We are working on developing a platform which models flow of entities across a graph. The system has to answer questions of the kind how many entities having these properties are sitting at a given node on the graph , what is the inflow on a node, outflow on a node etc. Flow data is fed to the system in a stream. We are thinking of breaking the flow data in time buckets(say 5 mins) and pre-compute various aggregates against different properties and storing the aggregates in DynamoDB to serve queries.
With regards to this we are evaluating the following options:
EMR: Put flow data in AWS -S3/DynamoDB run a Map Reduce/hive job
Putting recent data into AWS- RDS, computing the aggregates via sql
Akka: It is a framework to build distributed applications via Actors
and Message passing.
If anyone has worked on similar usecase or has used any of the above technologies, please let me know what approach would be best fit for our use case.
I have used EMR to process data in S3... works pretty well. And the best part is you can spin up hadoop clusters of various sizes that fit the work load.
you may want to look into Storm for stream processing
I am also collecting a list of big-data tools here: http://hadoopilluminated.com/hadoop_book/Bigdata_Ecosystem.html
The final solution employed AWS Redshift, the driving reason was the requirement of high speed data ingestion, which Redshift provides via the COPY command.
Hadoop is built to store the data efficiently, however it does not gurantees a sub-second sla for ingestion, neither does it provide an SLA for when the data will be available for MR jobs, this was the main reason we did not go with EMR or Hadoop in general.
Related
I have a few doubts regarding hadoop
In one of the videos published by cloudera an instructer told that in hadoop there is HDFS. Every file will be stored as a set of chucks or blocks. Each block will be replicated three times in different machines to minimize the point of failure. Each mapper will process a single hdfs block.
From these logics i perceived that if i have a server having some 100 peta bytes of logs which are not stored in traditional file system unlike hdfs.
Main doubt 1. Now if i want to analyse this huge data efficiently using the mapreduce technique then do i have to transfer the data in a new server running hdfs and having three times the storage of the old server.
In one more video which was also published by cloudera..the instructer mentioned clearly that we dont need to migrate the traditional system to a new system, we can use hadoop and map reduce on top of that. This is little contradictry to the statement mentioned in first point.
Main doubt 2: Lets assume that point 2 statement is true. Now how can this be possible. I mean how can we apply hadoop and map reduce on a traditional file system where there is no replication of blocks or name node ..deamon on each machine.
My main task is to Facilitate fast analysis of a huge amount of logs which are currently not stored in hdfs. For doing this will i need a new server or not.
P.S: I need some good tutorial or Books or some articles which could give me in depth knowledge of big data so that i can start working on it.
So recomendations are most welcome.
Hadoop is just an infrastructure for running a MapReduce style workload (for "big data" or "analytics" atop a cluster of servers.
You can use HDFS for data sharing across the nodes, then use Hadoop's built in workload management to distribute work to nodes where the data is stored. This is sometimes called "function shipping."
But it's also possible to not use HDFS. You can use another network file sharing / distribution mechanism. FTP (file copies), S3 (access from the Amazon Web Services cloud), and a variety of other clustered/distributed file systems are supported by various vendors/platforms. Some of these move the data to the system on which workload is being done ("data shipping").
Which storage strategy is appropriate, efficient, and performant is a big question, and depends greatly on your infrastructure and your MapReduce app's data access patterns. In general, however, analytics jobs are resource hungry, so only small analytics apps tend to run on servers doing other work (the "original systems"). So processing "big data" does tend to suggest new servers--if not ones you buy, ones you rent temporarily from a cloud service like AWS, RackSpace, etc.--and data streaming from replicas/clones of data captured in production ("secondary storage") rather than data still resident on "primary storage."
If you're just starting out with small or modest apps, you might be able to access data in-place, directly from existing systems. But if you've got 100 PB of logs, you're going to want that processed on systems devoted to the task.
Druid is used for both real time and batch processing. But can it totally replace hadoop?
If not why? As in what is the advantage of hadoop over druid?
I have read that druid is used along with hadoop. So can the use of Hadoop be avoided?
We are talking about two slightly related but very different technologies here.
Druid is a real-time analytics system and is a perfect fit for timeseries and time based events aggregation.
