Writing to single file from mappers - hadoop

I am working on mapreduce that is generating CSV file out of some data that is read from HBase. Is there a way to write to single file from mappers without reduce phase (or to merge multiple files generated by mappers at the end of job)? I know that I can set output format to write in file on Job level, is it possible to do similar thing for mappers?
Thanks

It is possible (and not uncommon) to have a Map/Reduce-Job without a reduce phase (example). For that you just use job.setNumReduceTasks(0).
However I am not sure how Job-Output is handled in this case. Ususally you get one result file per reducer. Without reducers I could imagine that you either get one file per mapper or that you cannot produce job output. You will have to try/research that.
If the above does not work for you, you could still use the default Reducer implementation, that just forwards the mapper output (identity function).

Seriously, this is not how MapReduce works.
Why do you even need a Job for that? Write a simple Java application that does the same for you. There are also command line utils that does the same for you.

Related

Mapreduce - Right way to confirm whether the file is split or not

We had a lot of xml files and we wanted to process one xml using one mapper task because of obvious reasons to make the processing ( parsing ) simpler.
We wrote a mapreduce program to achieve that by overriding isSplitable method of input format class.It seems it is working fine.
However, we wanted to confirm if one mapper is used to process one xml file. IS there is a way to confirm by looking at the logs produced by driver program or any other way .
Thanks
To answer your question, Just check the number of mapper count.
It should be equal to your number of input files.
Example :
/ds/input
/file1.xml
/file2.xml
/file3.xml
Then the mapper count should be 3.
Here is the command.
mapred job -counter job_1449114544347_0001 org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.JobCounter TOTAL_LAUNCHED_MAPS
You can get many details using mapred job -counter command. You can check video 54 and 55 from this playlist. It covers counters in detail.

Hadoop Streaming Job with no input file

Is it possible to execute a Hadoop Streaming job that has no input file?
In my use case, I'm able to generate the necessary records for the reducer with a single mapper and execution parameters. Currently, I'm using a stub input file with a single line, I'd like to remove this requirement.
We have 2 use cases in mind.
1)
I want to distribute the loading of files into hdfs from a network location available to all nodes. Basically, I'm going to run ls in the mapper and send the output to a small set of reducers.
We are going to be running fits leveraging several different parameter ranges against several models. The model names do not change and will go to the reducer as keys while the list of tests to run is generated in the mapper.
According to the docs this is not possible. The following are required parameters for execution:
input directoryname or filename
output directoryname
mapper executable or JavaClassName
reducer executable or JavaClassName
It looks like providing a dummy input file is the way to go currently.

when does data to output file is written in a map reduce architecture?How can i use processed reducer output data in reducer?

I am using hadoop version:1.0.0
After processing each reducer input key i am collecting the output.But it is not written to actual output file. I am trying to use processed intermediate output for processing further input keys.How can i do this?
Could you please suggest me how to use that intermediate data.When does mapreduce write data to output file?.
What you ask is something against the MR paradigm. And, as any deviation from the concept has consiquences.
Technically data is passed to the OutputFormat and it is his discretion to push it to output. I think it is written during the job, but You might have some delay before seeing it.
I think it would be easier for you to exolicitely accumulate processed data in reducer and use it, although this solution has inhenrent problem. You can face out of memory if there is enought keys.
I would suggest using two MR jobs, or some other techinques to make reducer stateless or at least limit amount of data it can accumulate.

how to output to HDFS from mapper directly?

In certain criteria we want the mapper do all the work and output to HDFS, we don't want the data transmitted to reducer(will use extra bandwidth, please correct me if there is case its wrong).
a pseudo code would be:
def mapper(k,v_list):
for v in v_list:
if criteria:
write to HDFS
else:
emit
I found it hard because the only thing we can play with is OutputCollector.
One thing I think of is to exend OutputCollector, override OutputCollector.collect and do the stuff.
Is there any better ways?
You can just set the number of reduce tasks to 0 by using JobConf.setNumReduceTasks(0). This will make the results of the mapper go straight into HDFS.
From the Map-Reduce manual: http://hadoop.apache.org/docs/current/hadoop-mapreduce-client/hadoop-mapreduce-client-core/MapReduceTutorial.html
Reducer NONE
It is legal to set the number of reduce-tasks to zero if no reduction is desired.
In this case the outputs of the map-tasks go directly to the FileSystem,
into the output path set by setOutputPath(Path). The framework does not sort
the map-outputs before writing them out to the FileSystem.
I'm assuming that you're using streaming, in which case there is no standard way of doing this.
It's certainly possible in a java Mapper. For streaming you'd need amend the PipeMapper java file, or like you say write your own output collector - but if you're going to that much trouble, you might has well just write a java mapper.
Not sending something to the Reducer may not actually save bandwidth if you are still going to write it to the HDFS. The HDFS is still replicated to other nodes and the replication is going to happen.
There are other good reasons to write output from the mapper though. There is a FAQ about this, but it is a little short on details except to say that you can do it.
I found another question which is potentially a duplicate of yours here. That question has answers that are more help if you are writing a Mapper in Java. If you are trying to do this in a streaming way, you can just use the hadoop fs commands in scripts to do it.
We can in fact write output to HDFS and pass it on to Reducer also at the same time. I understand that you are using Hadoop Streaming, I've implemented something similar using Java MapReduce.
We can generate named output files from a Mapper or Reducer using MultipleOutputs. So, in your Mapper implementation after all the business logic for processing input data, you can write the output to MultipleOutputs using multipleOutputs.write("NamedOutputFileName", Outputkey, OutputValue) and for the data you want to pass on to reducer you can write to context using context.write(OutputKey, OutputValue)
I think if you can find something to write the data from mapper to a named output file in the language you are using (Eg: Python) - this will definitely work.
I hope this helps.

Is the input file to a MapReduce program mandatory?

I am working on a use case where I generate random data using a map reduce program and I do not require any input file in HDFS. If I don't give input path MR program doesn't work. So, currently I have a dummy input file. Is there any way to avoid this?
Usually MR programs have some sort of data for processing. But, there might be scenarios like Random Generation where is there is no data to be processed. Checkout the TeraGen program for the random number generation which takes number of rows and the output directory as input. Also, I haven't tried the DataGenerator, but it seems interesting.

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