Workload management
Discussion of workload management technology, typically in analytic or mixed-workload DBMS.
Teradata will support Presto
At the highest level:
- Presto is, roughly speaking, Facebook’s replacement for Hive, at least for queries that are supposed to run at interactive speeds.
- Teradata is announcing support for Presto with a classic open source pricing model.
- Presto will also become, roughly speaking, Teradata’s replacement for Hive.
- Teradata’s Presto efforts are being conducted by the former Hadapt.
Now let’s make that all a little more precise.
Regarding Presto (and I got most of this from Teradata)::
- To a first approximation, Presto is just another way to write SQL queries against HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System). However …
- … Presto queries other data stores too, such as various kinds of RDBMS, and federates query results.
- Facebook at various points in time created both Hive and now Presto.
- Facebook started the Presto project in 2012 and now has 10 engineers on it.
- Teradata has named 16 engineers – all from Hadapt – who will be contributing to Presto.
- Known serious users of Presto include Facebook, Netflix, Groupon and Airbnb. Airbnb likes Presto well enough to have 1/3 of its employees using it, via an Airbnb-developed tool called Airpal.
- Facebook is known to have a cluster cited at 300 petabytes and 4000 users where Presto is presumed to be a principal part of the workload.
Daniel Abadi said that Presto satisfies what he sees as some core architectural requirements for a modern parallel analytic RDBMS project: Read more
An idealized log management and analysis system — from whom?
I’ve talked with many companies recently that believe they are:
- Focused on building a great data management and analytic stack for log management …
- … unlike all the other companies that might be saying the same thing 🙂 …
- … and certainly unlike expensive, poorly-scalable Splunk …
- … and also unlike less-focused vendors of analytic RDBMS (which are also expensive) and/or Hadoop distributions.
At best, I think such competitive claims are overwrought. Still, it’s a genuinely important subject and opportunity, so let’s consider what a great log management and analysis system might look like.
Much of this discussion could apply to machine-generated data in general. But right now I think more players are doing product management with an explicit conception either of log management or event-series analytics, so for this post I’ll share that focus too.
A short answer might be “Splunk, but with more analytic functionality and more scalable performance, at lower cost, plus numerous coupons for free pizza.” A more constructive and bottoms-up approach might start with: Read more
Actian Vector Hadoop Edition
I have a small blacklist of companies I won’t talk with because of their particularly unethical past behavior. Actian is one such; they evidently made stuff up about me that Josh Berkus gullibly posted for them, and I don’t want to have conversations that could be dishonestly used against me.
That said, Peter Boncz isn’t exactly an Actian employee. Rather, he’s the professor who supervised Marcin Zukowski’s PhD thesis that became Vectorwise, and I chatted with Peter by Skype while he was at home in Amsterdam. I believe his assurances that no Actian personnel sat in on the call. 🙂
In other news, Peter is currently working on and optimistic about HyPer. But we literally spent less than a minute talking about that
Before I get to the substance, there’s been a lot of renaming at Actian. To quote Andrew Brust,
… the ParAccel, Pervasive and Vectorwise technologies are being unified under the Actian Analytics Platform brand. Specifically, the ParAccel technology … is being re-branded Actian Matrix; Pervasive’s technologies are rechristened Actian DataFlow and Actian DataConnect; and Vectorwise becomes Actian Vector.
and
Actian … is now “one company, with one voice and one platform” according to its John Santaferraro
The bolded part of the latter quote is untrue — at least in the ordinary sense of the word “one” — but the rest can presumably be taken as company gospel.
All this is by way of preamble to saying that Peter reached out to me about Actian’s new Vector Hadoop Edition when he blogged about it last June, and we finally talked this week. Highlights include: Read more
| Categories: Actian and Ingres, Clustering, Database compression, Hadoop, ParAccel, Pervasive Software, SQL/Hadoop integration, VectorWise, Workload management | 4 Comments |
21st Century DBMS success and failure
As part of my series on the keys to and likelihood of success, I outlined some examples from the DBMS industry. The list turned out too long for a single post, so I split it up by millennia. The part on 20th Century DBMS success and failure went up Friday; in this one I’ll cover more recent events, organized in line with the original overview post. Categories addressed will include analytic RDBMS (including data warehouse appliances), NoSQL/non-SQL short-request DBMS, MySQL, PostgreSQL, NewSQL and Hadoop.
DBMS rarely have trouble with the criterion “Is there an identifiable buying process?” If an enterprise is doing application development projects, a DBMS is generally chosen for each one. And so the organization will generally have a process in place for buying DBMS, or accepting them for free. Central IT, departments, and — at least in the case of free open source stuff — developers all commonly have the capacity for DBMS acquisition.
