Discussion of Facebook’s data management technologies. Related subjects include:
- Cassandra, which was originated at Facebook
- Hadoop, one of whose largest supporters is Facebook
- Google’s data management technologies
- Amazon’s data management technologies
The technology industry is under broad political attack
I apologize for posting a December downer, but this needs to be said.
The technology industry is under attack:
- From politicians and political pundits …
- … especially from “populists” and/or the political right …
- … in the United States and other countries.
These attacks:
- Are in some cases specific to internet companies such as Google and Facebook.
- In some cases threaten the tech industry more broadly.
- Are in some cases part of general attacks on the educated/ professional/“globalist”/”coastal” “elites”.
You’ve surely noticed some of these attacks. But you may not have noticed just how many different attacks and criticisms there are, on multiple levels.
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Facebook, Google, Public policy | 3 Comments |
Notes on vendor lock-in
Vendor lock-in is an important subject. Everybody knows that. But few of us realize just how complicated the subject is, nor how riddled it is with paradoxes. Truth be told, I wasn’t fully aware either. But when I set out to write this post, I found that it just kept growing longer.
1. The most basic form of lock-in is:
- You do application development for a target set of platform technologies.
- Your applications can’t run without those platforms underneath.
- Hence, you’re locked into those platforms.
2. Enterprise vendor standardization is closely associated with lock-in. The core idea is that you have a mandate or strong bias toward having different apps run over the same platforms, because:
- That simplifies your environment, requiring less integration and interoperability.
- That simplifies your staffing; the same skill sets apply to multiple needs and projects.
- That simplifies your vendor support relationships; there’s “one throat to choke”.
- That simplifies your price negotiation.
3. That last point is double-edged; you have more power over suppliers to whom you give more business, but they also have more power over you. The upshot is often an ELA (Enterprise License Agreement), which commonly works:
- For a fixed period of time, the enterprise may use as much of a given product set as they want, with costs fixed in advance.
- A few years later, the price is renegotiated, based on then-current levels of usage.
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Buying processes, Cassandra, Exadata, Facebook, IBM and DB2, Microsoft and SQL*Server, MongoDB, Neo Technology and Neo4j, Open source, Oracle, SAP AG | 12 Comments |
Notes from a long trip, July 19, 2016
For starters:
- I spent three weeks in California on a hybrid personal/business trip. I had a bunch of meetings, but not three weeks’ worth.
- The timing was awkward for most companies I wanted to see. No blame accrues to those who didn’t make themselves available.
- I came back with a nasty cough. Follow-up phone calls aren’t an option until next week.
- I’m impatient to start writing. Hence tonight’s posts. But it’s difficult for a man and his cough to be productive at the same time.
A running list of recent posts is:
- As a companion to this post, I’m publishing a very long one on vendor lock-in.
- Spark and Databricks are both prospering, and of course enhancing their technology as well.
- Ditto DataStax.
- Flink is interesting as the streaming technology it’s now positioned to be, rather than the overall Spark alternative it used to be positioned as but which the world didn’t need.
Subjects I’d like to add to that list include:
- MemSQL, Zoomdata, and Neo Technology (also prospering).
- Cloudera (multiple topics, as usual).
- Analytic SQL engines (“traditional” analytic RDBMS aren’t doing well).
- Microsoft’s reinvention (it feels real).
- Metadata (it’s ever more of a thing).
- Machine learning (it’s going to be a big portion of my research going forward).
- Transitions to the cloud — this subject affects almost everything else.
Machine learning’s connection to (the rest of) AI
This is part of a four post series spanning two blogs.
- One post gives a general historical overview of the artificial intelligence business.
- One post specifically covers the history of expert systems.
- One post gives a general present-day overview of the artificial intelligence business.
- One post (this one) explores the close connection between machine learning and (the rest of) AI.
1. I think the technical essence of AI is usually:
- Inputs come in.
- Decisions or actions come out.
- More precisely — inputs come in, something intermediate is calculated, and the intermediate result is mapped to a decision or action.
- The intermediate results are commonly either numerical (a scalar or perhaps a vector of scalars) or a classification/partition into finitely many possible intermediate outputs.
Of course, a lot of non-AI software can be described the same way.
To check my claim, please consider:
- It fits rules engines/expert systems so simply it’s barely worth saying.
- It fits any kind of natural language processing; the intermediate results might be words or phrases or concepts or whatever.
- It fits machine vision beautifully.
To see why it’s true from a bottom-up standpoint, please consider the next two points.
2. It is my opinion that most things called “intelligence” — natural and artificial alike — have a great deal to do with pattern recognition and response. Examples of what I mean include: Read more
| Categories: Facebook, Google, IBM and DB2, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics | 6 Comments |
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
More notes on HBase
1. Continuing from last week’s HBase post, the Cloudera folks were fairly proud of HBase’s features for performance and scalability. Indeed, they suggested that use cases which were a good technical match for HBase were those that required fast random reads and writes with high concurrency and strict consistency. Some of the HBase architecture for query performance seems to be:
- Everything is stored in sorted files. (I didn’t probe as to what exactly the files were sorted on.)
- Files have indexes and optional Bloom filters.
- Files are marked with min/max field values and time stamp ranges, which helps with data skipping.
Notwithstanding that a couple of those features sound like they might help with analytic queries, the base expectation is that you’ll periodically massage your HBase data into a more analytically-oriented form. For example — I was talking with Cloudera after all — you could put it into Parquet.
