Multidimensional analysis in Hive/Impala - hadoop

I have a denormalized table say Sales that looks like:
SalesKey,
SalesOfParts, SalesOfEquipments, CostOfSales as some numeric measures
Industry, Country, State, Sales area, Equipment id, customer id, year of sale, month of sale and some more similar dimensions. (Total of 12 dimensions)
I need to support aggregation queries on the Sales, like total number of sales in a year, month... total cost of them etc.
Also these aggregates need to be filtered, i.e. something like total sales in year 2013, 04 belonging to Manufacturing industry of XYZ customer.
I have these dimension tables and facts in hive/impala.
I do not think I can make a cube on all the dimensions. I read a paper to see how to do OLAP over multiple dimensions :
http://www.vldb.org/conf/2004/RS14P1.PDF
Which basically suggests to materialize cubes over small fragments and do some kind of runtime computation when query spans multiple cubes.
I am not sure how to implement this model in Hive/Impala. Any pointers/suggestions will be awesome.
EDIT: I have about 10 million rows in the Sales table, and the dimensions are not comparable to 100, but are around 12 ( might go upto 15) but have a good cardinality each.

I would build cubes using a 3rd-party software. For example, icCube is an in-memory OLAP server that can handle with no issue at all 10mio of rows over 12 dimensions. Then the response time would be sub-second in all dimensions. Moving out from Hive 10mio of rows does not seem to be an issue (you could use the JDBC driver for that purpose). icCube is specifically designed to handle properly high sparsity.

Related

How to create visualization using ratio of fields

I have a data set similar to the table below (simplified for brevity)
I need to calculate the total spend per conversion per team for every month, with ability to plot this as time based line chart being an additional nicety. The total spend is equal to the sum of Phone Expenditure, Travel allowance & Misc. Allowance, this can be a calculated field.
I cannot add a calculated field for the ratio, as for some sales person, the number of conversion can be 0 for a given month. So, averaging over team is not option. How can I go about this?
Thanks for help and suggestions in advance!
I've discussed the question with the Harish offline. I've learned that he is trying to calculate ratio per group, not per row.
To perform calculations per group, users can add calculated fields inside a QuickSight analysis and use level aware aggregation expressions. (Note that level aware aggregations can only be used in an analysis, not in the data prep view). Here is a link to the documentation about level aware aggregations if you want to learn more about this area https://docs.aws.amazon.com/quicksight/latest/user/level-aware-aggregations.html

Calculate cumulative total in DAX?

I'm calculating cumulative total in DAX like:
DEFINE MEASURE 'Sales'[Running Total] =
CALCULATE (
SUM('Sales'[Revenue]),
FILTER(ALL('Date'[Date]),'Date'[Date]<=MAX('Date'[Date]))
)
This should be well-estabilished pattern (at least it is referenced here: http://www.daxpatterns.com/cumulative-total/)
My problem is when I try to evaluate it like:
EVALUATE SUMMARIZECOLUMNS(
'Date'[Date],
"Total_Revenue_By_Date",
'Sales'[Running Total]
)
I'm running into error
The resultset of a query to external data source has exceeded the maximum allowed size of '1000000' rows.
I'm using tabular model with direct query. I know I can enlarge the limit, however the underlying tables are small - Date table has around 10000 rows, Sales table has around 10000 rows as well (it will be much larger on production), so something here doesn't scale well.
I have an idea how to get away with calculating running totals on SQL level, any idea how to tackle this on DAX level ?
Models created by Power BI desktop has default limit of 1 million rows.
This might help you,
https://www.sqlbi.com/articles/tuning-query-limits-for-directquery/

