Where can I find Pentaho Kettle architecture? I'm looking for a short wiki, design document, blog post, anything to give a good overview on how things work. This question is not meant for specific "how to" starting guides but rather a good view at the technology and architecture.
Specific questions I have are:
How does data flow between steps? It would seem everything is in memory - am I right about this?
Is the above true about different transformations as well?
How are the Collect steps implemented?
Any specific performence guidelines to using it?
Is the ftp task reliable and performant?
Any other "Dos and Don'ts" ?
See this PDF.
How does data flow between steps? It would seem everything is in
memory - am I right about this?
Data flow is row-based. For transformation every step produce a 'tuple' or a row with fields. Every field is pair of data and a metadata. Every step has input and output. Step takes rows from input, modify rows and send rows to outputs. For most cases every all information is in memory. But. Steps reads data in streaming fashion (like jdbc or other) - so typically in memory only a part of data from a stream.
Is the above true about different transformations as well?
There is a 'job' concept and 'transformation' concept. All written above is mostly true for transformation. Mostly - means transformation can contain very different steps, some of them - like collect steps - can try to collect all data from a stream. Jobs - is a way to perform some actions that do not follow 'streaming' concept - like send email on success, load some files from net, execute different transformations one by one.
How are the Collect steps implemented?
It only depend on particular step. Typically as said above - collect steps may try to collect all data from stream - having so - can be a reason of OutOfMemory exceptions. If data is too big - consider replace 'collect' steps with different approach to process data (for example use steps that do not collect all data).
Any specific performence guidelines to using it?
A lot of. Depends on steps transformation is consists, sources of data used. I would try to speak on exact scenario rather then general guidelines.
Is the ftp task reliable and performant?
As far as I remember ftp is backed by EdtFTP implementation, and there may be some issues with that steps like - some parameters not saved, or http-ftp proxy not working or other. I would say Kettle in general is reliable and perfomant - but for some not commonly used scenarios - it can be not so.
Any other "Dos and Don'ts" ?
I would say the Do - is to understand a tool before starting use it intensively. As mentioned in this discussion - there is a couple of literature on Kettle/Pentaho Data Integration you can try search for it on specific sites.
One of advantages of Pentaho Data Integration/Kettle is relatively big community you can ask for specific aspects.
http://forums.pentaho.com/
https://help.pentaho.com/Documentation
Related
I have a usecase. I want to Integrate / Transform data from different / disparate sources without storing it. Data sources are database(oracle,db2,etc), Webservice(Rest/Soap), Flat files(CSV, XML, JSON), MQ dumps, mainframe systems. I want to pull data from these sources and do some kind of intelligent transformation and integration and provide it our customers. It looks like typical ETL scenario, but my situation is different. I am not allowed to store the data given by the desperate sources, that means, for simple example, i pull data from oracle, soap and a rest, and do all my intelligent transformations and integrations on the fly.
I browsed through google and technical stuffs but could not get convincing solution to my problem.
If you guys can help me giving some valuable insight on this problem and give suggestion and probable approaches to it.
Note: Data size from these sources can sometime be really huge.
Thanks in Advance
Take a look at htto://teiid.org
Thst is exactly what it does, and it is Open Source.
Talend Open Studio y a great solution as well, I'm using it and it's great and easy to make the ETL workflow.
https://www.talend.com/products/data-integration/data-integration-manuals-release-notes/
You can see a lot of help videos: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=talend+studio
I have a question about Nifi and its capabilities as well as the appropriate use case for it.
I've read that Nifi is really aiming to create a space which allows for flow-based processing. After playing around with Nifi a bit, what I've also come to realize is it's capability to model/shape the data in a way that is useful for me. Is it fair to say that Nifi can also be used for data modeling?
Thanks!
Data modeling is a bit of an overloaded term, but in the context of your desire to model/shape the data in a way that is useful for you, it sounds like it could be a viable approach. The rest of this is under that assumption.
While NiFi employs dataflow through principles and design closely related to flow based programming (FBP) as a means, the function is a matter of getting data from point A to B (and possibly back again). Of course, systems aren't inherently talking in the same protocols, formats, or schemas, so there needs to be something to shape the data into what the consumer is anticipating from what the producer is supplying. This gets into common enterprise integration patterns (EIP) [1] such as mediation and routing. In a broader sense though, it is simply getting the data to those that need it (systems, users, etc) when and how they need it.
