Alternatives to HBase

After years of optimizing our existing feed technology, we decided to make a larger leap with 2.0 of Stream. While the first iteration of Stream was powered by Python and Cassandra, for Stream 2.0 of our infrastructure we switched to Go.

The main reason why we switched from Python to Go is performance. Certain features of Stream such as aggregation, ranking and serialization were very difficult to speed up using Python.

We’ve been using Go since March 2017 and it’s been a great experience so far. Go has greatly increased the productivity of our development team. Not only has it improved the speed at which we develop, it’s also 30x faster for many components of Stream. Initially we struggled a bit with package management for Go. However, using Dep together with the VG package contributed to creating a great workflow.

Go as a language is heavily focused on performance. The built-in PPROF tool is amazing for finding performance issues. Uber’s Go-Torch library is great for visualizing data from PPROF and will be bundled in PPROF in Go 1.10.

The performance of Go greatly influenced our architecture in a positive way. With Python we often found ourselves delegating logic to the database layer purely for performance reasons. The high performance of Go gave us more flexibility in terms of architecture. This led to a huge simplification of our infrastructure and a dramatic improvement of latency. For instance, we saw a 10 to 1 reduction in web-server count thanks to the lower memory and CPU usage for the same number of requests.

#DataStores #Databases

1.0 of Stream leveraged Cassandra for storing the feed. Cassandra is a common choice for building feeds. Instagram, for instance started, out with Redis but eventually switched to Cassandra to handle their rapid usage growth. Cassandra can handle write heavy workloads very efficiently.

Cassandra is a great tool that allows you to scale write capacity simply by adding more nodes, though it is also very complex. This complexity made it hard to diagnose performance fluctuations. Even though we had years of experience with running Cassandra, it still felt like a bit of a black box. When building Stream 2.0 we decided to go for a different approach and build Keevo. Keevo is our in-house key-value store built upon RocksDB, gRPC and Raft.

RocksDB is a highly performant embeddable database library developed and maintained by Facebook’s data engineering team. RocksDB started as a fork of Google’s LevelDB that introduced several performance improvements for SSD. Nowadays RocksDB is a project on its own and is under active development. It is written in C++ and it’s fast. Have a look at how this benchmark handles 7 million QPS. In terms of technology it’s much more simple than Cassandra.

This translates into reduced maintenance overhead, improved performance and, most importantly, more consistent performance. It’s interesting to note that LinkedIn also uses RocksDB for their feed.

#InMemoryDatabases #DataStores #Databases

Context: I wanted to create an end to end IoT data pipeline simulation in Google Cloud IoT Core and other GCP services. I never touched Terraform meaningfully until working on this project, and it's one of the best explorations in my development career. The documentation and syntax is incredibly human-readable and friendly. I'm used to building infrastructure through the google apis via Python , but I'm so glad past Sung did not make that decision. I was tempted to use Google Cloud Deployment Manager, but the templates were a bit convoluted by first impression. I'm glad past Sung did not make this decision either.

Solution: Leveraging Google Cloud Build Google Cloud Run Google Cloud Bigtable Google BigQuery Google Cloud Storage Google Compute Engine along with some other fun tools, I can deploy over 40 GCP resources using Terraform!

Check Out My Architecture: CLICK ME

Check out the GitHub repo attached

I'm trying to build a way to read financial data really, really fast, for low cost. We are write/update-light (in this arena) and read-heavy. Google BigQuery being serverless can keep costs beyond low, but query speeds are always a few seconds because, I think, of the lack of indexing and potential to take advantage of the structure of the common queries. I have tried various partitions on BigQuery to speed things up too with some success but nothing extraordinary. I have never used Google Cloud Bigtable but get how it works conceptually. I believe it would make date-range based queries markedly faster. Question is, are there ways to take advantage of date-ranges in BigQuery, or does it makes sense to just shift to BigTable for mega-fast reads? I'd love to get sub-50ms.