Cassandra Modeling for filter and range queries

I'm trying to model a database of users. These users have various vital statistics: age, sex, height, weight, hair color, etc.
I want to be able to write queries like these:
get all users 5'1" to 6'0" tall with red hair who weigh more than 100 pounds
or
get all users who are men who are 6'0" are ages 31-37 and have black hair
How can I model my data in order to make these queries? Let's assume this database will hold billions of users. I can't think of an approach that wouldn't require me to make MANY requests or cluster the data on VERY few nodes.
EDIT:
Just a little more background, let's assume this thought problem is to build a dating website. The site should allow users to filter people based on the aforementioned criteria (age, sex, height, weight, hair, etc.). These filters are optional, and you can have as many as you want. This site has 2 billion users. Is that something that can be achieved through data modeling alone?
IF I UNDERSTAND THINGS CORRECTLY
If I have 2 billion users and I create both of the tables mentioned in the first answer (assuming options of male and female for sex, and blonde, brown, red for hair color), I will, for the first table, be putting at most 2 billion records on one node if everyone has blonde hair. Best case scenario, 2/3 billion records on three nodes. In the second case, I will be putting 2/5 billion records on each node in the best case with the same worst case. Am I wrong? Shouldn't the partition keys be more unique than that?
So if you are trying to model you data inside Cassandra then the general rule is that you need to make a table per query. There are also significant restrictions on what you can filter your query by. If you want to understand some of the restrictions I suggest you take a look at this post:
http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/a-deep-look-to-the-cql-where-clause
or my long answer here:
cassandra - how to perform table query?
All of the above only applies if you are running fixed queries that are known ahead of time. If instead you are looking to perform some sort of analytical analysis on your data (it sounds like you might be) than I would look at using Spark in conjunction with Cassandra. This will provide you a fast tool to do in-memory processing of your data. If you look at using Datastax (Community or Enterprise) then Spark also has a connector that makes reading and writing data to and from Cassandra easy.
Edited with Additional Information
Based on the query "get all users 5'1" to 6'0" tall with red hair who weigh more than 100 pounds" you would need to build a table with following:
CREATE TABLE user_by_haircolor_weight_height (
haircolor text,
weight float,
height_in int,
user varchar,
PRIMARY KEY ((haircolor), weight, height_in)
);
You could then query this by:
SELECT * from user_by_haircolor_weight_height where haircolor='red' and weight>100 and height_in>61 and height_in<73;
For the query "get all users who are men who are 6'0" are ages 31-37 and have black hair" you would need to build a similar table with a
PRIMARY KEY ((haircolor, sex), height_in, age)
In the end if what you are trying to do is perform either ad-hoc or a set number analytics (i.e. can have a bit more latency than a straight CQL query) on the data stored in you cassandra table than I suggest you look at using Spark. If you need something a bit more real-time to handle ad-hoc queries you can look at using Solr to perform Lucene powered searches on your table.
my recommendation is :
1) keep main table with proper partition key, so that million records being spread across cluster, don't here use any cluster column which will cross row key limitation of 2gb etc.,
2) depending on query pattern you may better create additional tables(like index) as much as possible to keep inverted index data in it. coz write is cheap.
3) use multiple query to get what you need.
4) last option is, use DSE solr search capability.
Just to reiterate the end of the conversation:
"Your understanding is correct and you are correct in stating that partition keys should be more unique than that. Each partition had a maximum size of 2GB but a practical limit is lower. In practice you would want your data partitioned into far smaller chunks that the table above. Given the ad-hoc nature of your queries in your example I do not think you would be able to practically do this by data modelling alone. I would suggest looking at using a Solr index on a table. This would allow you a robust search capability. If you use Datastax you are even able to query this via CQL"
Cassandra alone is not a good candidate for this sort of complex filtering across a very large data set.

SSAS Performance: Multiple measures+no Dim vs one measure+DimType

I am building a finance cube and trying to understand the best practice while designing my main fact table.
What do you think will be a better solution:
Have one column in the fact (amount) and have an additional field which will indicate the type of financial transaction (costs, income, tax, refund, etc).
T
TransType Amount Date
Costs 10 Aug-1
Income 15 Aug-1
Refunds 5 Aug-2
Costs 5 Aug-2
"Pivot" the table to create several columns according to the type of the transaction.
Costs Income Refund Date
10 15 NULL Aug-1
5 NULL 5 Aug-2
Of course, the cube will follow whatever option is selected - several real measures vs several calculated measures which each one of the are based on one main measure while being sliced on a member from a "Transaction Type" dimension.
(in general all transaction types has the same number of rows)
thank you in advanced.
Oren.
For a finance related cube, I believe it is much better to use account dimension functionality.
By using account dimension, you can add/remove accounts to the dimension without changing the structure of your model. Also if you use account dimension, time balance(aggregate function) functionality of the cube cube can help you a lot.
However SSAS account dimension has its own problems as well. For example, if you assign time balance to a formula or a hierachical parent, it is silently ignored and that is not documented as far as I know. So be ready to fix the calculations in the calculation script.
You can also use custom rollup member functionality to load your financial formulas.
In our case, we have 6000+ accounts, and the formulas can change without our control.
So having custom rollup member functionality helps a lot.
You need to be careful with solve orders(ratios..) etc, but that is as usual for any complicated/financial cube.

