hosted BigQuery instance - hadoop

Is there any way I can host big query software on my company server?
The company does not want the data to be anywhere else other than own data center.
What are BigQuery alternatives? (cloud as well as hosted)

Is there any way I can host big query software on my company server?
Google Big Query is an implementation of the Google Dremel Paper, but is offered as a service and is not available as a software to be installed in-premise.
What are big query alternatives? (cloud as well as hosted)
Apache Drill is an implementation of the above mentioned Dremel, but has just started and might take some time to materialize.
Cloudera has recently announced Imapala for real-time queries on Hadoop. Check the blog for more details.
Would be interested to know some other alternatives for real-time queries on Big Data.
Edit : Here is an interesting article from InfoWorld on the same.

Hive and Pig are two common solutions to making a queryable system, but since you mentioned Google's Big Query, I assume you mean real-time queries.
In addition to the real-time solutions mentioned by Praveen, there are some workarounds to making other column-oriented solutions faster by writing redundant stores, in a normalized fashion. Think of it this way: You can 'pre-join' the data in a column family, as long as you understand that you're trading fast access against excess volume and slower insertion speed.
-t.

Related

NoSQL for multi-site archival logging with full-text search

I'm looking at building a somewhat complex log handling system to replace an old ad-hoc setup and could use a bit of advice. I'm pretty familiar with SQL databases and networking, but am very new to NoSQL stores, which seem to be the key to solving this mess. Note that we have a very good team, but a limited licensing budget, so free/open-source options are vastly preferred. (That said, availability of support if something goes pear-shaped would be nice.)
Requirements:
Archive (test) logs generated in the several GB/day range at multiple sites around the world.
Provide full text search of those logs at each site fairly instantaneous for debugging purposes.
Push that archived data back to a central location (though a replica at each site would be absolutely okay).
Provide for analytics of that data back at the central location.
Constraints:
The sites have fairly crap Internet connections for the moment (high latency and fairly low bandwidth). Much of the data is generated during the day and a good portion of the sync would have to lag behind and finish overnight each day.
Sites MUST be able to function if the WAN goes completely off-line.
Extras
The log data is (as usual) highly compressible. Any solution that compresses data transacting from node to node across the WAN is preferred.
Many log files are related to each other in multi-level hierarchies, and that relationship is very important and must be maintained!
Sites will generally not modify the same data or modify it again once stored. This is all archival for the most part.
We can either stream as the logs are generated or push blocks of logs. Streaming is preferred, as it would simplify things considerably.
Options I'm aware of:
Local MySQL and folder structure for logging and local configuration management.
This is what we have now and it's running, but not a long-term solution by any means.
Elasticsearch
I've read that ElasticSearch would probably be really good for this, though from what I understand that doesn't support multi-site.
Cassandra
This seems to have built-in multi-site support, but I'm not exactly familiar with the data-model. Is this a good choice for something like this, or will I hate myself if I give it a try?
CouchDB
This is a document store that seems(?) like a good match for log data, but again doesn't appear to have multi-site support.
Apache Kafka
I read up on this, but I haven't quite wrapped my head around it yet...
Questions:
Do any of these actually let you stream-append logs or are they best suited to dumping completed files in?
Is there a solution I'm missing that might be better?
Any recommendations on multi-site with some of the options that don't support multi-site by themselves?
Interesting links:
https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every-software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying
http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/2015/07/deploying-apache-kafka-a-practical-faq/
https://www.elastic.co/blog/scaling_elasticsearch_across_data_centers_with_kafka
https://kafka.apache.org/08/ops.html
https://github.com/Stratio/cassandra-lucene-index
I may be a bit biased, since Couchbase is my employer, but this sounds like the kind of problem that XDCR (Cross Datacenter Replication) was made to solve.
You could stand up a cluster on multiple geographical sites (Couchbase calls these "datacenters") and then XDCR would automatically replicate (bidirectionally) the data between sites. If I understand your requirements correctly, this sounds like just what you need.

Manage reports, when our database is Cassandra ...Spark or Solr...or BOTH?