Joe Witt, one of the creators of NiFi, gave a great talk that may be in line with this idea of data shaping in the context of Data Science at a Meetup. The slides of which are available [2].
If you have any additional questions, I would point you to check out the community mailing lists [3] and ask any additional questions so you can dig in more and get a broader perspective.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_Integration_Patterns
[2] http://files.meetup.com/6195792/ApacheNiFi-MD_DataScience_MeetupApr2016.pdf
[3] http://nifi.apache.org/mailing_lists.html
Data modeling might well mean many things to many folks so I'll be careful to use that term here. What I do think in what you're asking is very clear is that Apache NiFi is a great system to use to help mold the data into the right format and schema and content you need for your follow-on analytics and processing. NiFi has an extensible model so you can add processors that can do this or you can use the existing processors in many cases and you can even use the ExecuteScript processors as well so you can write scripts on the fly to manipulate the data.
I am currently in the process of writing an ElasticSearch Nifi processor. Individual inserts / writes to ES are not optimal, instead batching documents is preferred. What would be considered the optimal approach within a Nifi processor to track (batch) documents (FlowFiles) and when at a certain amount batch them in? The part I am most concerned about is if ES is unavailable, down, network partition, etc. prevents the batch from being successful. The primary point of the question, is given that Nifi has content storage for queuing / back-pressure, etc. is there a preferred method for using that to ensure no FlowFiles get lost if a destination is down? Maybe there is another processor I should look at for an example?
I have looked at the Mongo processor, Merge, etc. to try and get an idea of the preferred approach for batching inside of a processor, but can't seem to find anything specific. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Good chance I am overlooking some basic functionality baked into Nifi. I am still fairly new to the platform.
Thanks!
Great question and a pretty common pattern. This is why we have the concept of a ProcessSession. It allows you to send zero or more things to an external endpoint and only commit once you know it has been ack'd by the recipient. In this sense it offers at least-once semantics. If the protocol you're using supports two-phase commit style semantics you can get pretty close to the ever elusive exactly-once semantic. Much of the details of what you're asking about here will depend on the destination systems API and behavior.
There are some examples in the apache codebase which reveal ways to do this. One way is if you can produce a merged collection of events prior to pushing to the destination system. Depends on its API. I think PutMongo and PutSolr operate this way (though the experts on that would need to weigh in). An example that might be more like what you're looking for can be found in PutSQL which operates on batches of flowfiles to send in a single transaction (on the destination DB).
https://github.com/apache/nifi/blob/master/nifi-nar-bundles/nifi-standard-bundle/nifi-standard-processors/src/main/java/org/apache/nifi/processors/standard/PutSQL.java
Will keep an eye here but can get the eye of a larger NiFi group at users#nifi.apache.org
Thanks
Joe
I want to build a Hadoop-Job that basically takes the wikipedia pagecount-statistic as input and creates a list like
en-Articlename: en:count de:count fr:count
For that I need the different articlenames related to each language - i.e. Bruges(en, fr), Brügge(de), which the MediaWikiApi query articlewise(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=Bruges&prop=langlinks&lllimit=500).
My question is to find the right approach to solve this problem.
My sketched approach would be:
Process the pagecount file line by line (line-example 'de Brugge 2 48824')
Query the MediaApi and write sth. like'en-Articlename: process-language-key:count'
Aggreate all en-Articlename-values to one line (maybe in a second job?)
Now it seems rather unhandy to query the MediaAPI for every line but currently can not get my head around a better solution.
Do you think the current approach for is feasible or can you think of a different one?
On a sidenote: The created job-chain shall be used to do some time-measuring on my (small) Hadoop-Cluster, so altering the task is still okay
Edit:
Here is a quite similar discussion which I just found now..
I think it isn't a good idea to query MediaApi during your batch processing due to:
network latency (your processing will be considerably slowed down)
single point of failure (if the api or your internet connection goes down your calculation will be aborted)
external dependency (its hard to repeat the calculation and got the same result)
legal issues and a ban possibility
The possible solution to your problem is to download the whole wikipedia dump. Each article contains links to that article in other languages in a predefined format, so you can easily write a map/reduce job that collects that information and builds a correspondence between English article name and the rest.
Then you can use the correspondence in a map/reduce job processing pagecount-statistic. If you do that you'll become independent to mediawiki's api, speed up your data processing and improve debugging.
