Tag: Apache Drill

The Year in SQL Engines

As an addendum to my year-end review of machine learning and deep learning, I offer this survey of SQL engines. SQL is the most widely used language for data science according to O’Reilly’s 2016 Data Science Salary Survey. Most projects require at least some SQL operations, and many need nothing but SQL.

This review covers six open source leaders: Hive, Impala, Spark SQL, Drill, HAWQ, and Presto; plus, for completeness, Calcite, Kylin, Phoenix, Tajo, and Trafodion. Omitted: two commercial options, Oracle Big Data SQL and IBM Big SQL, which IBM has not yet rebranded as “Watson SQL.”

(A reader asks: What about Druid? My response: erm. On inspection, I agree that Druid belongs in this category, so check it out.)

I use the term ‘SQL Engine’ loosely. Hive, for example, is not an engine; it’s a framework that uses the MapReduce, Tez, or Spark engines to run queries. And it doesn’t run SQL; it runs HiveQL, an SQL-like language that closely approximates SQL. ‘SQL-in-Hadoop’ is also inapt; while Hive and Impala work primarily with Hadoop, Spark, Drill, HAWQ, and Presto also work with a wide variety of other data storage systems.

Unlike relational databases, SQL engines operate independently of the data storage system. In contrast, relational databases bundle the query engine and storage into a single tightly coupled system, which permits certain types of optimization. Uncoupling them, on the other hand, provides greater flexibility, though at the potential loss of performance.

Figure 1, below, shows the relative popularity of the leading SQL engines according to DB-Engines, a website maintained by the Austrian consultancy Solid IT. DB-engines computes a monthly popularity score for more than 200 database systems. The score reflects search engine queries; mentions in online discussions; job offers; mentions in professional profiles, and tweets.

Figure 1

screen-shot-2017-01-31-at-1-04-43-pm
Source: DB-Engines, January 2017 http://db-engines.com/en/ranking

Although Impala, Spark SQL, Drill, Hawq, and Presto consistently beat Hive on measures such as runtime performance, concurrency, and throughput, Hive remains the most popular (at least by the DB-Engines metric). There are three reasons why that is so:

— Hive is the default option for SQL in Hadoop, supported in every distribution. The others align with specific vendors and cater to niche users.

— Hive has closed the performance gap to the other engines. Most of the Hive alternatives launched in 2012 when analysts would rather kill themselves than wait for a Hive query to finish. But while Impala, Spark, Drill, et.al. ran away like rabbits back then, Hive just kept chugging along, tortoise-like, with incremental improvements. Today, while Hive is not the fastest choice, it’s a lot better than it was five years ago.

— While bleeding-edge speed is cool, most organizations know that the world does not end if a junior marketing manager has to wait ten seconds to find out if the chicken wings outperformed the buffalo burgers in the Duxbury restaurant last Tuesday.

As you can see in Figure 2, below, the top SQL engines compete well for user interest compared to leading commercial data warehouse appliances.

Figure 2

screen-shot-2017-01-31-at-2-27-15-pm
Source: DB-Engines, January 2017 http://db-engines.com/en/ranking

The best measure of health for an open source project is the size of its active developer community. Hive and Presto have the largest base of contributors, as shown in Figure 3, below. (Data for Spark SQL is unavailable.)

Figure 3

screen-shot-2017-01-31-at-2-52-27-pm
Source: Open Hub https://www.openhub.net/

In 2016, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Kognitio, and Teradata waded into the Battle of the Benchmarks Tony Baer summarizes. I’m sure that you will be shocked to learn that the vendor’s preferred SQL engine outperformed the others in each of these studies, which begs the question: are benchmarks bullshit?

AtScale‘s biannual benchmark is not BS. AtScale, a BI startup, markets software that brokers between BI front ends and SQL backends. The company’s software is engine-neutral — it seeks to run on as many as possible — and its broad experience in BI gives the testing a real-world flavor.

AtScale’s key findings from its most recent round, which included Hive, Impala, Spark SQL, and Presto:

— All four engines successfully ran AtScale’s BI benchmark queries.

— Each engine has its own performance “sweet spot” depending on data volume, query complexity, and concurrent users.

– Impala and Spark SQL outperform the others in queries against small data sets

– On large data sets, Impala and Spark SQL handle complex joins better than the others

– Impala and Presto demonstrate the best results in concurrency tests

— All engines showed 2X-4X performance gains in the six months since AtScale’s previous benchmark.

Alex Woodie reports on the test results; Andrew Oliver analyzes.

Let’s dive into the individual projects.

Apache Hive

Apache Hive was the first SQL framework in the Hadoop ecosystem. Engineers at Facebook introduced Hive in 2007 and donated the code to the Apache Software Foundation in 2008; in September 2010, Hive graduated to top-level Apache project status. Every major player in the Hadoop ecosystem distributes and supports Hive, including Cloudera, MapR, Hortonworks, and IBM. Amazon Web Services offers a modified version of Hive as a cloud service in Elastic MapReduce (EMR).

Early releases of Hive used MapReduce to run queries. Complex queries required multiple passes through the data, which impaired performance. As a result, Hive was not suitable for interactive analysis. Led by Hortonworks, the Stinger initiative markedly enhanced Hive’s performance, notably through the use of Apache Tez, an application framework that delivers streamlined MapReduce code. Tez and ORCfile, a new storage format, produced a significant speedup for Hive queries.

Cloudera Labs spearheaded a parallel project to re-engineer Hive’s back end to run on Apache Spark. After an extended beta, Cloudera released Hive-on-Spark to general availability in early 2016.