My db is Cassandra (datastax enterprise => linux). Since it doesn't support group-by, aggregate and etc. for reporting, according to its fundamentals, it's not a good decision to use Cassandra, downright. I googled about this deficit and found some results as this, and this and also this one.
But I really became confused! Hive uses additional tables, individually. Solr is better for full-text searching and like that. And Spark...it's useful for analysis, but, I didn't understand if it uses Hadoop eventually, or not.
I will have many reports, which needs indexing and grouping, at least. But I don't want to use additional tables which will impose overhead. And also, I'm .Net (and not Java) developer, and my application is besed on .Net Framework, too.
I am not exactly sure what your question is here and your confusion is understandable as with Cassandra and DSE there is a lot going on.
You are correct in stating that Cassandra does not support any aggregations or group by functionality that you would want to use for reporting.
Solr (DSE Search) is used for ad-hoc and full text searching of the data stored in Cassandra. This only works on a single table at a time.
Spark (DSE Analytics) provides analytics capabilities such as Map-Reduce as well as the ability to filter and join tables. This is not done in real-time though as the processing and shuffling of data can be expensive depending on the data load.
Spark does not use Hadoop. It performs many of the same jobs but is more efficient in many scenarios as it allows for in-memory distributed processing on the data.
Since you are using DataStax Enterprise the advantage is that you have built in connectors to both Solr (DSE Search) to provide ad-hoc queries and Spark (DSE Analytics) to provide analytics on your data.
Since I don't know your exact reporting requirements it is difficult to give you a specific recommendation. If you can provide some additional details about what sort of reporting (scheduled versus ad-hoc etc.) you will be running I may be able to help you more.

Using elasticsearch as central data repository

We are currently using elasticsearch to index and perform searches on about 10M documents. It works fine and we are happy with its performance. My colleague who initiated the use of elasticsearch is convinced that it can be used as the central data repository and other data systems (e.g. SQL Server, Hadoop/Hive) can have data pushed to them. I didn't have any arguments against it because my knowledge of both is too limited. However, I am concerned.
I do know that data in elasticsearch is stored in a manner that is efficient for text searching. Hadoop stores data just as a file system would but in a manner that is efficient to scale/replicate blocks over over multiple data nodes. Therefore, in my mind it seems more beneficial to use Hadoop (as it is more agnostic w.r.t its view on data) as a central data repository. Then push data from Hadoop to SQL, elasticsearch, etc...
I've read a few articles on Hadoop and elasticsearch use cases and it seems conventional to use Hadoop as the central data repository. However, I can't find anything that would suggest that elasticsearch wouldn't be a decent alternative.
Please Help!
As is the case with all database deployments, it really depends on your specific application.
Elasticsearch is a great open source search engine built on top of Apache Lucene. Its features and upgrades allow it to basically function just like a schema-less JSON datastore that can be accessed using both search-specific methods and regular database CRUD-like commands.
Nevertheless all the advantages Elasticsearch that brings, there are still some main disadvantages:
Security - Elasticsearch does not provide any authentication or access control functionality. It's supported since they have introduced shield.
Transactions - There is no support for transactions or processing on data manipulation. Well now data manipulation is handled with logstash.
Durability - ES is distributed and fairly stable but backups and durability are not as high priority as in other data stores.
Maturity of tools - ES is still relatively new and has not had time to develop mature client libraries and 3rd party tools which can make development much harder. We can consider that it's quite mature now
with a variety of connectors and tools around it like kibana. But it's still not suited for large computations - Commands for searching data are not suited to "large" scans of data and advanced computation on the db side.
Data Availability - ES makes data available in "near real-time" which may require additional considerations in your application (ie: comments page where a user adds new comment, refreshing the page might not actually show the new post because the index is still updating).
If you can deal with these issues then there's certainly no reason why you can't use Elasticsearch as your primary data store. It can actually lower complexity and improve performance by not having to duplicate your data but again this depends on your specific use case.
As always, weigh the benefits, do some experimentation and see what works best for you.
DISCLAIMER: This answer was written a while ago for the Elasticsearch 1.x series. These critics still somehow stand with the 2.x series. But Elastic is working on them, as the 2.x series comes with more mature tools, APIs and plugins per example, security wise, like Shield or even transport clients like Logstash or Beats, etc.
I'd highly discourage most users from using elasticsearch as your primary datastore. It will work great until your cluster melts down due to a network partition. Even settings such as minimum_master_nodes that the ES pros always set won't save you. See this excellent analysis by Aphyr with his Call Me Maybe series:
http://aphyr.com/posts/317-call-me-maybe-elasticsearch
eliasah, is right, it depends on your use case, but if your data (and job) is important to you, stay away.
Keep your golden record of your data stored in something really focused on persisting and sync your data out to search from there. It adds extra complexity and resources, but will result in a better nights rest :)
There are plenty of ways to go about this and if elasticsearch does everything you need, you can look into Kafka for persisting all the events going into a cluster which would allow replaying if things go wrong. I like this approach as it provides an async ingestion pipeline into elasticsearch that also does the persistence.