Hadoop is HDFS (a distributed file system) + Map Reduce (a paradigm for executing distributed processes), which together have created an eco system for distributed processing and act as underlying/influencing technology for many other open source projects.
You can setup druid to use Hadoop; that is to fire MR jobs to index batch data and to read its indexed data from HDFS (of course it will cache them locally on the local disk)
If you want to ignore Hadoop, you can do your indexing and loading from a local machine as well, of course with the penalty of being limited to one machine.
Can you avoid using Hadoop with Druid? Yes, you can stream data in real-time into a Druid cluster rather than batch-loading it with Hadoop. One way to do this is to stream data into Kafka, which will handle incoming events and pass them into Storm, which can then process and load them into Druid Realtime nodes.
Typically this setup is used with Hadoop in parallel, because streamed real-time data comes with its own baggage and often needs to be fixed up and backfilled. That whole architecture has been dubbed "Lambda" by some.
Druid is used for both real time and batch processing. But can it totally replace hadoop? If not why?
It depends on your cases. Have a look at Druid official website documentation.
Druid is good choice for below use cases:
Insert rates are very high, but updates are less common
Most of queries are aggregation and reporting with low latency of 100ms to a few seconds.
Data has a time component
Load data from Kafka, HDFS, flat files, or object storage like Amazon S3
Druid is not good choince for below use cases
Need low-latency updates of existing records using a primary key. Druid supports streaming inserts, but not streaming updates
Building an offline reporting system where query latency is not very important.
In case of big joins
So if you are looking for offline reporting system where query latency is not important, Hadoop may score in that scenario.
We have a lot of user interaction data from various websites stored in Cassandra such as cookies, page-visits, ads-viewed, ads-clicked, etc.. that we would like to do reporting on. Our current Cassandra schema supports basic reporting and querying. However we also would like to build large queries that would typically involve Joins on large Column Families (containing millions of rows).
What approach is best suited for this? One possibility is to extract data out to a relational database such as mySQL and do data mining there. Alternate could be to attempt at use hadoop with hive or pig to run map reduce queries for this purpose? I must admit I have zero experience with the latter.
Anyone have experience of performance differences in one one vs the other? Would you run map reduce queries on a live Cassandra production instance or on a backup copy to prevent query load from affecting write performance?
In my experience Cassandra is better suited to processes where you need real-time access to your data, fast random reads and just generally handle large traffic loads. However, if you start doing complex analytics, the availability of your Cassandra cluster will probably suffer noticeably. In general from what I've seen it's in your best interest to leave the Cassandra cluster alone, otherwise the availability starts suffering.
Sounds like you need an analytics platform, and I would definitely advise exporting your reporting data out of Cassandra to use in an offline data-warehouse system.
If you can afford it, having a real data-warehouse would allow you to do complex queries with complex joins on multiples tables. These data-warehouse systems are widely used for reporting, here is a list of what are in my opinion the key players:
Netezza
Aster/TeraData
Vertica
A recent one which is gaining a lot of momentum is Amazon Redshift, but it is currently in beta, but if you can get your hands on it you could give this a try since it looks like a solid analytics platform with a pricing much more attractive than the above solutions.
Alternatives like using Hadoop MapReduce/Hive/Pig are also interesting to look at, but probably not a replacement for Hadoop technologies. I would recommend Hive if you have a SQL background because it will be very easy to understand what you're doing and you can scale easily. There are actually already libraries integrated with Hadoop, like Apache Mahout, which allow you to do data-mining on a Hadoop cluster, you should definitely give this a try and see if it fits your needs.
To give you an idea, an approach that I've used that has been working well so far is pre-aggregating the results in Hive and then have the reports themselves generated in a data-warehouse like Netezza to compute complex joins .
Disclosure: I'm an engineer at DataStax.
In addition to Charles' suggestions, you might want to look into DataStax Enterprise (DSE), which offers a nice integration of Cassandra with Hadoop, Hive, Pig, and Mahout.
As Charles mentioned, you don't want to run your analytics directly against Cassandra nodes that are handling your real-time application needs because they can have a substantial impact on performance. To avoid this, DSE allows you to devote a portion of your cluster strictly to analytics by using multiple virtual "datacenters" (in the NetworkToplogyStrategy sense of the term). Queries performed as part of a Hadoop job will only impact those nodes, essentially leaving your normal Cassandra nodes unaffected. Additionally, you can scale each portion of the cluster up or down separately based on your performance needs.
