I'm currently using hadoop mapreduce jobs with SequenceFiles of writables.
The same Writable type are used for serialization also in the non-hadoop related parts of the system.
This method is hard to maintain - mainly because of the lack of schema and the need for manual handling of version changes.
It appears that apache avro handles these issues.
The problem is, that during the migration I will have data in both formats.
is there a simple way to handle the migration?
I haven't tried it myself, but maybe using AvroSequenceFile format would help. It's just a wrapper around SequenceFile so in theory you should be able to write data in both your old SequenceFile format as well as your new Avro format which should make the migration easier.
Here is more information about this format.
Generally, there is nothing stopping you from using Avro data and SequenceFiles interchangably. Use whatever InputFormat is necessary for the type of data you need, and for output it of course makes sense to use Avro formats whenever practial. If your input comes in different formats, take a look at MultipleInputs. Essentially, you will still have to implement separate Mappers, but that's to be expeced considering the Map input key/value is different.
Moving to Avro is a wise move. If you have the capacity in time and hardware, it might even be worthwhile to explicitly convert your data from SequenceFile to Avro right away. You can use any language supported by Avro which also happens to supports SequenceFiles to do this. Java certainly does (clearly), but Pig is also pretty handy for doing this.
The user contributed PiggyBank project has functionality for reading a SequenceFile, and then it is simply a matter of using AvroStorage from the same PiggyBank project with the appropriate Avro Scheme to get your Avro file.
If only Pig supported loading Avro schemas from file.. ! If you use Pig you will unfortunately have to form scripts that explicitly contain the Avro schema, which can be a bit annoying.

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