In particular, at many enterprises either departments have the ability to buy their own analytic technology, or else IT will willingly buy and administer things for a single department. This dynamic fueled much of the early rise of analytic RDBMS.
Buyer inertia is a greater concern.
- A significant minority of enterprises are highly committed to their enterprise DBMS standards.
- Another significant minority aren’t quite as committed, but set pretty high bars for new DBMS products to cross nonetheless.
- FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) about new DBMS is often justifiable, about stability and consistent performance alike.
A particularly complex version of this dynamic has played out in the market for analytic RDBMS/appliances.
- First the newer products (from Netezza onwards) were sold to organizations who knew they wanted great performance or price/performance.
- Then it became more about selling “business value” to organizations who needed more convincing about the benefits of great price/performance.
- Then the behemoth vendors became more competitive, as Teradata introduced lower-price models, Oracle introduced Exadata, Sybase got more aggressive with Sybase IQ, IBM bought Netezza, EMC bought Greenplum, HP bought Vertica and so on. It is now hard for a non-behemoth analytic RDBMS vendor to make headway at large enterprise accounts.
- Meanwhile, Hadoop has emerged as serious competitor for at least some analytic data management, especially but not only at internet companies.
Otherwise I’d say: Read more
Introduction to CitusDB
One of my lesser-known clients is Citus Data, a largely Turkish company that is however headquartered in San Francisco. They make CitusDB, which puts a scale-out layer over a collection of fully-functional PostgreSQL nodes, much like Greenplum and Aster Data before it. However, in contrast to those and other Postgres-based analytic MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) DBMS:
- CitusDB does not permanently fork PostgreSQL; Citus Data has committed to always working with the latest PostgreSQL release, or at least with one that’s less than a year old.
- Citus Data never made the “fat head” mistake — if a join can’t be executed directly on the CitusDB data-storing nodes, it can’t be executed in CitusDB at all.
- CitusDB follows the modern best-practice of having many virtual nodes on each physical node. Default size of a virtual node is one gigabyte. Each virtual node is technically its own PostgreSQL table.*
- Citus Data has already introduced an open source column-store option for PostgreSQL, which CitusDB of course exploits.
*One benefit to this strategy, besides the usual elasticity and recovery stuff, is that while PostgreSQL may be single-core for any given query, a CitusDB query can use multiple cores by virtue of hitting multiple PostgreSQL tables on each node.
Citus has thrown a few things against the wall; for example, there are two versions of its product, one which involves HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) and one of which doesn’t. But I think Citus’ focus will be scale-out PostgreSQL for at least the medium-term future. Citus does have actual customers, and they weren’t all PostgreSQL users previously. Still, the main hope — at least until the product is more built-out — is that existing PostgreSQL users will find CitusDB easy to adopt, in technology and price alike.
MemSQL update
I stopped by MemSQL last week, and got a range of new or clarified information. For starters:
- Even though MemSQL (the product) was originally designed for OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing), MemSQL (the company) is now focused on analytic use cases …
- … which was the point of introducing MemSQL’s flash-based columnar option.
- One MemSQL customer has a 100 TB “data warehouse” installation on Amazon.
- Another has “dozens” of terabytes of data spread across 500 machines, which aggregate 36 TB of RAM.
- At customer Shutterstock, 1000s of non-MemSQL nodes are monitored by 4 MemSQL machines.
- A couple of MemSQL’s top references are also Vertica flagship customers; one of course is Zynga.
- MemSQL reports encountering Clustrix and VoltDB in a few competitive situations, but not NuoDB. MemSQL believes that VoltDB is still hampered by its traditional issues — Java, reliance on stored procedures, etc.
On the more technical side: Read more
Cloudera, Impala, data warehousing and Hive
There’s much confusion about Cloudera’s SQL plans and beliefs, and the company has mainly itself to blame. That said, here’s what I think is going on.
- Hive is good at some tasks and terrible at others.
- Hive is good at batch data transformation.
- Hive is bad at ad-hoc query, unless you really, really need Hive’s scale and low license cost. One example, per Eli Collins: Facebook has a 500 petabyte Hive warehouse, but jokes that on a good day an analyst can run 6 queries against it.
- Impala is meant to be good at what Hive is bad at – i.e., fast-response query. (Cloudera mentioned reliable 100 millisecond response times for at least one user.)