There are a couple of upsides to the DSE approach. The first is that you don't need to perform any ETL prior to processing your data; Cassandra's normal replication mechanisms keep the nodes devoted to analytics up to date. Second, you don't need an external Hadoop cluster. DSE includes a drop-in replacement for HDFS called CFS (CassandraFS), so all source data, intermediate results, and final results from a Hadoop job can be stored in the Cassandra cluster.
We're strategizing on how to analyze user "interest" (clicks, likes, etc) on 1M+ items on our site to generate a "similar items" list.
In order to process a large amount of raw data we're learning about Hadoop, Hive, and related projects.
My question is regarding this concern: Hadoop/Hive and the like seem to be geared more towards data dumps, followed by processing cycles. Presumably the end of the processing cycle is something to the extend of an indexed graph of links between related items.
If I'm on track so far, how is data typically processed in these scenarios: I.e.
Is the raw user data re-analyzed at intervals to re-build an indexed graph of links?
Do we stream data as it comes in, analyze it and update the data store?
As the resultant data from the analysis changes, are we typically updating it piece by piece, or re-processing in bulk?
Is this use case better addressed by Cassandra than Hive/HDFS?
I'm looking to better understand the common approach to this kind of big data processing.
I think this is a good use case for Hadoop family of tools.
It looks to me like HDFS and Flume might be obvious choices, I would look into either HBase or Hive depending on what kinds of analysis you are interested in, how flexible you are in organizing the data
and querying it.
Is the raw user data re-analyzed at intervals to re-build an indexed graph of links?
Answer: Hadoop is very good for this. I would use HBase for this, but there are other choices.
Do we stream data as it comes in, analyze it and update the data store?
Answer: Flume is good for this.
As the resultant data from the analysis changes, are we typically updating it piece by piece, or re-processing in bulk?
Answer: You have options to do both. Bulk would probably be a MapReduce job on HDFS where piece-by-piece could be managed through HBase column-family values or Hive rows. If you give more details, I could be more precise.
Is this use case better addressed by Cassandra than Hive/HDFS?
Answer: Cassandra and HBase are both implementations of Google's BigTable. I think that choice depends on
how do you need to organize, access, analyze and update data. I can provide more guidance if needed.
HBase is usually better for semi-structured, high R/W processing.
DHFS is generally good choice for flexible, scalable storage of data dumps as you call them.
Flume is applicable for moving streaming data.
I would also consider looking into Titan and HBase if you are thinking graph.
Hive would be applicable if you are interested in tabular-oriented data and using SQL-like queries.
What is the point in feeding an Hadoop cluster and using that cluster to feed data into a Vertica/InfoBright datawarehouse ?
All thse vendor keep saying "we can connect with Hadoop", but I don't understand what's the point. What is the interest of storing in Hadoop and transfering into InfoBright ? Why not have the applications store directly in the Infobright/Vertica DW ?
Thank you !
Why combine the solutions? Hadoop has some great capabilities (see url below). These capabilities though do not include allowing business users to run quick analytics. Queries that take 30 minutes to hours in Hadoop are being delivered in 10’s of seconds with Infobright.
BTW, your initial question did not presuppose an MPP architecture and for good reason. Infobright customers Liverail, AdSafe Media & InMobi, among others, utilize IEE with Hadoop.
If you register for an Industry White Paper http://support.infobright.com/Support/Resource-Library/Whitepapers/ you will see a view of the current marketplace where four suggested Use Cases for Hadoop are outlined. It was authored by Wayne Eckerson , Director of Research, Business Applications and Architecture Group, TechTarget, in September 2011.
1) Create an online archive.
With Hadoop, organizations don’t have to delete or ship the data to offline storage; they can keep it online indefinitely by adding commodity servers to meet storage and processing requirements. Hadoop becomes a low-cost alternative for meeting online archival requirements.
2) Feed the data warehouse.
Organizations can also use Hadoop to parse, integrate and aggregate large volumes of Web or other types of data and then ship it to the data warehouse, where both casual and power users can query and analyze the data using familiar BI tools. Here, Hadoop becomes an ETL tool for processing large volumes of Web data before it lands in the corporate data warehouse.