More than 100 individuals contributed to Hive in 2016. The team announced Hive 2.0 in February and Hive 2.1 in June. Hive 2.0 includes improvements to several improvements to Hive-on-Spark, plus performance, usability, supportability and stability enhancements. Hive 2.1 includes Hive LLAP (“Live Long and Process”), which combines persistent query servers and optimized in-memory caching for high performance. The team claims a 25X speedup.

In September, the Hivemall project entered the Apache Incubator, as I noted in Part Two of my machine learning year-end roundup. Originally developed by Treasure Data and donated to the Apache Software Foundation, Hivemall is a scalable machine learning library implemented as a collection of Hive UDFs designed to run in Hive, Pig or Spark SQL with MapReduce, Tez or Spark. The team plans an initial release in Q1 2017.

Apache Impala

Cloudera launched Impala, an open source MPP SQL engine, in 2012, as a high-performance alternative to Hive. Impala works with HDFS and HBase, and it leverages Hive metadata; however, it bypasses MapReduce to run queries. Mike Olson, Cloudera’s Chief Strategy Officer,

Mike Olson, Cloudera’s Chief Strategy Officer, argued in late 2013 that Hive’s architecture was fundamentally flawed. In Olson’s view, developers could only deliver high-performance SQL with a whole new approach, exemplified by Impala. In 2014 Cloudera released a series of benchmarks in January, May, and September. In these tests, Impala showed progressive improvement in query runtime, and significantly outperformed Hive on Tez, Spark SQL, and Presto. In addition to running fast, Impala performed particularly well in concurrency, throughput, and scalability.

In 2015, Cloudera donated Impala to the Apache Software Foundation, where it entered the Apache Incubator program. Cloudera, MapR, Oracle and Amazon Web Services distribute Impala;  Cloudera, MapR, and Oracle provide commercial build and installation support.

Impala made steady progress in the Apache Incubator in 2016. The team cleaned up the code, ported it to Apache infrastructure and delivered Release 2.7.0, its first Apache release in October. The new version includes performance and scalability improvements, as well as some other minor enhancements.

In September, Cloudera published results of a study that compared Impala to Amazon Web Services’ Redshift columnar database. The report is interesting reading, though subject to the usual caveats about vendor benchmarks.

Spark SQL

Spark SQL is a Spark component for structured data processing. The Apache Spark team launched Spark SQL in 2014 and absorbed Shark, an early Hive-on-Spark project. It quickly became the most widely used Spark module.

Spark SQL users can run SQL queries, read data from Hive, or use it as means to create Spark Datasets and DataFrames. (Datasets are distributed collections of data; DataFrames are Datasets organized into named columns.) The Spark SQL interface provides Spark with information about the structure of the data and operations to be performed; Spark’s Catalyst optimizer uses this information to construct an efficient query.

In 2015, Spark’s machine learning developers introduced the ML API, a package that leveraged Spark DataFrames instead of the lower-level Spark RDD API. This approach proved to be attractive and fruitful; in 2016, with Release 2.0, the Spark team placed the RDD-based API in maintenance mode. The DataFrames API is now the primary interface for Spark machine learning.

Also in 2016, the team released Structured Streaming, in an Alpha release as of Spark 2.1.0. Structured Streaming is a stream processing engine built on Spark SQL. Users can query streaming data sources in the same manner as static sources, and they can combine streaming and static sources in a single query. Spark SQL runs the query continuously and updates results as streaming data arrives. Structured Streaming delivers exactly-once fault-tolerance guarantees through checkpointing and Write Ahead Logs.

Apache Drill

In 2012, a group led by MapR, one of the leading Hadoop distributors, proposed to build an open-source version of Google’s Dremel, a distributed system for interactive ad-hoc analysis. They named the project Apache Drill. Drill languished in the Apache Incubator for more than two years, finally graduating in late 2014. The team delivered its 1.0 release in 2015.

MapR distributes and supports Apache Drill.

More than 50 individuals contributed to Drill in 2016. The team delivered five dot releases in 2016. Key enhancements include:

  • Web authentication
  • Support for the Apache Kudu columnar database
  • Support for HBase 1.x
  • Dynamic UDF support

Two key Drill contributors left MapR to start Dremio in 2015; the startup remains in stealth mode.

Apache HAWQ

Pivotal Software introduced HAWQ as a commercially licensed high-performance SQL engine in 2012 and attempted to market it with minimal success. Changing strategy, Pivotal donated the project to Apache in June 2015, and it entered the Apache Incubator program in September 2015.

Fifteen months later, HAWQ remains in the Incubator. The team released HAWQ 2.0.0.0 in December, with a load of bug fixes. I suspect the project will graduate in 2017.

One small point in HAWQ’s favor is its support for Apache MADlib, the machine-learning-in-SQL project that is also still in the Incubator. The combination of HAWQ and MADlib should be a nice consolation to the folks who bought Greenplum and wonder what the hell happened.

Presto

Facebook engineers initiated the Presto project in 2012 as a fast interactive alternative to Hive. Rolled out in 2013, the software successfully supported more than a thousand Facebook users and more than 30,000 queries per day on petabytes of data. Facebook released Presto to open source in 2013.

Presto supports ANSI SQL queries across a range of data sources, including Hive, Cassandra, relational databases or proprietary file systems (such as Amazon Web Services’ S3.)  Presto queries can federate data from multiple sources.  Users can submit queries from C, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, R and Ruby.

