Pig does not import data into system before applying queries - apache-pig

I was reading some documentations on Pig Latin and could not fully understand why would Pig not need to import the data into the system before applying queries, during data analysis?
Can someone please explain? Thanks.

In Hadoop and HDFS there is a concept of Data Locality, which actually means that "Bringing your computer/code near to data" not bringing the data near to computer.
This concepts applied to all the data processing technology over Hadoop, like MapReduce, Hive and Pig.This is the mail reason Pig doesn't import the data into the system instead it goes near to data and analyze it.
Data locality: An important concept with HDFS and MapReduce, data locality can best be described as “bringing the compute to the data.” In other words, whenever you use a MapReduce program on a particular part of HDFS data, you always want to run that program on the node, or machine, that actually stores this data in HDFS. Doing so allows processes to be run much faster, since it prevents you from having to move large amounts of data around.
When a MapReduce job is submitted, part of what the JobTracker does is look to see which machines the blocks required for the task are located on. This is why, when the NameNode splits data files into blocks, each one is replicated three times: the first is stored on the same machine as the block, while the second and third are each stored on separate machines.
Storing the data across three machines thus gives you a much higher chance of achieving data locality, since it’s likely that at least one of the machines will be freed up enough to process the data stored at that particular location.
Reference: http://www.plottingsuccess.com/hadoop-101-important-terms-explained-0314/

Related

monetdb in the cloud, scalability, amazon s3

i have recently discovered MonetDB and i am evaluating it for an internal project, so probably my questions are from a really newbie point of view. Maybe someone could point me to a site and/or document where i could find more info (i haven't found too much googling)
regarding scalability, correct me please if i am wrong, but what i understand is that if i need to scale, i would launch more server instances and discover them from the control node, is it right?
is there any limit on the number of servers?
the other point is about storage, is it possible to use amazon S3 to back MonetDB readonly instances?
update we would need to store a massive amount of Call Detail Records from different sources, on a read-only basis. We would aggregate/reduce that data for the day-to-day operation, accessing the bigger tables only when the full detail is required.
We would store the historical data as well to perform longer-term analysis. My concern is mostly about memory, disk storage wouldn't be the issue i think; if the hot dataset involved in a report/analysis eats up the whole memory space (fast response times needed, not sure about how memory swapping would impact), i would like to know if i can scale somehow instead of reingeneering the report/analysis process (maybe i am biased by the horizontal scaling thing :-) )
thanks!
You will find advantages of monetdb easily on net so let me highlight some disadvantages
1. In monetdb deleting rows does not free up the space
Solution: copy data in other table,drop existing table, and rename the other table
2. Joins are little slower
3. We can can not give table name as dynamic variable
Eg: if you have table name stored in one main table then you can't make a query like "for each (select tablename from mytable) select data from tablename)" the sql
You can't make functions with tablename as variable argument.
But it is still damn fast and can store large amount of data.

Amazon EMR NativeS3FileSystem internals query

Does anybody have insights on the internal working of NativeS3FileSystem with different InputFormat's in Amazon EMR case as compared to normal Hadoop HDFS i.e. input split calculation, actual data flow? What is the best practices & points to consider when using Amazon EMR with S3?
Thanks,
What's important is that if you're planning to use S3N instead of HDFS, you should know that it means you will lose the benefits of data locality, which can have a significant impact on your jobs.
In general when using S3N you have 2 choices for your jobflows:
Stream data from S3 as a replacement for HDFS: this is useful if you need constant access to your whole dataset, but as explained there can be some performance constraints.
Copy your data from S3 to HDFS: if you only need access to a small sample of your data at some point in time, you should just copy to HDFS to retain the benefit of data locality.
From my experience I also noticed that for large jobs, splits calculation can become quite heavy, and I've even seen cases where the CPU was at 100% just for calculating input splits. The reason for that is that I think the Hadoop FileSystem layer tries to get the size of each file separately, which in case of files stored in S3N involves sending API calls for every file, so if you have a big job with many input files that's where the time can be spent.
For more information, I would advise taking a look at the following article where someone asked a similar questions on the Amazon forums.

What Database for extensive logfile analysis?

