Mapreduce job not launching when running hive query with where clause - hive

I am using apache-hive-1.2.2 on Hadoop 2.6.0. When am running a hive query with where clause it is giving results immediately without launching any MapReduce job. I'm not sure what is happening. Table has over 100k records.

I am quoting this from Hive Documentation
hive.fetch.task.conversion
Some select queries can be converted to a single FETCH task,
minimizing latency. Currently the query should be single sourced not
having any subquery and should not have any aggregations or distincts
(which incur RS – ReduceSinkOperator, requiring a MapReduce task),
lateral views and joins.
Any type of the sort of aggregation like max or min or count is going to require a MapReduce job. So it depends on your data-set you have.
select * from tablename;
It just reads raw data from files in HDFS, so it is much faster without MapReduce and it doesn't need MR.

This is due to the the property "hive.fetch.task.conversion". The default value is set to "more" (Hive 2.1.0) and results in Hive trying to go straight at the data by launching a single Fetch task instead of a Map Reduce job wherever possible.
This behaviour however might not be desirable in case you have a huge table (say 500 GB+) as it would cause a single thread to be launched instead of multiple threads as happens in the case of a Map Reduce job.
You can set this property to "minimal" or "none" in hive-site.xml to bypass the behaviour.

Related

How to force MR execution when running simple Hive query?

There is Hive 2.1.1 over MR, table test_table stored as sequencefile and the following ad-hoc query:
select t.*
from test_table t
where t.test_column = 100
Although this query can be executed without starting MR (fetch task), sometimes it takes longer to scan HDFS files rather than triggering a single map job.
When I want to enforce MR execution, I make the query more complex: e.g., using distinct. The significant drawbacks of this approach are:
Query results may differ from the original query's
Brings meaningless calculation load on the cluster
Is there a recommended way to force MR execution when using Hive-on-MR?
The hive executor decides either to execute map task or fetch task depending on the following settings (with defaults):
hive.fetch.task.conversion ("more") — the strategy for converting MR tasks into fetch tasks
hive.fetch.task.conversion.threshold (1 GB) — max size of input data that can be fed to a fetch task
hive.fetch.task.aggr (false) — when set to true, queries like select count(*) from src also can be executed in a fetch task
It prompts me the following two options:
set hive.fetch.task.conversion.threshold to a lower value, e.g. 512 Mb
set hive.fetch.task.conversion to "none"
For some reason lowering the threshold did not change anything in my case, so I stood with the second option: seems fine for ad-hoc queries.
More details regarding these settings can be found in Cloudera forum and Hive wiki.
Just add set hive.execution.engine=mr; before your query and it will enforce Hive to use MR.

Is it possible to reduce the number of MetaStore checks when querying a Hive table with lots of columns?

I am using spark sql on databricks, which uses a Hive metastore, and I am trying to set up a job/query that uses quite a few columns (20+).
The amount of time it takes to run the metastore validation checks is scaling linearly with the number of columns included in my query - is there any way to skip this step? Or pre-compute the checks? Or to at least make the metastore only check once per table rather than once per column?
A small example is that when I run the below, even before calling display or collect, the metastore checker happens once:
new_table = table.withColumn("new_col1", F.col("col1")
and when I run the below, the metastore checker happens multiple times, and therefore takes longer:
new_table = (table
.withColumn("new_col1", F.col("col1")
.withColumn("new_col2", F.col("col2")
.withColumn("new_col3", F.col("col3")
.withColumn("new_col4", F.col("col4")
.withColumn("new_col5", F.col("col5")
)
The metastore checks it's doing look like this in the driver node:
20/01/09 11:29:24 INFO HiveMetaStore: 6: get_database: xxx
20/01/09 11:29:24 INFO audit: ugi=root ip=unknown-ip-addr cmd=get_database: xxx
The view to the user on databricks is:
Performing Hive catalog operation: databaseExists
Performing Hive catalog operation: tableExists
Performing Hive catalog operation: getRawTable
Running command...
I would be interested to know if anyone can confirm that this is just the way it works (a metastore check per column), and if I have to just plan for the overhead of the metastore checks.
I am surprised by this behavior as it does not fit with the Spark processing model and I cannot replicate it in Scala. It is possible that it is somehow specific to PySpark but I doubt that since PySpark is just an API for creating Spark plans.
What is happening, however, is that after every withColumn(...) the plan is analyzed. If the plan is large, this can take a while. There is a simple optimization, however. Replace multiple withColumn(...) calls for independent columns with df.select(F.col("*"), F.col("col2").as("new_col2"), ...). In this case, only a single analysis will be performed.
In some cases of extremely large plans, we've saved 10+ minutes of analysis for a single notebook cell.