I just finished the very first version of my new hobby project: #MovieGeeks. It is a minimalist online movie catalog for you to save the movies you want to see and for rating the movies you already saw. This is just the beginning as I am planning to add more features on the lines of sharing and discovery

For the #BackEnd I decided to use Node.js , GraphQL and MongoDB:

1. Node.js has a huge community so it will always be a safe choice in terms of libraries and finding solutions to problems you may have

2. GraphQL because I needed to improve my skills with it and because I was never comfortable with the usual REST approach. I believe GraphQL is a better option as it feels more natural to write apis, it improves the development velocity, by definition it fixes the over-fetching and under-fetching problem that is so common on REST apis, and on top of that, the community is getting bigger and bigger.

3. MongoDB was my choice for the database as I already have a lot of experience working on it and because, despite of some bad reputation it has acquired in the last months, I still believe it is a powerful database for at least a very long list of use cases such as the one I needed for my website

I am starting to become a full-stack developer, by choosing and learning .NET Core for API Development, Angular CLI / React for UI Development, MongoDB for database, as it a NoSQL DB and Flutter / React Native for Mobile App Development. Using Postman, Markdown and Visual Studio Code for development.

The early data ingestion pipeline at Pinterest used Kafka as the central message transporter, with the app servers writing messages directly to Kafka, which then uploaded log files to S3.

For databases, a custom Hadoop streamer pulled database data and wrote it to S3.

Challenges cited for this infrastructure included high operational overhead, as well as potential data loss occurring when Kafka broker outages led to an overflow of in-memory message buffering.

Why we built Marmaray, an open source generic data ingestion and dispersal framework and library for Apache Hadoop :

Built and designed by our Hadoop Platform team, Marmaray is a plug-in-based framework built on top of the Hadoop ecosystem. Users can add support to ingest data from any source and disperse to any sink leveraging the use of Apache Spark . The name, Marmaray, comes from a tunnel in Turkey connecting Europe and Asia. Similarly, we envisioned Marmaray within Uber as a pipeline connecting data from any source to any sink depending on customer preference:

https://eng.uber.com/marmaray-hadoop-ingestion-open-source/

(Direct GitHub repo: https://github.com/uber/marmaray Kafka Kafka Manager )

My background is in Data analytics in the telecom domain. Have to build the database for analyzing large volumes of CDR data so far the data are maintained in a file server and the application queries data from the files. It's consuming a lot of resources queries are taking time so now I am asked to come up with the approach. I planned to rewrite the app, so which database needs to be used. I am confused between MongoDB and Druid.

So please do advise me on picking from these two and why?

My process is like this: I would get data once a month, either from Google BigQuery or as parquet files from Azure Blob Storage. I have a script that does some cleaning and then stores the result as partitioned parquet files because the following process cannot handle loading all data to memory.

The next process is making a heavy computation in a parallel fashion (per partition), and storing 3 intermediate versions as parquet files: two used for statistics, and the third will be filtered and create the final files.

I make a report based on the two files in Jupyter notebook and convert it to HTML.

• Everything is done with vanilla python and Pandas.
• sometimes I may get a different format of data
• cloud service is Microsoft Azure.

What I'm considering is the following:

Get the data with Kafka or with native python, do the first processing, and store data in Druid, the second processing will be done with Apache Spark getting data from apache druid.

the intermediate states can be stored in druid too. and visualization would be with apache superset.

We implemented our first large scale EPR application from naologic.com using CouchDB .

Very fast, replication works great, doesn't consume much RAM, queries are blazing fast but we found a problem: the queries were very hard to write, it took a long time to figure out the API, we had to go and write our own @nodejs library to make it work properly.

It lost most of its support. Since then, we migrated to Couchbase and the learning curve was steep but all worth it. Memcached indexing out of the box, full text search works great.

Hey, we want to build a referral campaign mechanism that will probably contain millions of records within the next few years. We want fast read access based on IDs or some indexes, and isolation is crucial as some listeners will try to update the same document at the same time. What's your suggestion between Couchbase and MongoDB? Thanks!