The task is to filter and analyze a huge amount of logfiles (around 8TB) from a finished research project. The idea is to fill a database with the data to be able to run different analysis tasks later.
The values are stored comma separated. In principle the values are tuples of up to 5 values:
id, timestamp, type, v1, v2, v3, v4, v5
In a first try using MySQL I used one table with one log entry per row. So there is no direct relation between the log values. The downside here is slow querying of subsets.
Because there is no relation I looked into alternatives like NoSQL databases, and column based tables like hbase or cassandra seemed to be a perfect fit for this kind of data. But these systems are made for huge distributed systems, which we not have. In our case the analysis will run on a single machine or perhaps some VMs.
Which kind of database would fit this task? Is it worth to setup a single machine instance with hadoop+hbase... or is this all a bit over-sized?
What database would you choose to do high-performance logfile analysis?
EDIT: Maybe out of my question it is not clear that we cannot spend money for cloud services or new hardware. The Question is if there are benefits in using noSQL approaches instead of mySQL (especially for this data). If there are none, or if they are so small that the effort of setting up a noSQL system is not worth the benefit we can use our ESXi infrastructure and MySQL.
EDIT2: I'm still having the Problem here. I did further experiments with MySQL and just inserted a quarter of all available data. The insert is now running for over 2 days and is not yet finished. Currently there are 2,147,483,647 rows in my single table db. With indeces this takes 211,2 GiB of disk space. And this is just a quarter of all logging data...
A query of the form
SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE `timestamp`>=1342105200000 AND `timestamp`<=1342126800000 AND `logid`=123456 AND `unit`="UNIT40";
takes 761 seconds to complete, in this case returning one row.
There is a combined index on timestamp, logid, unit.
So I think this is not the way to go, because later in analysis I will have to get all entries in a time range and compare the datapoints.
I read bout MongoDB and Redis, but the problem with them is, that they are in Memory databases.
In the later analyzing process there will a very small amount of concurrent database access. In fact the analyzing will be run from one single machine.
I do not need redundancy. I would be able to regenerate the database in case of a failure.
When the database is once completely written, there would also be no need to update or add further row.
What do you think about alternatives like Redis, MongoDB and so on. When I get this right, i would need RAM in the dimension of my data...
Is this task even somehow possible with a single node system or with maybe two nodes?
well i personally would prefer the faster solution, as you said you need a high-perfomance analysis. the problem is, if you have to setup a whole new system to do so and the performance-improvement would be minor in relation to the additional effort you'd need, then stay with SQL.
in our company, we have a quite small Database containing not even half a GB of Data on the VM. the problem now is, as soon as you use a VM, you will have major performance issues, when opening the Database on VM you can go for a coffee in the meantime ;)
But if the time until the Database is loaded to cache is not so important it doesn't matter. It all depends on how much faster you think the new System will be, and how much effort you will have to put in it, but as i said i'd prefer the faster solution if you have to go for "high-performance analysis"

Why doesn't Hadoop file system support random I/O?

The distributed file systems which like Google File System and Hadoop doesn't support random I/O.
(It can't modify the file which were written before. Only writing and appending is possible.)
Why did they design file system like this?
What are the important advantages of the design?
P.S I know Hadoop will support modifing the data which were written.
But they said, it's performance will very not good. Why?
Hadoop distributes and replicates files. Since the files are replicated, any write operation is going to have to find each replicated section across the network and update the file. This will heavily increase the time for the operation. Updating the file could push it over the block size and require the file split into 2 blocks, and then replicating the 2nd block. I don't know the internals and when/how it would split a block... but it's a potential complication.
What if the job failed or got killed which already did an update and gets re-run? It could update the file multiple times.
The advantage of not updating files in a distributed system is that you don't know who else is using the file when you update it, you don't know where the pieces are stored. There are potential time outs (node with the block is unresponsive) so you might end up with mismatched data (again, I don't know the internals of hadoop and an update with a node down might be handled, just something I'm brainstorming)
There are a lot of potential issues (a few laid out above) with updating files on the HDFS. None of them are insurmountable, but they will require a performance hit to check and account for.
Since the HDFS's main purpose is to store data for use in mapreduce, row level update isn't that important at this stage.
I think it's because of the block size of the data and the whole idea of Hadoop is that you don't move data around but instead you move the algorithm to the data.
Hadoop is designed for non-realtime batch processing of data. If you're looking at ways of implementing something more like a traditional RDBMS in terms of response time and random access have a look at HBase which is built on top of Hadoop.

Loading large amounts of data to an Oracle SQL Database

I was wondering if anyone had any experience with what I am about to embark on. I have several csv files which are all around a GB or so in size and I need to load them into a an oracle database. While most of my work after loading will be read-only I will need to load updates from time to time. Basically I just need a good tool for loading several rows of data at a time up to my db.
Here is what I have found so far:
I could use SQL Loader t do a lot of the work
I could use Bulk-Insert commands
Some sort of batch insert.
Using prepared statement somehow might be a good idea. I guess I was wondering what everyone thinks is the fastest way to get this insert done. Any tips?
I would be very surprised if you could roll your own utility that will outperform SQL*Loader Direct Path Loads. Oracle built this utility for exactly this purpose - the likelihood of building something more efficient is practically nil. There is also the Parallel Direct Path Load, which allows you to have multiple direct path load processes running concurrently.
From the manual:
Instead of filling a bind array buffer
and passing it to the Oracle database
with a SQL INSERT statement, a direct
path load uses the direct path API to
pass the data to be loaded to the load
engine in the server. The load engine
builds a column array structure from
the data passed to it.
The direct path load engine uses the
column array structure to format
Oracle data blocks and build index
keys. The newly formatted database
blocks are written directly to the
database (multiple blocks per I/O
request using asynchronous writes if
the host platform supports
asynchronous I/O).
Internally, multiple buffers are used
for the formatted blocks. While one
buffer is being filled, one or more
buffers are being written if
asynchronous I/O is available on the
host platform. Overlapping computation
with I/O increases load performance.
There are cases where Direct Path Load cannot be used.
With that amount of data, you'd better be sure of your backing store - the dbf disks' free space.
sqlldr is script drive, very efficient, generally more efficient than a sql script.
The only thing I wonder about is the magnitude of the data. I personally would consider several to many sqlldr processes and assign each one a subset of data and let the processes run in parallel.
You said you wanted to load a few records at a time? That may take a lot longer than you think. Did you mean a few files at a time?
You may be able to create an external table on the CSV files and load them in by SELECTing from the external table into another table. Whether this method will be quicker not sure however might be quicker in terms of messing around getting sql*loader to work especially when you have a criteria for UPDATEs.