Systems have to sometimes accommodate the possibility of real world bad data. Consider that some data originates with paper forms. And forms inherently have a limited means of validating data.
Example 1: On one form users are expected to enter an integer distance (in miles) into a blank. We capture the information as written as a string since we don't always end up getting integer values.
Example 2: On another form we capture a code. That code should map to one of the codes in our system. However, sometimes the code written on the form is incorrect. We capture the code and allow it to exist with an invalid value until some future time of resolution. That is, we temporarily allow bad data since it's important to record the record even if some of it is invalid.
I'm interested in learning more about how systems accommodate bad data, that is, human error. Databases are supposed to be bastions of data integrity, but the real world is messy and people make mistakes. Systems must allow us to reflect those mistakes.
What are some ways systems you've developed accommodate human error? What practices have you used? What lessons have you learned?
Any further reading on the topic? (I had trouble Googling it.)
I agree with you, whatever we do there's no guarantee that we can get rid of bad or incorrect data. Especially, but not only, if it comes to user input. In my experience the same problems exist in complex integration projects, in which you have to integrate and merge (often inconsistent) data retrieved from different systems.
A good strategy is to decouple the input from the operational system itself. First, place user (or external system) provided data in a separate datastore (e.g. different schema). In a second step load this data into your operational datastore, but only if it confirms to strict rules (e.g. use address verification software to verify a given address). This Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) approach is fairly common in Data Warehousing (DWH) solutions, but can be applied programmatically in transactional systems as well (in my experience).
The above approach often leads to asynchronous processes in which the input is subitted first and (maybe) at a later time the external entity (user or system) retrives feedback whether its data was correct or not.
EDIT: For further readings I recommend to have a look at DWH concepts. Alhtough, you may not want to build such a thing, you could partially apply those concepts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_warehouse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cleansing
A government department I worked in does a lot of surveys, most of which are (were) still paper based.
All the results were OCR'd into the system.
As part of the OCR process a digital scan of the forms is kept.
Data is then validated, data that is undecipherable or which fails validation is flagged.
When a human operator reviews the digital data they can modify the data if they are confident that they can correctly interpret what the code could not; they (here's the cool bit) can also bring up the scan of the paper based original, and use that to determine what the user was trying to say.
On a different thread; at some point you want to validate the data coming in against any expected data ranges that you want it to conform to; buy rejecting it at the point of entry you give the user a chance to correct it - the trade off is that every time you reject it you increase the chance of them abandoning the whole process.
At some point in your system you need to specify the rules which will be used for validation. At the end of the day a system is only going to be as smart as those rules. You can develop these yourself into the code (probably the business logic) or you might use a 3rd party component.
having flexible control over the validation is pretty important as they are likely to change overtime.
To be honest with you, one point of migrating from paper-based systems to IT is to remove these errors and make sure all data is always correct. I doubt any correctly planned and developed IT system (especially business financial systems) would allow such errors. Not in the company I am working for anyway...
There are lots of software tools that address the kinds of problems you mention. There are platforms and tools that let you define rules for scrubbing and transforming data and handling validation errors. Those techniques are widely used for Data Integration and Business Intelligence applications. Google for "Data Quality" or "Data Integration".
The easiest thing to do is to (this is not always possible) design the interface where users enter the data to limit as much as possible the amount of text that they need to enter. In my experience this seems to be where a lot of problems come from. One simple example of this is to provide a select, or auto-complete select field
One thing that you could do is do everything possible to determine if the data is correct before going into the db. I try to give the user entering the data as much feedback as possible so they can (ideally) fix some of the issues before the data gets persisted. For example, it is a very quick check to determine if the data being entered is of the correct type.
I got started in legal systems before the PC era. Litigation support databases routinely have to accommodate factually incorrect, incomplete, and contradictory information. It takes a different way of thinking.
The short version . . .
Instead of recording a single fact, you record multiple assertions about a fact. It boils down to designing a database to store data from assertions like these.
In an interview at 2011-01-03 08:13, Neil Rimes told Officer Cane
that he was at home from 2011-01-02 20:00 until 2011-01-03 08:13.
In an interview at 2011-01-03 08:25, Liza Nevers told Officer Cane
that Neil Rimes came home at 2011-01-02 23:45.
In a deposition at 2011-05-13 10:22, Cody Maxon told attorney Kurt
Schlagel that he saw Neil Rimes at Kroger at 2011-01-03 03:00