Airpal, a web-based query tool developed by Airbnb, offers users the ability to submit queries to Presto through a browser. Qubole provides a managed service for Presto. AWS delivers a Presto service on EMR.

In June 2015, Teradata announced plans to develop and support the project.  Under an announced three-phase program, Teradata proposed to integrate Presto into the Hadoop ecosystem, enable operation under YARN and enhance connectivity through ODBC and JDBC. Teradata offers its own distribution of Presto, complete with a data sheet. In June, Teradata announced the certification of Information Builders, Looker, Qlik, Tableau, and ZoomData, with MicroStrategy and Microsoft Power BI on the way.

Presto is a very active project, with a vast and vibrant contributor community. The team cranks out releases faster than Miki Sudo eats hot dogs — I count 42 releases in 2016. Teradata hasn’t bothered to summarize what’s new, and I don’t plan to sift through 42 sets of release notes, so let’s just say it’s better.

Other Apache Projects

There are five other SQL-ish projects in the Apache ecosystem.

Apache Calcite

Apache Calcite is an open source framework for building databases. It includes:

— A SQL parser, validator and JDBC driver

— Query optimization tools, including a relational algebra API, rule-based planner, and a cost-based query optimizer.

Apache Hive uses Calcite for cost-based query optimization, while Apache Drill and Apache Kylin use the SQL parser.

The Calcite team pushed out five releases in 2016, with bug fixes and new adapters for Cassandra, Druid, and Elasticsearch.

Apache Kylin

Apache Kylin is an OLAP engine with a SQL interface. Developed by eBay and donated to Apache, Kylin graduated to top-level status in 2015.

A startup named Kyligence launched in 2016; it offers commercial support and a data warehousing product called KAP, FWIW. While the company has no funding listed in Crunchbase, a source tells me that it has strong backing and a large office in Shanghai.

Apache Phoenix

Apache Phoenix is a SQL framework that runs on HBase and bypasses MapReduce. Salesforce developed the software and donated it to Apache in 2013. The project graduated to top-level status in May 2014. Hortonworks includes Phoenix in the Hortonworks Data Platform. Since the leading SQL engines all work with HBase, it’s not clear why we need Phoenix.

Apache Tajo

Apache Tajo is a fast SQL data warehousing framework introduced in 2011 by Gruter, a Big Data infrastructure company, and donated to Apache in 2013. Tajo graduated to top level status in 2014. The project has attracted little interest from prospective users and contributors outside of Gruter’s primary market in South Korea. Other than a brief mention by Gartner’s Nick Heudecker, the project isn’t on anyone’s dashboard.

Apache Trafodion

Apache Trafodion is another SQL-on-HBase project, conceived by HP Labs, which tells you pretty much all you need to know. HP launched Trafodion in June 2014, a month after Apache Phoenix graduated to production. Six months later, it dawned on HP executives that there might be limited commercial potential for another SQL-on-HBase engine — I can see the facepalms — so they donated the project to Apache, where it entered the Incubator in May 2015.

Trafodion promises to be a transactional database if it ever gets out of incubation. Unfortunately, there are lots of options in that space, and the only competitive benefit the development team can articulate seems to be “it’s open source, so it’s cheap.”

Big Analytics Roundup (March 7, 2016)

Hortonworks wins the internet this week beating the drum for its partnership with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.  The story is down under “Commercial Announcements,” just above the story about Hortonworks’ shareholder lawsuit.

Google releases a distributed version of TensorFlow, and HDP releases a new version of Dataflow.  We are reaching peak flow.

IBM demonstrates its core values.

Folks who fret about cloud security don’t understand that data is safer in the cloud than it is on premises.  There are simple steps you can take to reduce or eliminate concerns about data security.  Here’s a practical guide to anonymizing your data.

Explainers

In the morning paper, Adrian Colyer explains trajectory data mining,

On the AWS Big Data Blog, Manjeet Chayel explains how to analyze your data on DynamoDB with Spark.

Nicholas Perez explains how to log in Spark.

Altiscale’s Andrew Lee explains memory settings in part 4 of his series of Tips and Tricks for Running Spark on Hadoop.  Parts 1-3 are here, here and here.

Sayantam Dey explains topic modeling using Spark for TF-IDF vectorization.

Slim Baltagi updates all on state of Flink community.

Martin Junghanns explains scalable graph analytics with Neo4j and Flink.

On SlideShare, Vasia Kalavri explains batch and stream graph processing with Flink.

DataTorrent’s Thomas Weise explains exactly-once processing with DataTorrent Apache Apex.

Nishant Singh explains how to get started with Apache Drill.

On the Cloudera Engineering Blog, Xuefu Zhang explains what’s new in Hive 2.0.

On the Google Cloud Platform Blog, Matthieu Mayran explains how to build a recommender with the Google Compute Engine.

In TechRepublic, James Sanders explains Amazon Web Services in what he characterizes as a smart person’s guide.  If you’re not smart and still want to use AWS, go here.

Perspectives

We continue to digest analysis from Spark Summit East:

— Altiscale’s Barbara Lewis summarizes her nine favorite sessions.

— Jack Vaughan interviews attendees from CapitalOne, eBay, DataXu and some other guy who touts open source.

— Alex Woodie interviews attendees from Bloomberg and Comcast and grabs quotes from Tony Baer, Mike Gualtieri and Anjul Bhambhri, who all agree that Spark is a thing.

In other matters:

— In KDnuggets, Gregory Piatetsky attacks the idea of the “citizen data scientist” and give it a good thrashing.