How to handle hive locking across hive and presto

I have a few hive tables that are insert-overwrite from spark and hive. Those tables are also accessed by analysts on presto. Naturally, we're running into some windows of time that users are hitting an incomplete data set because presto is ignoring locks.
The options I can think of:
Fork the presto-hive connector to support hive S and X locks appropriately. This isn't too bad, but time consuming to do properly.
Swap the table location on the hive metastore once an insert overwrite is complete. This is OK, but a little messy because we like to store explicit locations at the database level and let the tables inherit location.
Stop doing insert-overwrite on these tables and instead just add a new partition for the things that have changed, then once a new partition is written, alter the hive table to see it. Then we can just have views on top of the data that will properly reconcile the latest version of each row.
Stop doing insert-overwrite on s3 which has a long window of copy from hive staging to the target table. If we move to hdfs for all insert-overwrite, we still have the issue, but it's over the span of time that it takes to do a hdfs mv which is significantly faster. (probably bad: there's still a window that we can get incomplete data)
My question is how do people generally handle that? It seems like a common scenario that would have an explicit solution, but I seem to be missing it. This can be asked in general for any third party tool that can query the hive metastore and interact with the hdfs/s3 directly while not respecting hive locks.

Hive analyze compute stats query failing

I'm running Hive 1.0, trying to compute column statistics using the built-in analyze command. HQL script looks like:
set hive.cbo.enable=true;
set hive.compute.query.using.stats=true;
set hive.stats.fetch.column.stats=true;
use db;
analyze table tbl compute statistics for columns;
Which kicks off a map-only MR task as expected. The job runs to 100% for both map and reduce, then reports:
FAILED: Execution Error, return code 1 from org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.exec.ColumnStatsTask
But the job is registered as a SUCCESS.
Googling led me to this JIRA ticket, but the resolution says the problem is resolved in Hive 0.14. Is there something simple I'm missing in the query?
EDIT: Five and a half years later, I've changed jobs and industries twice, picked up Spark and then abandoned Hadoop altogether in all my workflows, and the world aligned around efficient cloud data lakes that don't require a new query language. Hive is a distant memory for me, but I hope the other answer seekers found sufficient workarounds. I don't think I ever did.

Running Elastic Mapreduce Hive Queries from an Application

I've run Hive on elastic mapreduce in interactive mode:
./elastic-mapreduce --create --hive-interactive
and in script mode:
./elastic-mapreduce --create --hive-script --arg s3://mybucket/myfile.q
I'd like to have an application (preferably in PHP, R, or Python) on my own server be able to spin up an elastic mapreduce cluster and run several Hive commands while getting their output in a parsable form.
I know that spinning up a cluster can take some time, so maybe my application might have to do that in a separate step and wait for the cluster to become ready. But is there any way to do something like this somewhat concrete hypothetical example:
create Hive table customer_orders
run Hive query "SELECT dt, count(*) FROM customer_orders GROUP BY dt"
wait for result
parse result in PHP
run Hive query "SELECT MAX(id) FROM customer_orders"
wait for result
parse result in PHP
...
Does anyone have any recommendations on how I might do this?
You may use MRJOB. It lets you write MapReduce jobs in Python 2.5+ and run them on several platforms.
An alternative is HiPy, it is an awesome project which should perhaps be enough for all your needs. The purpose of HiPy is to support programmatic construction of Hive queries in Python and easier management of queries, including queries with transform scripts.
HiPy enables grouping together in a single script of query
construction, transform scripts and post-processing. This assists in
traceability, documentation and re-usability of scripts. Everything
appears in one place and Python comments can be used to document the
script.
Hive queries are constructed by composing a handful of Python objects,
representing things such as Columns, Tables and Select statements.
During this process, HiPy keeps track of the schema of the resulting
query output.
Transform scripts can be included in the main body of the Python
script. HiPy will take care of providing the code of the script to
Hive as well as of serialization and de-serialization of data to/from
Python data types. If any of the data columns contain JSON, HiPy takes
care of converting that to/from Python data types too.
Check out the Documentation for details!