To provide employees with the critical need of interactive querying, we’ve worked with Presto, an open-source distributed SQL query engine, over the years. Operating Presto at Pinterest’s scale has involved resolving quite a few challenges like, supporting deeply nested and huge thrift schemas, slow/ bad worker detection and remediation, auto-scaling cluster, graceful cluster shutdown and impersonation support for ldap authenticator.

Our infrastructure is built on top of Amazon EC2 and we leverage Amazon S3 for storing our data. This separates compute and storage layers, and allows multiple compute clusters to share the S3 data.

We have hundreds of petabytes of data and tens of thousands of Apache Hive tables. Our Presto clusters are comprised of a fleet of 450 r4.8xl EC2 instances. Presto clusters together have over 100 TBs of memory and 14K vcpu cores. Within Pinterest, we have close to more than 1,000 monthly active users (out of total 1,600+ Pinterest employees) using Presto, who run about 400K queries on these clusters per month.

Each query submitted to Presto cluster is logged to a Kafka topic via Singer. Singer is a logging agent built at Pinterest and we talked about it in a previous post. Each query is logged when it is submitted and when it finishes. When a Presto cluster crashes, we will have query submitted events without corresponding query finished events. These events enable us to capture the effect of cluster crashes over time.

Each Presto cluster at Pinterest has workers on a mix of dedicated AWS EC2 instances and Kubernetes pods. Kubernetes platform provides us with the capability to add and remove workers from a Presto cluster very quickly. The best-case latency on bringing up a new worker on Kubernetes is less than a minute. However, when the Kubernetes cluster itself is out of resources and needs to scale up, it can take up to ten minutes. Some other advantages of deploying on Kubernetes platform is that our Presto deployment becomes agnostic of cloud vendor, instance types, OS, etc.

#BigData #AWS #DataScience #DataEngineering

From my point of view, both OpenRefine and Apache Hive serve completely different purposes. OpenRefine is intended for interactive cleaning of messy data locally. You could work with their libraries to use some of OpenRefine features as part of your data pipeline (there are pointers in FAQ), but OpenRefine in general is intended for a single-user local operation.

I can't recommend a particular alternative without better understanding of your use case. But if you are looking for an interactive tool to work with big data at scale, take a look at notebook environments like Jupyter, Databricks, or Deepnote. If you are building a data processing pipeline, consider also Apache Spark.

Edit: Fixed references from Hadoop to Hive, which is actually closer to Spark.

1.0 of Stream leveraged Cassandra for storing the feed. Cassandra is a common choice for building feeds. Instagram, for instance started, out with Redis but eventually switched to Cassandra to handle their rapid usage growth. Cassandra can handle write heavy workloads very efficiently.

Cassandra is a great tool that allows you to scale write capacity simply by adding more nodes, though it is also very complex. This complexity made it hard to diagnose performance fluctuations. Even though we had years of experience with running Cassandra, it still felt like a bit of a black box. When building Stream 2.0 we decided to go for a different approach and build Keevo. Keevo is our in-house key-value store built upon RocksDB, gRPC and Raft.

RocksDB is a highly performant embeddable database library developed and maintained by Facebook’s data engineering team. RocksDB started as a fork of Google’s LevelDB that introduced several performance improvements for SSD. Nowadays RocksDB is a project on its own and is under active development. It is written in C++ and it’s fast. Have a look at how this benchmark handles 7 million QPS. In terms of technology it’s much more simple than Cassandra.

This translates into reduced maintenance overhead, improved performance and, most importantly, more consistent performance. It’s interesting to note that LinkedIn also uses RocksDB for their feed.

#InMemoryDatabases #DataStores #Databases

I am researching different querying solutions to handle ~1 trillion records of data (in the realm of a petabyte). The data is mostly textual. I have identified a few options: Milvus, HBase, RocksDB, and Elasticsearch. I was wondering if there is a good way to compare the performance of these options (or if anyone has already done something like this). I want to be able to compare the speed of ingesting and querying textual data from these tools. Does anyone have information on this or know where I can find some? Thanks in advance!