— Paige Roberts probes the true meaning of “real time.”

— MapR’s Jim Scott compares Drill and Spark for SQL, offers his opinion on the strengths of each.

— Sri Ambati describes the road ahead for H2O.ai.

Open Source Announcements

— Google releases Distributed TensorFlow without an announcement.  On KDnuggets, Matthew Mayo applauds.

— Hortonworks announces a new release of Dataflow, which is Apache NiFi with the Hortonworks logo.  New bits include integrated security and support for Apache Kafka and Apache Storm.

— On the Databricks blog, Joseph Bradley et. al. introduce GraphFrames, a graph processing library that works with the DataFrames API.  GraphFrames is a Spark Package.

Commercial Announcements

— Hortonworks announces partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise to enhance Apache Spark.  HPE claims to have rewritten Spark shuffle for faster performance, and HDP will help them contribute the code back to Spark.  That’s nice.  Not exactly the ground-shaking announcement HDP touted at Spark Summit East, but nice.

— Meanwhile, Hortonworks investors sue the company, claiming it lied in a November 10-Q when it said it had enough cash on hand to fund twelve months of operations.  The basic issue is that Hortonworks burns cash faster than Kim Kardashian out for a spree on Rodeo Drive, spending more than $100 million in the first nine months of 2015, leaving $25 million in the bank.  Hortonworks claims analytic prowess; perhaps it should apply some of that know-how to financial controls.

— OLAP on Hadoop vendor AtScale announces 5X revenue growth in 2015, which isn’t too surprising since they were previously in stealth.  One would expect infinite revenue growth.

2015 in Big Analytics

Looking back at 2015, a few stories stand out:

  • Steady progress for Spark, punctuated by two big announcements.
  • Solid growth in cloud-based machine learning, led by Microsoft.
  • Expanding options for SQL and OLAP on Hadoop.

In 2015, the most widely read post on this blog was Spark is Too Big to Fail, published in April.  I wrote this post in response to a growing chorus of snark about Spark written by folks who seemed to know little about the project and its goals.

IBM Embraces Spark

IBM’s commitment to Spark, announced on Jun 15, lit up the crowds gathered in San Francisco for the Spark Summit.  IBM brings a number of things to Spark: deep pockets to build a community, extensive technical resources and a large customer base.  It also brings a clutter of aging and partially integrated products, an army of suits and no less than 164 Vice Presidents whose titles include the words “Big Data.”

When IBM announced its Spark initiative I joked that somewhere in the bowels of IBM, someone will want to put Spark on a mainframe.  Color me prophetic.

It’s too early to tell what substantive contributions IBM will make to Spark.  Unlike Mesosphere, Typesafe, Tencent, Palantir, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Huawei, Shopify, Netflix, Intel, Yahoo, Kixer, UC Berkeley and Databricks, IBM did not help test Release 1.5 in September.  This is a clear miss, given the scope of IBM’s resources and the volume of hype it puts out about its commitment to the project.

All that said, IBM brings respectability, and the assurance that Spark is ready for prime time.  This is priceless.  Since IBM’s announcement, we haven’t heard a peep from the folks who were snarking at Spark earlier this year.

Cloudera Announces “One Platform” Initiative

In September, Cloudera announced its One Platform initiative to unify Spark and Hadoop, an announcement that surprised everyone who thought Spark and Hadoop were already pretty well integrated.  As with the IBM announcement, the symbolism matters.  Some analysts took this announcement to mean that Cloudera is replacing MapReduce with Spark, which isn’t exactly true.  It’s fairer to say that in Cloudera’s vision, Hadoop users will rely more on Spark in the future than they do today, but MapReduce is not dead.

The “One Platform” positioning has more to do with Cloudera moving to stem the tide of folks who use Spark outside of Hadoop.  According to Databricks’ recent Spark user survey, only 40% use Spark under YARN, with the rest running in a freestanding cluster or on Mesos.  It’s an understandable concern for Cloudera; I’ve never heard a fish seller suggest that we should eat less fish.  But if Cloudera thinks “One Platform” will stem that tide, it is mistaken.  It all boils down to use cases, and there are many use cases for Spark that don’t need Hadoop’s baggage.

Microsoft Builds Credibility in Analytics

In 2015, Microsoft took some big steps to demonstrate that it offers serious solutions for analytics.  The acquisition of Revolution Analytics, announced in January, was the first step; in one move, Microsoft acquired a highly skilled team and valuable software assets.  Since the acquisition, Microsoft has rolled Revolution’s enhanced R distribution into SQL Server and Azure, opening both platforms to the large and growing R community.

Microsoft’s other big move, in February, was the official launch of Azure Machine Learning (AML).   First released in beta in June 2014, AML is both easy to use and powerful.  The UI is simple to understand, and documentation is excellent; built-in analytic functionality is very rich, and the tool is extensible with custom R or Python scripts.  Microsoft’s trial user program is generous, and clearly designed to encourage adoption and use.

Azure Machine Learning contrasts markedly with Amazon Machine Learning.  Amazon’s offering remains a skeleton, with minimal functionality and an API only a developer could love.  Microsoft is clearly making a play for the data science market as a way to leapfrog Amazon.  If analytic capabilities are driving your choice of cloud platform, Azure is by far your best option.

SQL Engines Proliferate

At the beginning of 2015, there were two main options for SQL on Hadoop: Hive for batch SQL and Impala for interactive SQL.  Spark SQL was still in Alpha; Drill was a curiosity; and Presto was something used at Facebook.