3) Support analytics.
The big data crowd (i.e., Internet developers) views Hadoop primarily as an analytical engine for running analytical computations against large volumes of data. To query Hadoop, analysts currently need to write programs in Java or other languages and understand MapReduce, a framework for writing distributed (or parallel) applications. The advantage here is that analysts aren’t restricted by SQL when formulating queries. SQL does not support many types of analytics, especially those that involve inter-row calculations, which are common in Web traffic analysis. The disadvantage is that Hadoop is batch-oriented and not conducive to iterative querying.
4) Run reports.
Hadoop’s batch-orientation, however, makes it suitable for executing regularly scheduled reports. Rather than running reports against summary data, organizations can now run them against raw data, guaranteeing the most accurate results.
There are several reasons you may want to do that
1. Cost per TB. The storage costs in Hadoop are much cheaper than Vertica/Netezza/greenplum and the like). You can get long-term retention in Hadoop and shorter term data in the analytics DB
2. Data ingestion capabilities in hadoop (performing transformations) is better in Hadoop
3. programatic analytics (libraries like Mahout ) so you can build advanced text analytics
4. dealing with unstructured data
The MPP dbs provide better performance in ad-hoc queries, better dealing with structured data and connectivity to traditional BI tools (OLAP and reporting) - so basically Hadoop complements the offering of these DBs
Hadoop is more of a platform than a DB.
Think of Hadoop as a neat filesystem that supports lots of queries over different of file types. With this in mind, most people dump raw data onto Hadoop and use it as a staging layer in the data pipeline, where it can chew the data and push it to other systems like vertica or any other. You have several advantages that can be resumed to decoupling.
So Hadoop is turning into the facto storage platform for big data. It is simple, fault-tolerant, scales well, and it is easy to feed and to get data out of it. So most vendors are trying to push a product to companies that probably have a Hadoop installation.
What makes the joint deployment so effective for this software ?
First, both platforms have a lot in common:
Purpose-built from scratch for Big Data transformation and analytics
Leverage MPP architecture to scale out with commodity hardware,
capable of managing TBs through PBs of data
Native HA support with low administration overhead
Hadoop is ideal for the initial exploratory data analysis, where the data is often available in HDFS and is schema-less, and batch jobs usually suffice, whereas Vertica is ideal for stylized, interactive analysis, where a known analytic method needs to be applied repeatedly to incoming batches of data.
By using Vertica’s Hadoop connector, users can easily move data between the two platforms. Also, a single analytic job can be decomposed into bits and pieces that leverage the execution power of both platforms; for instance, in a web analytics use case, the JSON data generated by web servers is initially dumped into HDFS. A map-reduce job is then invoked to convert such semi-structured data into relational tuples, with the results being loaded into Vertica for optimized storage and retrieval by subsequent analytic queries.
What are the Key differences that make Hadoop and Vertica complement each other when addressing Big Data.
Interface and extensibility
Hadoop
Hadoop’s map-reduce programming interface is designed for developers.The platform is acclaimed for its multi-language support as well as ready-made analytic library packages supplied by a strong community.
Vertica
Vertica’s interface complies with BI industry standards (SQL, ODBC, JDBC etc). This enables both technologists and business analysts to leverage Vertica in their analytic use cases. The SDK is an alternative to the map-reduce paradigm, and often delivers higher performance.
Tool chain/Eco system
Hadoop
Hadoop and HDFS integrate well with many other open source tools. Its integration with existing BI tools is emerging.
Vertica
Vertica integrates with the BI tools because of its standards compliant interface. Through Vertica’s Hadoop connector, data can be exchanged in parallel between Hadoop and Vertica.
Storage management
Hadoop
Hadoop replicates data 3 times by default for HA. It segments data across the machine cluster for loading balancing, but the data segmentation scheme is opaque to the end users and cannot be tweaked to optimize for the analytic jobs.
Vertica
Vertica’s columnar compression often achieves 10:1 in its compression ratio. A typical Vertica deployment replicates data once for HA, and both data replicas can attain different physical layout in order to optimize for a wider range of queries. Finally, Vertica segments data not only for load balancing, but for compression and query workload optimization as well.
