Getting data into Hadoop - hadoop

I come from a lot of SQL servers so it can be a bit difficult to picture exactly what happens to data when it goes into hadoop.
My understanding is that if you have a book in a text format that could be around 200k or so... you simply copy the data into hadoop and it becomes searchable. However does this data become part of a block so that HDFS can be more optimal or does it remain a 200k file in HDFS hurting performance?
Also is a Block what is often called a Tablet in Bigtable?
Thanks a lot for your help.
FlyMario

A file which is less than the block size of HDFS (default 64 megabytes) becomes part of a block, yes. But small files such as these might still hurt your performance in some cases, such as if you have a lot of these small files and you run a MapReduce job on them.
Vanilla Hadoop has nothing to do with Bigtable, and HDFS blocks aren't really comparable with tablets. While Hadoop's HDFS blocks have no knowledge of the data they're holding, Bigtable tablets are data-aware.

Related

Is it possible to create/work with a non-paralleized file in hadoop

we always talk about how much faster will be if we use hadoop to paralleized our data and programme .
I would like to know is that possible to keep a small file in one specific dataNode(not paralleized)?
possible to keep a small file in one specific dataNode
HDFS will try to split any file into HDFS blocks. The datanodes don't store the entire file, nor should you attempt to store on a particular one. Let Hadoop manage the data-locality.
Your file will be replicated 3 times by default in Hadoop for fault tolerance anyway.
If you have small files (less than the HDFS block size, 64 or 128MB, depending on the Hadoop version), then you probably shouldn't be using Hadoop. If you need parallelized processing, start with multi-threading. If you actually need distributed processes, my recommendation nowadays would be Spark or Flink, not Hadoop (MapReduce).
If you want this, seems like you want object storage, not block storage

To hadoop or not to hadoop

We have data (not allot at this point) that we want to transform/aggregate/pivot up to wazoo.
I had a look on the www and all the answers i am asking is pointing to hadoop for scalable,cheap to run(no SQL server machine and license),fast(if you have allot of data), programmable(not little boxes that you drag around).
There is just one problem that i keep coming up against
namely 'Use hadoop if you have more than 10gb of data'
Now we don't even have 1gb of data(at this stage) is it still viable.
My other option is SSIS. Now we do use SSIS for some of our current ETL but we don't have resources for it and putting a SQL in the cloud is just going to cost to much and don't even get me started on scalability cost and config.
thanks
Your current data volume seems to be too low for making an entry into hadoop. Enter into hadoop ecosystem only if you are dealing with huge volume of data(TB/year) and if you suspect the data volume to increase exponentially down the line.
Let me explain why I suggest against hadoop for such low volume of data.
By default hadoop stores your files into 128MB chunks of data and while processing also, it takes 128MB Chunks at a time to process(parallely). If your business requirement involves heavy CPU intensive processing, then you can decrease the input chunk size from 128MB to less. But then again by decreasing the amount of data to be processed parallely, you'll end up increasing the number of IO seaks(low level block storage). At the end you might be spending more resource on managing the tasks rather than what the actual task is taking. Hence, try avoiding distributed computing as a solution for your(low) data volume.
As #Makubex has suggested, don't use hadoop.
And SISS is a good option as it handles the data in-memory so it would perform data aggregations, data type conversions, merging, etc at a much faster rate than writing to the disk using temporary tables in stored procedures.
Hadoop is meant for large amounts of data I would suggest it only for data in terabytes. It would be way slower that SISS(which runs in-memory) for small data-sets.
Refer: When to use T-SQL or SSIS for ETL

Intention of Hadoop FS is to keep in RAM or disk?

We are thinking about going with Hadoop in my company. From looking at the docs in the Internet I got the impression the idea of HDFS is to keep it in RAM to speed up things. Now our architects says that the main idea of HDFS is scalability. I'm fine with that. But then he also claims the main idea is to keep it on the on the harddisk. HDFS is basically a scalable harddisk. My opinion is that backing HDFS by the harddisk is an option. The main idea, however, is to keep it in RAM. Who is right now? I'm really confused now and the point is crucial for the understanding of Hadoop, I would say.
Thanks, Oliver
Oliver, your architect is correct. Horizontal scalability is one of the biggest advantages of HDFS(Hadoop in general). When you say Hadoop it implies that you are dealing with very huge amounts of data, right? How are you going to put so much data in-memory?(I am assuming that by the idea of HDFS is to keep it in RAM to speed up things you mean to keep the data stored in HDFS in RAM).
But, the HDFS's metadata is kept in-memory so that you can quickly access the data stored in your HDFS. Remember, HDFS is not something physical. It is rather a virtual filesystem that lies on top of your native filesystem. So, when you say you are storing data into HDFS, it eventually gets stored in your native/local filesystem on your machine's disk and not RAM.
Having said that, there are certain major differences in the way HDFS and native FS behave. Like the block size which is very large when compared to local FS block size. Similarly the replicated manner in which data is stored in HDFS(think of RAID but at the software level).
So how does HDFS make things faster?
Hadoop is a distributed platform and HDFS a distributed store. When you put a file into HDFS it gets split into n small blocks(of size 64MB default, but configurable). Then all the blocks
of a file get stored across all the machines of your Hadoop cluster. This allows us to read all of the block together in parallel thus reducing the total reading time.
I would suggest you to go through this link in order to get a proper understanding of HDFS :
http://hadoop.apache.org/docs/stable/hdfs_design.html
HTH

