SQL/NewSQL suited read only, OLAP Database - sql

I am looking for a sql/newsql database Engine which is suited for fast Response times on a read only Star Schema for ad-hoc olap purposes. Complete dataset is about 4 Billion rows and MySql ist performing very slow on that Task.
I would be very grateful for some recommendations

If it is a read only star schema benchmark, try MariaDB Columnstore. It is very fast with data load and star schema-like queries.

Hive
"The Apache Hive ™ data warehouse software facilitates reading,
writing, and managing large datasets residing in distributed storage
using SQL. Structure can be projected onto data already in storage. A
command line tool and JDBC driver are provided to connect users to
Hive."

Related

Replicate data from cloud SQL postgres to bigQuery

I am looking for the recommended way of streaming database change from cloud SQL (postgres) to bigQuery ? I am seeing that CDC streaming does not seems available for postgres, does anyone know the timeline of this feature ?
Thanks a lot for you help.
Jonathan.
With Datastream for BigQuery, you can now replicate data and schema updates from operational databases directly into BigQuery.
Datastream reads and delivers every change—insert, update, and delete—from your MySQL, PostgreSQL, AlloyDB, and Oracle databases into BigQuery with minimal latency. The source database can be hosted on-premises, on Google Cloud services such as Cloud SQL or Bare Metal Solution for Oracle, or anywhere else on any cloud.
https://cloud.google.com/datastream-for-bigquery
You have to create an ETL process. That will allow you to automatically transform data from Postgres into BigQuery. You can do that using many ways, but I will point you to the two main approaches that I've already implemented:
Way 1:
Set Up the ETL Process manually:
Create your ETL using open source tools...
This method involves the use of the COPY command to migrate data from PostgreSQL tables and standard file-system files. It can be used as a normal SQL statement with SQL functions or PL/pgSQL procedures which gives a lot of flexibility to extract data as a full dump or incrementally. You need to know that it is a time-consuming process and would need you to invest in engineering bandwidth!
Also, you could try different tech stacks to implement the above, and I recommended this one Java Spring Data Flow
Way 2:
Using DataFlow
You can automate the ETL process using GCP's DataFlow without coding your own solution. It is faster and it cost, of course.
DataFlow is Unified stream and batch data processing that's
serverless, fast, and cost-effective.
Check more details and learn in a minute here
Also check this

Tableau visualization - Performance issue with huge data

I have huge data from different DB sources ( Oracle, Mongo, Cassandra ) and also eventing data available in Kafka. Using Tableau for analytics and facing performance issue with huge data. So, planning to store data in some other way and use Tableau for visualization also. Have multiple options now and need some help to finalize the approach.
Option 1:-
Read DB data and store them in Parquet file and then expose it over Spark SQL or HiveQL or Presto SQL and let Tableau connect to this SQL.
Option 2:-
Read DB data and store them in Parquet file in S3 and then use AWS Athena for analytics and let Tableau connect to Athena.
Option 3:-
Read DB data and store them in Parquet file in S3 and then move to Redshift for analytics and let Tableau connect to Redshift.
Not sure if any of the above approach will be a good solution for streaming data( Kafka ) analytics as well.
Note:- I have multiple big tables and need joins b/w them.
I understand you have huge data from different sources, and you also have access to AWS. Then, you plan to use this data for analytics and dashboarding via Tableau.
Option 1 and 2
Your Options 1 and 2 are basically the same, as AWS Athena and Hive are based on the same principle of creating tables over flat files via a metastore which stores table definition. Both Athena's Presto engine and Spark are distributed and highly efficient on huge data (TB data). The main difference is the pricing model (Athena is based on price per data processed per request and is serverless, whereas Spark may imply infrastructure cost).
Then, both options may not perform well as they are not OLAP systems designed for self service BI (they are better use for ad hoc queries over huge data regarding).
Then, you may have trouble in managing your data model using flat files and table or views over them (data storage and compression won't be optimized for each table which may impact Tableau performance).
Option 3
Option 3 is better as it is based on Redshift which is designed to support OLAP system. You can connect Tableau directly to Redshift but you'll suffer from latency and you may have trouble managing your cluster load depending on the number of users and/or requests. But it can work the way you describe it.
Then, if you have performance issues, you'll be able to create data source extracts from Redshift to Tableau later on. You can also implement an intermediate database to store pre-aggregated queries (= datamarts) and connect Tableau directly to it which will avoid performing the same query on Redshift each time a dashboard is opened in Tableau (in that case Redshift also caches queries).
Then, as you need to perform multiple joins, you'll be able to optimize data storage for such queries using Redshift by setting the right partition and sort keys.
To conclude, you can also directly access flat files from Redshift using Redshift Spectrum (via Athena/Glue metastore).
Documentations:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/best-practices.html
https://aws.amazon.com/fr/athena/pricing/

What is the generic term for technologies like AWS Athena (Presto) and GCP BigQuery?

From a user perspective, Athena and BigQuery both accept a sql-like query, they both query files stored on disk (without needing to have set up a relational database), and they both return results (usually very quickly). Do such technologies have a name? i.e. is there a generic term for technologies like AWS Athena and GCP BigQuery?
They are both distributed SQL Query Engines for big [in-place] data. Athena is based on Presto, which declares itself to be a Distributed SQL Query Engine for Big Data.
Apache Drill was based on the original BigQuery design and defines itself as a Schema-free SQL Query Engine for Hadoop, NoSQL and Cloud Storage
The three things that define them are the possibility of running SQL, their distributed nature so they can operate at scale for interactive queries, and the power to query data without having to ingest it first.
Note in the case of BigQuery, initially the data would need to be ingested and it is still the preferred way of working, even if querying data directly from GCS has been available for a number of years. Athena only works with external tables.
Google BigQuery is a serverless data warehouse that supports super-fast SQL queries for analyze data in parallel. Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that allows you to conveniently analyze data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) by using basic SQL in parallel.
Both technologies could be considered as MPP (massively parallel processing) systems as both technologies process data analytics in parallel.