- Impala is also meant to be good at what Hive is good at, and will someday from Cloudera’s standpoint completely supersede Hive, but Cloudera is in no hurry for that day to arrive. Hive is more mature. Hive still has more SQL coverage than Impala. There’s a lot of legacy investment in Hive. Cloudera gets little business advantage if a customer sunsets Hive.
- Impala is already decent at some tasks analytic RDBMS are commonly used for. Cloudera insists that some queries run very quickly on Impala. I believe them.
- Impala is terrible at others, including some of the ones most closely associated with the concept of “data warehousing”. Data modeling is a big zero right now. Impala’s workload management, concurrency and all that are very immature.
- There are some use cases for which SQL-on-Hadoop blows away analytic RDBMS, for example ones involving data transformations – perhaps on multi-structured data – that are impractical in RDBMS.
And of course, as vendors so often do, Cloudera generally overrates both the relative maturity of Impala and the relative importance of the use cases in which its offerings – Impala or otherwise – shine.
Related links
- A survey of SQL/Hadoop integration (February, 2014)
- The cardinal rules of DBMS development (March, 2013)
| Categories: Cloudera, Data warehousing, Facebook, Hadoop, SQL/Hadoop integration, Workload management | 4 Comments |
Vertica 7
It took me a bit of time, and an extra call with Vertica’s long-time R&D chief Shilpa Lawande, but I think I have a decent handle now on Vertica 7, code-named Crane. The two aspects of Vertica 7 I find most interesting are:
- Flex Zone, a schema-on-need technology very much like Hadapt’s (but of course with access to Vertica performance).
- What sounds like an alternate query execution capability for short-request queries, the big point of which is that it saves them from being broadcast across the whole cluster, hence improving scalability. (Adding nodes of course doesn’t buy you much for the portion of a workload that’s broadcast.)
Other Vertica 7 enhancements include:
- A lot of Bottleneck Whack-A-Mole.
- “Significant” improvements to the Vertica management console.
- Security enhancements (Kerberos), Hadoop integration enhancements (HCatalog), and enhanced integration with Hadoop security (Kerberos again).
- Some availability hardening. (“Fault groups”, which for example let you ensure that data is replicated not just to 2+ nodes, but also that the nodes aren’t all on the same rack.)
- Java as an option to do in-database analytics. (Who knew that feature was still missing?)
- Some analytic functionality. (Approximate COUNT DISTINCT, but not yet Approximate MEDIAN.)
Overall, two recurring themes in our discussion were:
- Load and ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) performance, and/or obviating ETL.
- Short-request performance, in the form of more scalable short-request concurrency.
Impala and Parquet
I visited Cloudera Friday for, among other things, a chat about Impala with Marcel Kornacker and colleagues. Highlights included:
- Impala is meant to someday be a competitive MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) analytic RDBMS.
- At the moment, it is not one. For example, Impala lacks any meaningful form of workload management or query optimization.
- While Impala will run against any HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) file format, claims of strong performance assume that the data is in Parquet …
- … which is the replacement for the short-lived Trevni …
- … and which for most practical purposes is true columnar.
- Impala is also meant to be more than an RDBMS; Parquet and presumably in the future Impala can accommodate nested data structures.
- Just as Impala runs against most or all HDFS file formats, Parquet files can be used by most Hadoop execution engines, and of course by Pig and Hive.
- The Impala roadmap includes workload management, query optimization, data skipping, user-defined functions, hash distribution, two turtledoves, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Data gets into Parquet via batch jobs only — one reason it’s important that Impala run against multiple file formats — but background format conversion is another roadmap item. A single table can be split across multiple formats — e.g., the freshest data could be in HBase, with the rest is in Parquet.
IBM BLU
I had a good chat with IBM about IBM BLU, aka BLU Accelerator or Acceleration. BLU basics start:
- BLU is a part of DB2.
- BLU works like a columnar analytic DBMS.
- If you want to do a join combining BLU and non-BLU tables, all the BLU tables are joined first, and the result set is joined to the other tables by the rest of DB2.
And yes — that means Oracle is now the only major relational DBMS vendor left without a true columnar story.
BLU’s maturity and scalability basics start:
- BLU is coming out in IBM DB2 10.5, this quarter.
- BLU will initially be single-server, but …
- … IBM claims “near-linear” scalability up to 64 cores, and further says that …
- … scale-out for BLU is coming “soon”.
- IBM already thinks all your analytically-oriented DB2 tables should be in BLU.
- IBM describes the first version of BLU as being optimized for 10 TB databases, but capable of handling 20 TB.
BLU technical highlights include: Read more