Runtime optimization
Hadoop
Because the HDFS storage management does not sort or segment data in ways that optimize for an analytic job, at job runtime the input data often needs to be resegmented across the cluster and/or sorted, incurring a large amount of network and disk I/O.
Vertica
The data layout is often optimized for the target query workload during data loading, so that a minimal amount of I/O is incurred at query runtime. As a result, Vertica is designed for real-time analytics as opposed to batch oriented data processing.
Auto tuning
Hadoop
The map-reduce programs use procedural languages (Java, python, etc), which provide the developers fine-grained control of the analytic logic, but also requires that the developers optimize the jobs carefully in their programs.
Vertica
The Vertica Database Designer provides automatic performance tuning given an input workload. Queries are specified in the declarative SQL language, and are automatically optimized by the Vertica columnar optimizer.
I'm not a Hadoop user (just a Vertica user/DBA), but I would assume the answer would be something along these lines:
-You already have a setup using Hadoop and you want to add a "Big Data" database for intensive analytical analysis.
-You want to use Hadoop for non-analytical functions and processing and a database for analysis. But it is the same data, so no need for two feeds.
To expand slightly on Arnon's answer, Hadoop has been recognized as a force that is not going away and is gaining increasing traction in organizations, many times via grassroots efforts from developers. MPP databases are good at answering questions that we know about at design time such as "How many transactions do we get per hour by country?".
Hadoop started as a platform for a new type of developer that lives somewhere between analysts and developers, one who can write code but also understands data analysis and machine learning. MPP databases (column or not) are very poor at serving this type of developer who often is analyzing unstructured data, using algorithms that require too much CPU power to run in a database or datasets which are too large. The sheer amount of CPU power required to build some models makes running these algorithms in any sort of traditional sharded DB impossible.
My personal pipeline using hadoop typically looks like:
Run a number of very large global queries in Hadoop to get a basic feel for the data and the distribution of variables.
Use Hadoop to build a smaller dataset with just the data I am interested in.
Export the smaller dataset into a relational DB.
Run lots of small queries on the relational db, build excel sheets, sometimes do a little R.
Bear in mind that this workflow only works for the "analyst developer" or "data scientist". Others mileage will vary.
Coming back to your question due to people like me abandoning their tools these companies are looking for ways to remain relevant in an age where Hadoop is synonymous with big data, the coolest startups and cutting edge technology (whether this is earned or not you may discuss amongst yourselves.) Also many Hadoop installations are an order of magnitude or more larger than an organizations MPP deployments, meaning more data is being retained for longer in Hadoop.
Massive parallel database like Greenplum DB are excellent for handling massive amounts of structured data. Hadoop is excellent at handling even more massive amounts of unstructured data, e.g. websites.
Nowadays, a ton of interesting analytics combines these both types of data to gain insight. Therefore it is important for these database systems to be able to integrate with Hadoop.
For example you could do text processing on the Hadoop Cluster using MapReduce until you have some scoring value per product or something. This scoring value then could be used by the database to combine it with other data that is already stored in the database or data that has been loaded into the database from other sources.
Unstructured data, by their nature, is not suitable for loading into your traditional data warehouse. Hadoop mapreduce jobs can extract structures out of your log files (ex) and then the same can then be ported into your DW for analytics. Hadoop is batch processing, therefore is not suitable for analytic query processing. So you can process your data using hadoop to bring some structure, and then make it query ready via your visualization/sql layer.
What is the point in feeding an Hadoop cluster and using that cluster to feed data into a Vertica/InfoBright datawarehouse ?
The point is you would not want your users to fire up a query and wait for minutes, sometimes hours before you come back with an answer. Hadoop cannot provide you with a real time query response. Although this is changing with the advent of Cloudera's Impala and Hortonworks's Stinger. These are real-time data processing engines over Hadoop.
Hadoop's underlying data system, HDFS, allows chunking up your data and distributing it over the nodes in your cluster. In fact, HDFS can also be replaced with a 3rd party data storage like S3. Point is: Hadoop provides both -> storage + processing. So you are welcome to use hadoop as storage engine and extract the data into your data warehouse when needed. You can also use Hadoop to create cubes and marts and store these marts in the warehouse.
However, with the advent of Stinger and Impala, the strength of these claims will eventually be erased. So keep an eye out.