What is meant by "HDFS lacks random read and write access"? - hadoop

Any file system should provide an API to access its files and directories, etc.
So, what is meant by "HDFS lacks random read and write access"?
So, we should use HBase.

The default HDFS block size is 128 MB. So you cannot read one line here, one line there. You always read and write 128 MB blocks. This is fine when you want to process the whole file. But it makes HDFS unsuitable for some applications, like where you want to use an index to look up small records.
HBase on the other hand is great for this. If you want to read a small record, you will only read that small record.
HBase uses HDFS as its backing store. So how does it provide efficient record-based access?
HBase loads the tables from HDFS to memory or local disk, so most reads do not go to HDFS. Mutations are stored first in an append-only journal. When the journal gets large, it is built into an "addendum" table. When there are too many addendum tables, they all get compacted into a brand new primary table. For reads, the journal is consulted first, then the addendum tables, and at last the primary table. This system means that we only write a full HDFS block when we have a full HDFS block's worth of changes.
A more thorough description of this approach is in the Bigtable whitepaper.

In a typical database where the data is stored in tables in RDBMS format you can read or write to any record from any table without having to know what is there in other records. This is called random writing/reading.
But in HDFS data is stored in the file format(generally) rather than table format. So if you are reading/writing its not as easy as is in RDBMS.

Related

How to efficiently update Impala tables whose files are modified very frequently

We have a Hadoop-based solution (CDH 5.15) where we are getting new files in HDFS in some directories. On top os those directories we have 4-5 Impala (2.1) tables. The process writing those files in HDFS is Spark Structured Streaming (2.3.1)
Right now, we are running some DDL queries as soon as we get the files written to HDFS:
ALTER TABLE table1 RECOVER PARTITONS to detect new partitions (and their HDFS directories and files) added to the table.
REFRESH table1 PARTITIONS (partition1=X, partition2=Y), using all the keys for each partition.
Right now, this DDL is taking a bit too long and they are getting queued in our system, damaging the data availability of the system.
So, my question is: Is there a way to do this data incorporation more efficiently?
We have considered:
Using the ALTER TABLE .. RECOVER PARTITONS but as per the documentation, it only refreshes new partitions.
Tried to use REFRESH .. PARTITON ... with multiple partitions at once, but the statement syntaxis does not allow to do that.
Tried batching the queries but the Hive JDBC drives does not support batching queries.
Shall we try to do those updates in parallel given that the system is already busy?
Any other way you are aware of?
Thanks!
Victor
Note: The way in which we know what partitions need refreshed is by using HDFS events as with Spark Structured Streaming we don´t know exactly when the files are written.
Note #2: Also, the files written in HDFS are sometimes small, so it would be great if it could be possible to merge those files at the same time.
Since nobody seems to have the answer for my problem, I would like to share the approach we took to make this processing more efficient, comments are very welcome.
We discovered (doc. is not very clear on this) that some of the information stored in the Spark "checkpoints" in HDFS is a number of metadata files describing when each Parquet file was written and how big was it:
$hdfs dfs -ls -h hdfs://...../my_spark_job/_spark_metadata
w-r--r-- 3 hdfs 68K 2020-02-26 20:49 hdfs://...../my_spark_job/_spark_metadata/3248
rw-r--r-- 3 hdfs 33.3M 2020-02-26 20:53 hdfs://...../my_spark_job/_spark_metadata/3249.compact
w-r--r-- 3 hdfs 68K 2020-02-26 20:54 hdfs://...../my_spark_job/_spark_metadata/3250
...
$hdfs dfs -cat hdfs://...../my_spark_job/_spark_metadata/3250
v1
{"path":"hdfs://.../my_spark_job/../part-00004.c000.snappy.parquet","size":9866555,"isDir":false,"modificationTime":1582750862638,"blockReplication":3,"blockSize":134217728,"action":"add"}
{"path":"hdfs://.../my_spark_job/../part-00004.c001.snappy.parquet","size":526513,"isDir":false,"modificationTime":1582750862834,"blockReplication":3,"blockSize":134217728,"action":"add"}
...
So, what we did was:
Build a Spark Streaming Job polling that _spark_metadata folder.
We use a fileStream since it allow us to define the file filter to use.
Each entry in that stream is one of those JSON lines, which is parsed to extract the file path and size.
Group the files by the parent folder (which maps to each Impala partition) they belong to.
For each folder:
Read a dataframe loading only the targeted Parquet files (to avoid race conditions with the other job writing the files)
Calculate how many blocks to write (using the size field in the JSON and a target block size)
Coalesce the dataframe to the desired number of partitions and write it back to HDFS
Execute the DDL REFRESH TABLE myTable PARTITION ([partition keys derived from the new folder]
Finally, delete the source files
What we achieved is:
Limit the DDLs, by doing one refresh per partition and batch.
By having batch time and block size configurable, we are able to adapt our product to different deployment scenarios with bigger or smaller datasets.
The solution is quite flexible, since we can assign more or less resources to the Spark Streaming job (executors, cores, memory, etc.) and also we can start/stop it (using its own checkpointing system).
We are also studying the possibily of applying some data repartitioning, while doing this process, to have partitions as close as possible to the most optimum size.

How can we delete specific rows from HDFS?

We have a huge number of text files containing information about clients. We have to delete specific rows from this HDFS file; for example rows associated with the clients X, Y and Z and keeping the others.
First create a hive table on the top of that hdfs location , then create another one from first hive table with filter logic.Now delete the first hive table.Make sure that tables should be internal.
The concept of a "row" only makes sense for line-delimited data. For example, if you had Parquet data, or XML files... You want to delete records.
One does not simply "delete records" from HDFS files. HDFS is an append only filesystem.
If the data is already on HDFS, the best you can do is read the files, filter out data you don't want (using whatever tool you want - Pig or Spark would be the easiest IMO), then write a new file, optionally overwriting the old data.
To prevent this from happening, you need an ETL process between the data source and HDFS which sanitizes the data ahead of time.