Performance comparison between hadoop Pseudo-Distributed Operation and Standalone Operation

I'm a very beginner of hadoop. But I had this interesting observation.
Using the example in hadoop documentation,
By running the same example in Standalone Operation and Pseudo-Distributed Operation, the standalone one took less than 1 minute but Pseudo-distributed operation took more than 3 minutes. This is big difference. I could understand there are extra network and scheduling overhead in distributed mode. But the difference just seems to be too much. This may not be a real comparison because the example is very simple.
My question is, how much difference did you experience between the standalone and distributed mode for a real-world job?
These are reasonably different scenarios. In stand-alone mode, it never starts up a proper one-node Hadoop cluster. Everything happens locally, inline, in the JVM. Data never has to be even written out to disk, potentially. Pseudo-distributed operation is the smallest "real" Hadoop installation, of one local node. You have to read/write data to a local HDFS instance, spawn another JVM, etc. All of that adds a lot of overhead. Maybe the overhead is indeed a few minutes. This seems entirely sensible to me.
Hadoop frame work is meant for processing BIG DATA..
So the size of the data matters a lot ,because ,a smaller file would get processed in traditional file system very quickly than in hadoop because hadoop mapreduce frame work has internal work to do (to make chunks of data file and to send it to data nodes and while processing again access from data nodes ).So for a smaller files ,hadoop frame work is not suitable.
Coming to standalone and pseudo distributed mode ,one aspect u should consider is size of the file and second being actual difference in standalone and pseudo distributed mode.
In standalone mode there is no concept of HDFS,data is not copied to hadoop distributed file system (obviously time saved).Where as in pseudo distributed mode ,hdfs involved which need to be copied with the data that's need to be processed.
Small size data files better to use traditional file processing and if the file size become huge and huge ,hadoop framework gives better processing time!
Hope this helps!

what does " local caching of data" mean in the context of this article?

From the following paragraphs of Text——
(http://developer.yahoo.com/hadoop/tutorial/module2.html),It mentions that sequential readable large files are not suitable for local caching. but I don't understand what does local here mean...
There are two assumptions in my opinion: one is Client caches data from HDFS and the other is datanode caches hdfs data in its local filesystem or Memory for Clients to access quickly. is there anyone who can explain more? Thanks a lot.
But while HDFS is very scalable, its high performance design also restricts it to a
particular class of applications; it is not as general-purpose as NFS. There are a large
number of additional decisions and trade-offs that were made with HDFS. In particular:
Applications that use HDFS are assumed to perform long sequential streaming reads from
files. HDFS is optimized to provide streaming read performance; this comes at the expense of
random seek times to arbitrary positions in files.
Data will be written to the HDFS once and then read several times; updates to files
after they have already been closed are not supported. (An extension to Hadoop will provide
support for appending new data to the ends of files; it is scheduled to be included in
Hadoop 0.19 but is not available yet.)
Due to the large size of files, and the sequential nature of reads, the system does
not provide a mechanism for local caching of data. The overhead of caching is great enough
that data should simply be re-read from HDFS source.
Individual machines are assumed to fail on a frequent basis, both permanently and
intermittently. The cluster must be able to withstand the complete failure of several
machines, possibly many happening at the same time (e.g., if a rack fails all together).
While performance may degrade proportional to the number of machines lost, the system as a
whole should not become overly slow, nor should information be lost. Data replication
strategies combat this problem.
Any real Mapreduce job is probably going to process GB's (10/100/1000s) of data from HDFS.
Therefore any one mapper instance is most probably going to be processing a fair amount of data (typical block size is 64/128/256 MB depending on your configuration) in a sequential nature (it will read the file / block in its entirety from start to end.
It is also unlikely that another mapper instance running on the same machine will want to process that data block again any time in the immediate future, more so that multiple mapper instances will also be processing data alongside this mapper in any one TaskTracker (hopefully with a fair few being 'local' to actually physical location of the data, i.e. a replica of the data block also exists on the same machine the mapper instance is running).
With all this in mind, caching the data read from HDFS is probably not going to gain you much - you'll most probably not get a cache hit on that data before another block is queried and will ultimately replace it in the cache.

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