understanding about stackoverflow underlying software infrastructure

I wonder what all databases/combination of databases stack overflow uses underneath, managing extensive user profile information over various verticals.
As i case of social networking sites like twitter and facebook the Big Data managemnet is done over hadoop. Is stack overflow also handles such higher volumes of data?
How about indexing the information , is redis part of stackoverflow solutions?
It will be really interesting to understand solution deployed at world most popular technical forum .
This article provides a glimpse at what stackoverflow's architecture looks like circa March 2011: http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/3/3/stack-overflow-architecture-update-now-at-95-million-page-vi.html
At a high level, its a .NET application which uses MS SQL server for a database, Redis for caching, HAProxy for load balancing, and a whole host of tools and hosted on both windows servers and linux servers (ubuntu+centos).
It doesn't look like they had any hadoop usage at the time of that article, but that could have changed. They might also be doing something different/custom for map/reduce type jobs or might not need anything like that at all yet. With delicacy, SQL servers can be scaled pretty far without needing to lean on "big data" toys. This is especially true if you can get most of your data out of your caching layer.

monetdb - anyone uses it in production?

I am very interested in using monetdb as a datamart, holding some huge data tables for querying and reporting
However, after some searching, I am unable to find any online posts / blogs regarding their use of Monetdb in any kind of production capacity.
Also, there seems to be little or next to no activity online regarding Monetdb.
Is this a bad sign for the future of Monetdb ?
I am very interested in using monetdb as a datamart, holding some huge data tables for >querying and reporting
My boss is also interested in MonetDB and I had the same reaction as you. No one is writing about MonetDB... is no one using MonetDB?
Regardless, I have been running performance tests on datasets of 500,000 to 1,000,000 records comparing MonetDB (column-oriented dbms) vs. MySQL (row-oriented dbms) and MonetDB beats MySQL in all regards- even in bulk inserts... which hypothetically it should not be as good at.
I can't speculate as to what all this means for MonetDB's future, but while it's around you might want to check it out because it performs well.
(I run Windows 7 and am communicating with each database using PHP)
I react a bit late to this post, but I'd like to add my voice to the ones using MonetDB in a production environment. We use it as the back-end of Spinque, a framework for designing complex search solutions. I've been using MonetDB for about 10 years, but only in the past 3 years in a production environment. Clearly, it has pros and cons and bugs like all other products, but it is being developed and improved very actively (I don't understand the low-activity signs that you refer to). If you want a DB that allows you to be ahead of the market standards, it's a good choice. Otherwise, just go for MS SQL ;)
I've been evaluating it lately for a client so I've had some time with it. My impression at this point is that it is just finishing "growing up" from being an academic experimental playground. It clearly has yet to be really discovered, though it does have some rough edges which might hinder certain applications.
As I write, I'm in the process of trying to load over 100 million rows into an instance (at 27mil presently). So far, it performs startlingly well in some areas (aggregates), but is oddly sluggish in others (most joins I've tried so far); that said, I've not yet run the recommended sampling process yet and I'm forcing it to live in just a single service with 32GB RAM.
I've found a few little glitches and one thing that caused a full service crash (obscure and reported), but I'm thinking that for many applications MonetDB could be just the ticket. Columnar storage (rather than NoSQL) seems to be the future IMO.
I'll update this if I find anything particularly interesting.
MonetDB is first and for all a research system, but has progressed far beyond the level of the average research prototype. It is the (only) relational column-store platform in open source that I know of that supports full SQL. I have used it myself at CWI in many research projects that are not core DB research, but do need advanced DB technology.
You can see on the user's mailing list that deployments happen in many different organisations. As Roberto Cornacchia stated in a different answer, it is the backend of all Spinque deployments and we are happy MonetDB users. MonetDB is also used at a variety of non-profit projects like open streetmap and open kvk.
More and more commercial parties deploy MonetDB for analytics. (They do not always like to advertise that their analyses depend on an open source system.) Recently, MonetDB Solutions has started to provide dedicated commercial support for these deployments.
We have been using MonetDB in our business. We analyse very large data sets with many millions of rows. Traditional methods of data warehousing on SQL databases became so slow. The problem we were facing was that the data was only going to get bigger! The only way forward was to go columnar.
The results have been amazing. When you have very few joins it is staggeringly quick. Even with joins on the data sets we are looking at it is still frightening how fast it comes back.
Having seen some of the commercial partnerships I think MonetDB is going to boom over the next few years. I believe some of the major BI suppliers are using Monet under their hood to perform the large data work.

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