Does Hadoop HBase support self healing data blocks?

HDFS supports a mechanism which is called 'self-healing'. As far as I understood this means, that when a file (or better a data block) is written into HDFS, the block is replicated over a cluster of data-nodes. HDFS verifies the consistency of the data blocks over all nodes and automatically detects inconsistent data to be replicated again into a new data block. This is a feature which I am looking for.
Now - Hbase is based on HDFS. As far as I understood Hbase is optimized for random access to 'smaler' datasets (with only a few MB). Hbase is also supporting primar keys and query language. This is what I am also looking for.
My Question is: does Hbase still support the 'self-healing' feature of HDFS or is this lost because of the different approach of a relational database analogy?

Hbase in comparison with Hive

Im trying to get a clear understanding on HBASE.
Hive:- It just create a Tabular Structure for the Underlying Files in
HDFS. So that we can enable the user to have Querying Abilities on the
HDFS file. Correct me if im wrong here?
Hbase- Again, we have create a Similar table Structure, But bit more
in Structured way( Column Oriented) again over HDFS File system.
aren't they both Same considering the type of job they does. except that Hive runs on Mapredeuce.
Also is that true that we cant create a Hbase table over an Already existing HDFS file?
Hive shares a very similar structures to traditional RDBMS (But Not all), HQL syntax is almost similar to SQL which is good for Database Programmer from learning perspective where as HBase is completely diffrent in the sense that it can be queried only on the basis of its Row Key.
If you want to design a table in RDBMS, you will be following a structured approach in defining columns concentrating more on attributes, while in Hbase the complete design is concentrated around the data, So depending on the type of query to be used we can design a table in Hbase also the columns will be dynamic and will be changing at Runtime (core feature of NoSQL)
You said aren't they both Same considering the type of job they does. except that Hive runs on Mapredeuce .This is not a simple thinking.Because when a hive query is executed, a mapreduce job will be created and triggered.Depending upon data size and complexity it may consume time, since for each mapreduce job, there are some number of steps to do by JobTracker, initializing tasks like maps,combine,shufflesort, reduce etc.
But in case we access HBase, it directly lookup the data they indexed based on specified Scan or Get parameters. Means it just act as a database.
Hive and HBase are completely different things
Hive is a way to create map/reduce jobs for data that resides on HDFS (can be files or HBase)
HBase is an OLTP oriented key-value store that resides on HDFS and can be used in Map/Reduce jobs
In order for Hive to work it holds metadata that maps the HDFS data into tabular data (since SQL works on tables).
I guess it is also important to note that in recent versions Hive is evolving to go beyond a SQL way to write map/reduce jobs and with what HortonWorks calls the "stinger initiative" they have added a dedicated file format (Orc) and import Hive's performance (e.g. with the upcoming Tez execution engine) to deliver SQL on Hadoop (i.e. relatively fast way to run analytics queries for data stored on Hadoop)
Hive:
It's just create a Tabular Structure for the Underlying Files in HDFS. So that we can enable the user to have SQL-like Querying Abilities on existing HDFS files - with typical latency up to minutes.
However, for best performance it's recommended to ETL data into Hive's ORC format.
HBase:
Unlike Hive, HBase is NOT about running SQL queries over existing data in HDFS.
HBase is a strictly-consistent, distributed, low-latency KEY-VALUE STORE.
From The HBase Definitive Guide:
The canonical use case of Bigtable and HBase is the webtable, that is, the web pages
stored while crawling the Internet.
The row key is the reversed URL of the page—for example, org.hbase.www. There is a
column family storing the actual HTML code, the contents family, as well as others
like anchor, which is used to store outgoing links, another one to store inbound links,
and yet another for metadata like language.
Using multiple versions for the contents family allows you to store a few older copies
of the HTML, and is helpful when you want to analyze how often a page changes, for
example. The timestamps used are the actual times when they were fetched from the
crawled website.
The fact that HBase uses HDFS is just an implementation detail: it allows to run HBase on an existing Hadoop cluster, it guarantees redundant storage of data; but it is not a feature in any other sense.
Also is that true that we cant create a Hbase table over an already
existing HDFS file?
No, it's NOT true. Internally HBase stores data in its HFile format.

Can HBase Access Text Documents and CSV Documents Just as Hadoop?

In Hadoop, I can easily create Map/Reduce apps which access and process data in huge text files and csv files. My question is can Hbase do the same and access such huge files, or HBase has other uses?
Hbase runs queries just as relational databases; so, I kind of have a hard time to understand the advantage of HBase, unless it can access huge text and csv files just as Hadoop does.
First of all Hbase is just a store. And a store never accesses anything. Rather you access the store to fetch or put the data. Like any other datastore Hbase has only one job to do, store your data and make it available to you whenever you need it. You can write MapReduce jobs or sequential Java programs etc etc to put data into Hbase or fetch data from it. It's totally upto you which path you prefer.
Coming to the second part of your question, Hbase never ever works like traditional relational databases. Everything, starting from storing the data to accessing the data, is totally different. The advantage of using Hbase is that you can store really really huge amount of data into it and have random read/write access. The data can be of any type viz. text, csv, tsv, binary etc etc. But, before going ahead, you must think well whether Hbase is a suitable choice for you or not, as one size doesn't fit all.
HTH

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