Poor Performance of Mondrian w/ Degenerate Dimensions

I have an application that collects performance metrics and stores them in a datamart. I then use Mondrian to enable analysis and ad-hoc exploration of the data. I'm collecting about 5e6 rows per day and total size of the METRIC table is about 300M rows.
We "color" our data based on the metrics comparison to an SLA. There are exactly 5 distinct values for color. When we do simple MDX queries to get, for example, a color distribution of the data for a specific date range, say 1 day, we see queries like below:
2014-06-11 23:17:08,042 DEBUG [sql] - 223: SqlTupleReader.readTuples
[[Color].[Color]]: executing sql [select "METRIC"."COLOR" as "c0"
from "METRIC" "METRIC" group by "METRIC"."COLOR" order by
"METRIC"."COLOR" ASC NULLS LAST] 2014-06-11 23:17:58,747 DEBUG [sql] -
223: , exec 50704 ms
In order to improve performance, the datamart includes aggregate tables at the hour and day levels, and both aggregate tables include the COLOR column.
I understand that Mondrian is very dependent on the underlying database performance, but there is really no way to tune this. I can create an index on COLOR (because a full scan of the index will be marginally faster than a full scan of the table), but it seems silly to create an index with 5 distinct value on a 300M row table. The day aggregate table has about 500K rows and would be significantly faster executing virtually the same query against this table, but Mondrian always seems to go to the base fact table for these dimension queries.
My question is, is there some way to avoid this query? If I can't avoid it, is it possible to get Mondrian to use the aggregate tables for this type of query? I have specified approxRowCount in the single level of this dimension/hierarchy and that eliminated the similar query to get the count of values. I haven't dug into the source of Mondrian yet to determine if there is a possibility of using the aggregate table or if there is some configuration on my part that is preventing it.
Edit for Clarification:
I probably didn't do a good job of asking my question-let me try and clarify. My MDX query looks something like:
select [Color].[Color].Members on columns,
{[Measures].[Metric Value], [Measures].[Count]} on rows
from [Metric]
where [Time].[2014].[June].[11]
I can look at this and hand write a SQL query that answers this query
select COLOR, avg(VALUE), sum(FACT_COUNT)
from AGG_DAY_METRIC
where YEAR = 2014
and MONTH = 6
and DAY_OF_MONTH = 11
group by COLOR
The database answers this query in about 100ms scanning approx 4K rows. It takes Mondrian several minutes to answer the
query because it does several queries that don't answer the MDX query directly, but rather get information about the
dimension. In the case above, the database has to scan 300M rows, taking 50 seconds, to return that there are 5 possible
colors. If color was in a normal dimension table there would only be 5 rows, but in a degenerate dimension there can be 100s
of millions of rows.
So my questions are:
a) Is there a way to tell Mondrian the values of a degenerate dimension and avoid these queries?
b) Is there a way to have Mondrian answer these queries from aggregate tables?
This problem was solved, not by modifying anything in the Mondrian schema or the application, but the database. The database in this case was Oracle and we were able to create a materialized view with query rewrite enabled.
The materialized view is created from the exact query issued by Mondrian. Since the color values don't change very frequently (almost never in our case), the materialized view does a full refresh once a day.
In this case the queries went from taking minute(s) to milliseconds. If your facing an issue like this and your database is Oracle this is a good approach to speeding up the tuples resolution for degenerate dimensions with low cardinality.
It's hard to give any specific directions without knowing more about your schema, but it looks to me you have to make sure that the number of rows with certain colours (count) has to be marked defined as an aggregate measure (Count or Max Number).
Please note that these aggregates are not calculated continuously (I think it would be to heavy for the backing data-store, and Mondrian won't keep a flowing set in memory for incoming facts).
The aggregation can be specified to be ran/rebuilt at specific times (nightly, hourly...). This would make Mondrian a bit unsuitable for real-time analysis, but you should be able to do almost instant queries on historical data.
If your dimension has 5 distinct values in a 300M fact table it should not be a degenerate dimension. It should be in a separate dimension table. A degenerate dimension should ONLY be used if its cardinality is close to the full fact table row count, making a separate table pointless, as there would be no significant storage savings and joining the dimension results in a lot of data being read;
If you put the colors on a separate dim table, any "Read Tuples" query will return results in a few ms, and your problem is solved.
However, more to the point of your question, Mondrian should be able to pick the dim values from the agg tables. Unless you have distinct-count aggregators in the cube, in which case you're in a tricky situation (unless there's an agg table that exactly matches the level of detail you need, Mondrian will very likely scan the fact table).
You should also set the highCardinality attribute of this degenerate dimension to True. Even with only 5 distinct values, having highCardinality=false tells Mondrian it's safe to scan the whole dimension to populate the list of members. Setting it to true stops this scan.
You should also add an index to this column. It's always a good idea to add indexes to every key and degenerate dimension column in a fact table. With an index the DB should answer much faster that SQL query.
Finally, you have a 300M row fact table. What DBMS are you using? Is it a Column oriented DB? If not, you should try them as a possible alternative to your data store. Column oriented DB have a significant performance increase over Row oriented DBs for Mondrian-like queries. There are a few good options out there, you should test drive them.

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