Several things happened during the year:

  • Hive on Tez established rough performance parity with the fast SQL engines.
  • Spark SQL went to general release, stabilized, and rolled out the DataFrames API.
  • MapR promoted Drill, and invested in improvements to the software.  Also, MapR’s Drill team spun off and started Dremio to provide commercial support.
  • Cloudera donated Impala to open source, and Pivotal donated Hawq.
  • Teradata placed its chips on Presto.

While it’s great to see so many options emerge, Hive continues to win actual evaluations.  Given Hive’s large user and contributor base and existing stock of programs, it’s unclear how much traction Hive alternatives have now that Hive on Tez offers competitive performance.  Obviously, Cloudera doesn’t think Impala offers a competitive advantage anymore, or they would not have donated the assets to Apache.

The other big news in SQL is TPC’s release of a benchmarking standard for decision support with Big Data.

OLAP on Hadoop Gets Real

For folks seeking to perform dimensional analysis in Hadoop, 2015 delivered not one but two options.  The open source option, Apache Kylin, originally an eBay project, just recently graduated to Apache top level status.  Adoption is limited at present, but any project used by eBay and Baidu is worth a look.

The commercial option is AtScale, a company that emerged from stealth in April.  Unlike BI-on-Hadoop vendors like Datameer and Pentaho, AtScale provides a dimensional layer designed to work with existing BI tools.  It’s a nice value proposition for companies that have already invested big time in BI tools, and don’t want to add another UI to the mix.

Funding for Machine Learning

H2O.ai’s recently announced B round is significant for a couple of reasons.  First, it validates H2O.ai’s true open source business model; second, it confirms the continued growth and expansion of the user base for H2O as well as H2O.ai’s paid subscription base.

Like Sherlock Holmes’ dog that did not bark, two companies are significant because they did not procure funding in 2015:

  • Skytree, whose last funding round closed in April 2013, churned its executive team and rebranded a couple of times.  It finally listed some new customers; interestingly, some are investors and others are affiliated with members of Skytree’s Board.
  • Alpine Data Labs, last funded in November 2013, struggled to distance itself from the Pivotal ecosystem.  Designed to run on Greenplum, Alpine offers limited functionality on Hadoop, which makes it unclear how this company survives.

Palantir continued to suck up capital like a whale feeding on krill.

Google TensorFlow

Google open sourced TensorFlow, so now we have sixteen open source Deep Learning frameworks instead of just fifteen.

Big Analytics Roundup (November 9, 2015)

My roundup of the Spark Summit Europe is here.

Two important events this week:

  • H2O World starts today and runs through Wednesday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View CA.   Yotam Levy summarizes here and here.
  • Open Data Science Conference meets November 14-15 at the Marriott Waterfront in SFO

Five backgrounders and explainers:

  • At HUG London, Apache’s Ufuk Celebi delivers a nice intro to Flink.
  • On the Databricks blog, Yesware’s Justin Mills explains how his team migrates Spark applications from concept through prototype through production.
  • On Slideshare, Alpine’s Holden Karau delivers an overview of Spark with Python.
  • Chloe Green wakes from a three year slumber and discovers Spark.
  • On the Cloudera Engineering blog, Madhu Ganta explains how to build a CEP app with Spark and Drools.

Third quarter financials drive the news:

(1) MapR: We Grew 160% in Q3

MapR posts its biggest quarter ever.

(2) HDP: We Grew 168% in Q3

HDP loses $1.33 on every dollar sold, tries to make it up on volume.  Stock craters.

(3) Teradata: We Got A Box of Steak Knives in Q3

Teradata reports more disappointing sales as customers continue to defer investments in big box solutions for data warehousing.  This is getting to be a habit with Teradata; the company missed revenue projections for 2014 as well as the first and second quarters of this year.  Any company can run into headwinds, but a management team that consistently misses targets clearly does not understand its own business and needs to go.

Full report here.

(4) “B” Round for H2O.ai

Machine learning software developer H2O.ai announces a $20 million Series B round led by Paxion Capital Partners.  H2O.ai leads development of H2O, an open source project for distributed in-memory machine learning.  The company reports 25 new support customers this year.

(5) Fuzzy Logix Lands Funds

In-database analytics vendor Fuzzy Logix announces a $5 million “A” round from New Science Ventures.  Fuzzy offers a library of analytic functions that run in a number of high-performance databases and in HiveQL.

(6) New Optimization Package for Spark

On the Databricks blog, Aaron Staple announces availability of Spark TFOCS, an optimization package based on the eponymous Matlab package.  (TFOCS=Templates for First Order Conic Solvers.)

(7) WSO2 Delivers IoT App on Spark 

IoT middleware vendor WSO2 announces Release 3.0 of its open source Data Analytics Server (DAS) platform.   DAS collects data streams and applies batch, real-tim or interactive analytics; predictive analytics are in the roadmap.  For streaming data sources, DAS supports java agents, javascript clients and 100+ connectors.  The software runs on Spark and Lucene.

(8) Hortonworks: We Aren’t Irrelevant

On the Hortonworks blog, Vinay Shukla and Ram Sriharsha tout Hortonworks’ contributions to Spark, including ORC support, an Ambari stack definition for Spark, tighter integration between Hive and Spark, minor enhancements to ML and user-facing documentation.  Looking at the roadmap, they discuss Magellan for geospatial and Zeppelin notebooks. (h/t Hadoop Weekly).