Azure SQL Database or SQL Data Warehouse

I am working on a solution architecture and am having hard time choosing between Azure SQL DB or SQL DW.
The current scope involves around developing real-time BI reporting solution which is based on multiple sources. But in the long run the solution may be extended into a full fledged EDW and Marts.
I initially thought of using SQL DW so that for future scope the MPP capabilities could be used. But when I spoke to a mate who recently used SQL DW, he explained that the the development in SQL DW is not similar to SQL DB.
I have worked previously on Real Time reporting with no scope for EDW and we successfully used SQL DB. With this as well we can create Facts and Dimension and Marts.
Is there a strong case where I should be choosing SQL DW over SQL DB?
I think the two most important data points you can have here is the volume of data you're processing and the number of concurrent queries that you need to support. When talking about processing large volume data, and by large, I mean more than 3tb (which is not even really large, but large enough), then Azure SQL Data Warehouse becomes a juggernaut. The parallel processing is simply amazing (it's amazing at smaller volumes too, but you're paying a lot of money for overkill). However, the one issue can be the simultaneous query limit. It currently has a limit of 128 concurrent queries with a limit of 1,000 queries queued (read more here). If you're using the Data Warehouse as a data warehouse to process large amounts of data and then feed them into data marts where the majority of the querying takes place, this isn't a big deal. If you're planning to open this to large volume querying, it quickly becomes problematic.
Answer those two questions, query volume and data volume, and you can more easily decide between the two.
Additional factors can include the issues around the T-SQL currently supported. It is less than traditional SQL Server. Again, for most purposes around data warehousing, this is not an issue. For a full blown reporting server, it might be.
Most people successfully implementing Azure SQL Data Warehouse are using a combination of the warehouse for processing and storage and Azure SQL Database for data marts. There are exceptions when dealing with very large data volumes that need the parallel processing, but don't require lots of queries.
The 4 TB limit of Azure SQL Database may be an important factor to consider when choosing between the two options. Queries can be faster with Azure SQL Data Warehouse since is a MPP solution. You can pause Azure SQL DW to save costs with Azure SQL Database you can scale down to Basic tier (when possible).
Azure SQL DB can support up to 6,400 concurrent queries and 32k active connections, where Azure SQL DW can only support up to 32 concurrent queries and 1,024 active connections. So SQL DB is a much better solution if you are using something like a dashboard with thousands of users.
About developing for them, Azure SQL Database supports Entity Framework but Azure SQL DW does not support it.
I want also to give you a quick glimpse of how both of them compare in terms of performance 1 DWU is approximately 7.5 DTU (Database Throughput Unit, used to express the horse power of an OLTP Azure SQL Database) in capacity although they are not exactly comparable. More information about this comparison here.
Thanks for you responses Grant and Alberto. The responses have cleared a lot of air to make a choice.
Since, the data would be subject to dash-boarding and querying, I am tilting towards SQL Database instead of SQL DW.
Thanks again.

Managing data in two relational databases in a single location

Background: We currently have our data split between two relational databases (Oracle and Postgres). There is a need to run ad-hoc queries that involve tables in both databases. Currently we are doing this in one of two ways:
ETL from one database to another. This requires a lot of developer
time.
Oracle foreign data wrapper on our
Postgres server. This is working, but the queries run extremely
slowly.
We already use Google Cloud Platform (for the project that uses the Postgres server). We are familiar with Google BigQuery (BQ).
What we want to do:
We want most of our tables from both these databases (as-is) available at a single location, so querying them is easy and fast. We are thinking of copying over the data from both DB servers into BQ, without doing any transformations.
It looks like we need to take full dumps of our tables on a periodic basis (daily) and update BQ since BQ is append-only. The recent availability of DML in BQ seems to be very limited.
We are aware that loading the tables as is to BQ is not an optimal solution and we need to denormalize for efficiency, but this is a problem we have to solve after analyzing the feasibility.
My question is whether BQ is a good solution for us, and if yes, how to efficiently keep BQ in sync with our DB data, or whether we should look at something else (like say, Redshift)?
WePay has been publishing a series of articles on how they solve these problems. Check out https://wecode.wepay.com/posts/streaming-databases-in-realtime-with-mysql-debezium-kafka.
To keep everything synchronized they:
The flow of data starts with each microservice’s MySQL database. These
databases run in Google Cloud as CloudSQL MySQL instances with GTIDs
enabled. We’ve set up a downstream MySQL cluster specifically for
Debezium. Each CloudSQL instance replicates its data into the Debezium
cluster, which consists of two MySQL machines: a primary (active)
server and secondary (passive) server. This single Debezium cluster is
an operational trick to make it easier for us to operate Debezium.
Rather than having Debezium connect to dozens of microservice
databases directly, we can connect to just a single database. This
also isolates Debezium from impacting the production OLTP workload
that the master CloudSQL instances are handling.
And then:
The Debezium connectors feed the MySQL messages into Kafka (and add
their schemas to the Confluent schema registry), where downstream
systems can consume them. We use our Kafka connect BigQuery connector
to load the MySQL data into BigQuery using BigQuery’s streaming API.
This gives us a data warehouse in BigQuery that is usually less than
30 seconds behind the data that’s in production. Other microservices,
stream processors, and data infrastructure consume the feeds as well.