2. The discussion of which kinds of data are originally put into HBase was a bit confusing.
- HBase is commonly used to receive machine-generated data. Everybody knows that.
- Cloudera drew a distinction between:
- Straightforward time series, which should probably just go into HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) rather than HBase.
- Data that is bucketed by entity, which likely should go into HBase. Examples of entities are specific users or devices.
- Cloudera also reminded me that OpenTSDB, a popular time series data store, runs over HBase.
OpenTSDB, by the way, likes to store detailed data and aggregates side-by-side, which resembles a pattern I discussed in my recent BI for NoSQL post.
3. HBase supports caching, tiered storage, and so on. Cloudera is pretty sure that it is publicly known (I presume from blog posts or conference talks) that: Read more
| Categories: Cloudera, eBay, Facebook, Hadoop, HBase, Market share and customer counts, NoSQL, Open source, Petabyte-scale data management, Specific users, Yahoo | 4 Comments |
Optimism, pessimism, and fatalism — fault-tolerance, Part 2
The pessimist thinks the glass is half-empty.
The optimist thinks the glass is half-full.
The engineer thinks the glass was poorly designed.
Most of what I wrote in Part 1 of this post was already true 15 years ago. But much gets added in the modern era, considering that:
- Clusters will have node hiccups more often than single nodes will. (Duh.)
- Networks are relatively slow even when uncongested, and furthermore congest unpredictably.
- In many applications, it’s OK to sacrifice even basic-seeming database functionality.
And so there’s been innovation in numerous cluster-related subjects, two of which are:
- Distributed query and update. When a database is distributed among many modes, how does a request access multiple nodes at once?
- Fault-tolerance in long-running jobs.When a job is expected to run on many nodes for a long time, how can it deal with failures or slowdowns, other than through the distressing alternatives:
- Start over from the beginning?
- Keep (a lot of) the whole cluster’s resources tied up, waiting for things to be set right?
Distributed database consistency
When a distributed database lives up to the same consistency standards as a single-node one, distributed query is straightforward. Performance may be an issue, however, which is why we have seen a lot of:
- Analytic RDBMS innovation.
- Short-request applications designed to avoid distributed joins.
- Short-request clustered RDBMS that don’t allow fully-general distributed joins in the first place.
But in workloads with low-latency writes, living up to those standards is hard. The 1980s approach to distributed writing was two-phase commit (2PC), which may be summarized as: Read more
| Categories: Clustering, CouchDB, Data warehousing, Databricks, Spark and BDAS, Facebook, Hadoop, MapReduce, Sybase, Theory and architecture, VoltDB and H-Store | 1 Comment |
Hardware and storage notes
My California trip last week focused mainly on software — duh! — but I had some interesting hardware/storage/architecture discussions as well, especially in the areas of:
- Rack- or data-center-scale systems.
- The real or imagined demise of Moore’s Law.
- Flash.
I also got updated as to typical Hadoop hardware.
If systems are designed at the whole-rack level or higher, then there can be much more flexibility and efficiency in terms of mixing and connecting CPU, RAM and storage. The Google/Facebook/Amazon cool kids are widely understood to be following this approach, so others are naturally considering it as well. My most interesting of several mentions of that point was when I got the chance to talk with Berkeley computer architecture guru Dave Patterson, who’s working on plans for 100-petabyte/terabit-networking kinds of systems, for usage after 2020 or so. (If you’re interested, you might want to contact him; I’m sure he’d love more commercial sponsorship.)
One of Dave’s design assumptions is that Moore’s Law really will end soon (or at least greatly slow down), if by Moore’s Law you mean that every 18 months or so one can get twice as many transistors onto a chip of the same area and cost than one could before. However, while he thinks that applies to CPU and RAM, Dave thinks flash is an exception. I gathered that he thinks the power/heat reasons for Moore’s Law to end will be much harder to defeat than the other ones; note that flash, because of what it’s used for, has vastly less power running through it than CPU or RAM do.
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Buying processes, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, Intel, Memory-centric data management, Pricing, Solid-state memory | 19 Comments |
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 |
DataStax/Cassandra update
Cassandra’s reputation in many quarters is:
- World-leading in the geo-distribution feature.
- Impressively scalable.
- Hard to use.
This has led competitors to use, and get away with, sales claims along the lines of “Well, if you really need geo-distribution and can’t wait for us to catch up — which we soon will! — you should use Cassandra. But otherwise, there are better choices.”
My friends at DataStax, naturally, don’t think that’s quite fair. And so I invited them — specifically Billy Bosworth and Patrick McFadin — to educate me. Here are some highlights of that exercise.
DataStax and Cassandra have some very impressive accounts, which don’t necessarily revolve around geo-distribution. Netflix, probably the flagship Cassandra user — since Cassandra inventor Facebook adopted HBase instead — actually hasn’t been using the geo-distribution feature. Confidential accounts include:
- A petabyte or so of data at a very prominent company, geo-distributed, with 800+ nodes, in a kind of block storage use case.
- A messaging application at a very prominent company, anticipated to grow to multiple data centers and a petabyte of so of data, across 1000s of nodes.
- A 300 terabyte single-data-center telecom account (which I can’t find on DataStax’s extensive customer list).
- A huge health records deal.
- A Fortune 10 company.
DataStax and Cassandra won’t necessarily win customer-brag wars versus MongoDB, Couchbase, or even HBase, but at least they’re strongly in the competition.
DataStax claims that simplicity is now a strength. There are two main parts to that surprising assertion. Read more