(9) Apache Drill Delivers Fast SQL-on-Laptop

On the MapR blog, Mitsutoshi Kiuchi offers a case study in how to run a silly benchmark.

Comparing the functionality of Drill and Spark SQL, Kiuchi argues that Drill “supports” NoSQL databases but Spark does not, relegating Spark’s packages to a footnote.  “Support” is a loaded word with open source software; technically, nothing is supported unless you pay for it, in which case the scope of support is negotiated as part of the SLA.  It’s also worth noting that MongoDB developed Spark’s interface to MongoDB (for example), which provides a certain amount of confidence.

Kiuchi does not consider other functional areas, such as security, YARN support, query fault tolerance, the user interface, metastore management and view support, where Drill comes up short.

In a previously published performance test of five SQL engines, Spark successfully ran nine out of eleven queries, while Drill ran eight out of ten.  On the eight queries both engines ran, Drill was slightly faster on six.  For this benchmark, Kiuchi runs three queries on his laptop with a tiny dataset.

As a general rule, one should ignore SQL-on-Hadoop benchmarks unless they run industry standard queries (e.g. TPC) with large datasets in a distributed configuration.

Big Analytics Roundup (April 6, 2015)

Late posting today due to holiday travel.

In the week following Spark Summit East, a number of Spark skeptics surfaced, a sign that people take Spark seriously.

The top item of the week, though, is Tiernan Ray’s interview with Michael Stonebraker in Barrons, a must-read.

Analytic Software

Forrester published its latest “wave” for Big Data Predictive Analytics Solutions, an inaptly named report that lumps together solutions that can work with Big Data and those that cannot.  I’ll write a more detailed summary later this week.  Quick takes:  Alteryx, Oracle and RapidMiner did well, but Alpine and Microsoft clearly need to shift some of their analyst relations spending from Gartner to Forrester.

Apache Drill

Apache Drill announces Release 0.8.

Apache Spark

Analysis

In opensource.com, Jen Wike Hugar interviews key Spark contributor Reynold Xin.

Mike Vizard, in the aptly named Talkin’ Cloud, describes the high potential for Spark in the cloud.  (Though he does not mention it, more than half of respondents to a recent Typesafe survey of Spark users said they deploy it in the cloud.)

Matei Zaharia, creator of Spark and CTO of Databricks, held an Ask Me Anything last week on Reddit.  Key takeaways: no, Matei is not a musician, and yes, he likes Nutella. 

Spark has clearly reached a point of inflection when skeptical analysis emerges.  Criticism is healthy, of course, but what the skeptics all seem to share is an ignorance of machine learning and streaming applications, and the challenge of making those applications work well in MapReduce.  In other words, they all seem to misunderstand the purpose of Spark, and would do well to learn more about the platform before quibbling on the margins.

  • Professional cat herder Andrew Oliver compares Spark to Tableau and, shockingly, finds it wanting.  Also, Andrew heard people say unflattering things about Hadoop at Spark Summit East.  Who knew that Hadoop devotees are so sensitive?
  • In DataMill, Nicole Leskowski asks if Apache Spark is the next big thing in Big Data Analytics, a question that would have been timely last year.
  • In TechTarget, Jack Vaughan wonders whether Spark is just a shiny new object, while ruminating about Digital Equipment and the PDP-11.  His point will be lost on most readers.
  • Returning to ZDNet from GigaOm, Andrew Brust asks if Spark is overhyped, citing unnamed second-hand sources that tell him Spark is “not ready for prime time.”   Note to Andrew: you can download the software here.

Spark Core

Matei Zaharia celebrates Spark’s fifth birthday with a brief history.

On the Cloudera blog, Sandy Ryza concludes his series on tuning Spark jobs.

Spark Streaming

On the Databricks blog. Cody Koeninger, Davies Liu and Tathagata Das describe the new direct Kakfa API available in Spark 1.3

Databricks

Databricks announced that Timeful, a startup specializing in intelligent time management, has deployed its recommendation engine in Databricks Cloud.  Case study available here.

Hadoop Ecosystem

In Datanami, Hadoop skeptic Alex Woodie asks if Hadoop needs a reality check, observing that the leading Hadoop distributors do not make money, a trait shared by most industries at comparable points of maturity.  Woodie cites Wikibon’s Big Data revenue summary as evidence that there is little money in Hadoop, without considering the validity of Wikibon’s data (which is self-reported by the vendors and lacks consistent definitions).  Even if we accept the Wikibon data at face value, Woodie also fails to note that startup Palantir (which is totally into Hadoop) now reports more Big Data revenue than industry leader SAS.  Another unanswered question: if Hadoop is so inconsequential, why has Teradata lost half its market value since 2012?

IBM

IBM announces BigInsights 4.0 just nine months after releasing BigInsights 3.0.  BigInsights includes the usual Hadoop bits, plus:

  • BigSQL, a federation engine for SQL across relational databases and Hadoop
  • Big Sheets, a Datameer-like spreadsheet-on-Hadoop tool
  • SystemML, a home-grown machine learning library that runs in MapReduce
  • Text analytics capability
  • Big R, an interface that can push embarrassingly parallel R processing into Hadoop

Streaming and Real-Time Processing

On the O’Reilly Radar blog, Ben Lorica describes platforms and applications for processing data streams.

Strata + Hadoop World 2014

A sellout crowd of 5,500 met at the Javits Center in New York last week for the 2014 Strata + Hadoop World conference.  There were three major themes:

Big Data in Action.   In his keynote address, Mike Olson of Cloudera noted the shift from talking about “geeky projects like Pig, Sqoop and Oozie” to talking about applications, such as fraud detection, product design and agriculture.   An entire track in the conference featured success stories from companies such as Goldman Sachs, Transamerica, American Express, L.L. Bean, FICO and Kaiser Permanente.

Symbiosis of Analytics and Big Data.  Paul Zikopoulos of IBM observed that “Big Data without analytics is just a bunch of data.”   Zikopoulos drew an analogy to the mining industry, which uses advanced technology to extract trace amounts of valuable material from large quantities of low-grade ore; in Big Data, we use advanced analytics to extract useful insight from large quantities of low-value per byte data.  Conference sessions reflected the critical role analytic technology plays in the Big Data value chain.

Spark has arrived.  The 2013 conference included two sessions about Spark; this year, thirteen sessions featured Spark, including the sold-out full day Spark Camp.  Moreover, vendors such as ClearStory Data and Platfora openly touted Spark integration, in the belief that this capability resonates with buyers.  Other conference sponsors recently certified on Spark include Pentaho, Skytree, Tableau, Talend and Trifacta; and MapR announced a project to deliver Apache Drill on Spark.

Among the notable Spark sessions:

  • Sean Owen of Cloudera delivered an excellent demonstration of Spark’s MLLib machine learning library for anomaly detection
  • Michael Armbrust of Databricks presented on Spark SQL and its uses as both a query language and a general framework for working with structured data

Advancing a theme he introduced last year, Olson speculated in his keynote that Hadoop will “disappear” this year because enterprises increasingly view Hadoop in the context of an overall data management strategy.  He cited the recent Teradata-Cloudera partnership as evidence of this trend.  That announcement is certainly significant, but it demonstrates the opposite of Olson’s high-level point; Teradata abandoned its exclusive relationship with Hortonworks because many of its customers prefer Cloudera to HDP, and they aren’t willing to switch simply because TD sells a “Unified Data Architecture.”  Most enterprises still make decisions about Hadoop separately from decisions about other elements in the warehousing mix, and there are currently few good reasons to change that behavior.

Rana El Kaliouby of Affectiva presented an excellent example of analytics and Big Data working together.  Affectiva uses streaming facial recognition to capture millions of data points as consumers react to content, and uses machine learning algorithms to draw insight from the data.  By mapping the streaming data to emotional states, they can identify what content resonates with consumers.

Several of the sponsored topics in the plenary sessions were quite good, including presentations by MapR, Intel, ClearStory and IBM; others were about what one expects from sponsored presentations.

There were also a number of entertaining presentations that had little to do with Big Data.  Shankar Vedantum of NPR, for example, spent ten minutes sermonizing about the propensity of the human mind to select facts that confirm existing biases, and selectively used facts to illustrate his point.  He should have paid attention in “Research Methods 101”; at best, his point seemed trite, like telling a convention of nutritionists that “dieting is hard.”

Eli Collins of Cloudera delivered the obligatory “ethics and Big Data” piece, in which he argued that we should “use data for good”; his piece was immediately followed, ironically, by a presentation about using facial recognition to get people to buy more candy.  Everyone agrees that doing good is a good thing, but a technologist delivering a sermon is as silly as a Baptist minister lecturing on Oozie.

Apache Spark for Big Analytics (Updated for Spark Summit and Release 1.0.1)

Updated and bumped July 10, 2014.

For a powerpoint version on Slideshare, go here.

Introduction

Apache Spark is an open source distributed computing framework for advanced analytics in Hadoop.  Originally developed as a research project at UC Berkeley’s AMPLab, the project achieved incubator status in Apache in June 2013 and top-level status in February 2014.  According to one analyst, Apache Spark is among the five key Big Data technologies, together with cloud, sensors, AI and quantum computing.

Organizations seeking to implement advanced analytics in Hadoop face two key challenges.  First, MapReduce 1.0 must persist intermediate results to disk after each pass through the data; since most advanced analytics tasks require multiple passes through the data, this requirement adds latency to the process.

A second key challenge is the plethora of analytic point solutions in Hadoop.  These include, among others, Mahout for machine learning; Giraph, and GraphLab for graph analytics; Storm and S4 for streaming; or Hive, Impala and Stinger for interactive queries.  Multiple independently developed analytics projects add complexity to the solution; they pose support and integration challenges.

Spark directly addresses these challenges.  It supports distributed in-memory processing, so developers can write iterative algorithms without writing out a result set after each pass through the data.  This enables true high performance advanced analytics; for techniques like logistic regression, project sponsors report runtimes in Spark 100X faster than what they are able to achieve with MapReduce.

Second, Spark offers an integrated framework for analytics, including:

A closely related project, Shark, supports fast queries in Hadoop.  Shark runs on Spark and the two projects share a common heritage, but Shark is not currently included in the Apache Spark project.  The Spark project expects to absorb Shark into Spark SQL as of Release 1.1 in August 2014.

Spark’s core is an abstraction layer called Resilient Distributed Datasets, or RDDs.  RDDs are read-only partitioned collections of records created through deterministic operations on stable data or other RDDs.  RDDs include information about data lineage together with instructions for data transformation and (optional) instructions for persistence.  They are designed to be fault tolerant, so that if an operation fails it can be reconstructed.

For data sources, Spark works with any file stored in HDFS, or any other storage system supported by Hadoop (including local file systems, Amazon S3, Hypertable and HBase).  Hadoop supports text files, SequenceFiles and any other Hadoop InputFormat.  Through Spark SQL, the Spark user can import relational data from Hive tables and Parquet files.

Analytic Features

Spark’s machine learning library, MLLib, is rapidly growing.   In Release 1.0.0 (the latest release) it includes:

  • Linear regression
  • Logistic regression
  • k-means clustering
  • Support vector machines
  • Alternating least squares (for collaborative filtering)
  • Decision trees for classification and regression
  • Naive Bayes classifier
  • Distributed matrix algorithms (including Singular Value Decomposition and Principal Components Analysis)
  • Model evaluation functions
  • L-BFGS optimization primitive

Linear regression, logistic regression and support vector machines all use a gradient descent optimization algorithm, with options for L1 and L2 regularization.  MLLib is part of a larger machine learning project (MLBase), which includes an API for feature extraction and an optimizer (currently in development with planned release in 2014).

In March, the Apache Mahout project announced that it will shift development from MapReduce to Spark.  Mahout no longer accepts projects built on MapReduce; future projects leverage a DSL for linear algebra implemented on Spark.  The Mahout team will maintain existing MapReduce projects.  There is as yet no announced roadmap to migrate existing projects from MapReduce to Spark.

Spark SQL, currently in Alpha release, supports SQL, HiveQL, and Scala. The foundation of Spark SQL is a type of RDD, SchemaRDD, an object similar to a table in a relational database. SchemaRDDs can be created from an existing RDD, Parquet file, a JSON dataset, or by running HiveQL against data stored in Apache Hive.

GraphX, Spark’s graph engine, combines the advantages of data-parallel and graph-parallel systems by efficiently expressing graph computation within the Spark framework.  It enables users to interactively load, transform, and compute on massive graphs.  Project sponsors report performance comparable to Apache Giraph, but in a fault tolerant environment that is readily integrated with other advanced analytics.

Spark Streaming offers an additional abstraction called discretized streams, or DStreams.  DStreams are a continuous sequence of RDDs representing a stream of data.  The user creates DStreams from live incoming data or by transforming other DStreams.  Spark receives data, divides it into batches, then replicates the batches for fault tolerance and persists them in memory where they are available for mathematical operations.

Currently, Spark supports programming interfaces for Scala, Java and Python;  MLLib algorithms support sparse feature vectors in all three languages.  For R users, Berkeley’s AMPLab released a developer preview of SparkR in January 2014

There is an active and growing developer community for Spark: 83 developers contributed to Release 0.9, and 117 developers contributed to Release 1.0.0.  In the past six months, developers contributed more commits to Spark than to all of the other Apache analytics projects combined.   In 2013, the Spark project published seven double-dot releases, including Spark 0.8.1 published on December 19; this release included YARN 2.2 support, high availability mode for cluster management, performance optimizations and improvements to the machine learning library and Python interface.  So far in 2014, the Spark team has released 0.9.0 in February; 0.9.1, a maintenance release, in April; and 1.0.0 in May.

Release 0.9 includes Scala 2.10 support, a configuration library, improvements to Spark Streaming, the Alpha release for GraphX, enhancements to MLLib and many other enhancements).  Release 1.0.0 features API stability, integration with YARN security, operational and packaging improvements, the Alpha release of Spark SQL, enhancements to MLLib, GraphX and Streaming, extended Java and Python support, improved documentation and many other enhancements.

Distribution

Spark is now available in every major Hadoop distribution.  Cloudera announced immediate support for Spark in February 2014; Cloudera partners with Databricks.  (For more on Cloudera’s support for Spark, go here).  In April, MapR announced that it will distribute Spark; Hortonworks and Pivotal followed in May.

Hortonworks’ approach to Spark focuses more narrowly on its machine learning capabilities, as the firm continues to promote Storm for streaming analytics and Hive for SQL.

IBM’s commitment to Spark is unclear.  While BigInsights is a certified Spark distribution and IBM was a Platinum sponsor of the 2014 Spark Summit, there are no references to Spark in BigInsights marketing and technical materials.

In May, NoSQL database vendor Datastax announced plans to integrate Apache Cassandra with the Spark core engine.  Datastax will partner with Databricks on this project; availability expected summer 2014.

At the 2014 Spark Summit, SAP announced its support for Spark.  SAP offers what it characterizes as a “smart integration”, which appears to represent Spark objects in HANA as virtual tables.

On June 26, Databricks announced its Certified Spark Distribution program, which recognizes vendors committed to supporting the Spark ecosystem.   The first five vendors certified under this program are Datastax, Hortonworks, IBM, Oracle and Pivotal.

At the 2014 Spark Summit, Cloudera, Dell and Intel announced plans to deliver a Spark appliance.

Ecosystem

In April, Databricks announced that it licensed the Simba ODBC engine, enabling BI platforms to interface with Spark.

Databricks offers a certification program for Spark; participants currently include:

In May, Databricks and Concurrent Inc announced a strategic partnership.  Concurrent plans to add Spark support to its Cascading development environment for Hadoop.

Community

In December, the first Spark Summit attracted more than 450 participants from more than 180 companies.  Presentations covered a range of applications such as neuroscience, audience expansion, real-time network optimization and real-time data center management, together with a range of technical topics. (To see the presentations, search YouTube for ‘Spark Summit 2013’, or go here).

The 2014 Spark Summit was be held June 30 through July 2 in San Francisco.  The event sold out at more than a thousand participants.  For a summary, see this post.

There is a rapidly growing list of Spark Meetups, including:

Now available for pre-order on Amazon:

Finally, this series of videos provides some good basic knowledge about Spark.