Big Data and Introduction to Hadoop « the Lazy Blogger

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Big Data and Introduction to HadoopPosted November 4, 2011

Filed under: Big Data | Tags: Big Data, Hadoop, HBase, Hive, Map Reduce |

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Last weekend (October 29, 2011) I attended a training on Hadoop, arranged by

my employer. It started on Friday afternoon ended Sunday evening, in 6

batches of 4 hours each. In the end, all 20 attendees had their brains spilling

out of their ears, but each one of us had a blast! It was a fabulous series!

Following (semi-technical) account is my 101 level take-away from some of the

sessions.

What is Hadoop?

Cloudera the leading vendor for Hadoop distributions defines it as follows at

their website

Technically, Hadoop consists of two key services: reliable data storage using

the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and high-performance parallel

data processing using a technique called MapReduce.

There you have it, from the horse’s mouth!

Little bit of history, Hadoop was sponsored by Yahoo! (yes, you read that right),

with Dough Cutting being the principal architect of the project. Once Hadoop

was mature enough Yahoo made Hadoop an Apache project. Dough left Yahoo

and formed Cloudera which is now considered the ‘Red Hat’ of Hadoop

distributions. If you really haven’t read Wikipedia about how Hadoop got it’s

name, it got it’s name from Doug’s son’s toy elephant!

More trivia, Hadoop project is based on Google’s papers on their

implementation of GFS and Big Table that google internally uses.

If it is just a file system + a technique how is it related to the cloud hoopla?

Well when we say Hadoop in context of a cloud we mean things on top of HDFS

and MapReduce. Basically Hadoop is the entire ecosystem built on top of the

‘classic definition’. It consists of Hbase as database, Hive as a Data Warehouse,

Pig as the query language all built on top of Hadoop and the Map-Reduce

framework.

HDFS is designed ground up to scale seamlessly as you throw hardware at it.

That’s it’s strength! Anyone designing server farms will agree, scaling

horizontally is non-trivial in most cases. For HDFS, problem of scale is simply

solved by throwing more hardware at the Farm. A lot of it is because actions

on HDFS are asynchronous. But the concept of throwing hardware at a farm

and getting scaling automatically is what endears Hadoop to Cloud computing.

Okay how is this different from SQL Server 2008 R2 running on top of

Windows 2008 R2′s NTFS?

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Big Data and Introduction to Hadoop « The Lazy Blogger https://sumitmaitra.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/big-data-and-introductio...

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Ah ha! Now that’s a loaded question. Let’s try to go one by one (list below is

pretty random with respect to importance or concepts, I am just doing a brain

dump here)

1. Data is not stored in the traditional table column format. At best some of

the database layers mimic this, but deep in the bowels of HDFS, there are no

tables, no primary keys, no indexes. Everything is a flat file with

predetermined delimiters. HDFS is optimized to recognize <Key, Value> mode

of storage. Every things maps down to <Key, Value> pairs.

2. HDFS supports only forward only parsing. So you are either reading ahead or

appending to the end. There is no concept of ‘Update’ or ‘Insert’.

3. Databases built on HDFS don’t guarantee ACID properties. Specially

‘Consistency’. It offers what is called as ‘Eventual Consistency’, meaning data

will be saved eventually, but because of the highly asynchronous nature of the

file system you are not guaranteed at what point it will finish. So HDFS based

systems are NOT ideal for OLTP systems. RDBMS still rock there.

4. Taking code to the data. In traditional systems you fire a query to get data

and then write code on it to manipulate it. In MapReduce, you write code and

send it to Hadoop’s data store and get back the manipulated data. Essentially

you are sending code to the data.

5. Traditional databases like SQL Server scale better vertically, so more cores,

more memory, faster cores is the way to scale. However Hadoop by design

scales horizontally. Keep throwing hardware at it and it will scale.

I am beginning to get it, why is it said Hadoop deals with unstructured

data? How do we store data actually?

Unstructured is a slight misnomer in the very basic sense. By Unstructured,

Hadoop implies it doesn’t know about column names, column data types,

column sizes or even number of columns. Also there is no implicit concept of

table. Data is stored in flat files! Flat files with some kind of delimiters that

needs to be agreed upon by all users of the data store. So it could me comma

delimited, pipe delimited, tab delimited. Line feed, as a thumb-rule, is always

treated as the end of record. So there is a method to the madness

(‘unstructured-ness’) but there are no hard-binding as employed by traditional

databases. When you are dealing with data from Hadoop you are on your own

with respect to data cleansing.

Data input in hadoop is as simple as loading your data file into HDFS, and by

loading it’s very very close to copying files in the usual sense on any OS.

Okay, so there is no SQL, no Tables, no Columns, once I load my data how do

I get it back?

In Short: Write code to do Map-Reduce.

Huh! Seriously? Map-Reduce… wha…?

Yes. You have to write code to get data from a Hadoop System. The

abstractions on top of Hadoop are a few and all are sub-optimal. So the best

way to get data is to write Java code that calls the MapReduce framework that

slices and dices the stored data for you on the fly.

The Map-Reduce framework works in two steps, (no points for guessing), step 1

is Map and step 2 is Reduce.

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2 of 6 8/11/2012 12:54 AM

Mapping Data: If it is plain de-limited text data, you have the freedom to pick

your selection of keys from the record (remember records are typically

linefeed separated) and values and tell the framework what your Key is and

what values that key will hold. MR will deal with actual creation of the Map.

When the map is being created you can control on what keys to include or

what values to filter out. In the end you end up with a giant hashtable of

filtered key value pairs. Now what?

Reducing Data: Once the map phase is complete code moves on to the reduce

phase. The reduce phase works on mapped data and can potentially do all the

aggregation and summation activities.

Finally you get a blob of the mapped and reduced data.

But… but… Do I really have to write Java?

Well, if you are that scared of Java, then you have Pig. No, I am not calling

names here. Pig is a querying engine that has more ‘business-friendly’ syntax

but spits out MapReduce code in the backend and does all the dirty work for

you. The syntax for Pig is called, of course, Pig Latin.

When you write queries in Pig Latin, Pig converts it into MapReduce and sends

it off to Hadoop, then retrieves the results and hands it back to you.

Analysis shows you get about half the performance of raw optimal hand written

MapReduce java code, but the same code takes more than 10 times the time to

write when compared to a Pig query.

If you are in the mood for a start-up idea, generating optimal MapReduce code

from Pig Latin is a topic to consider …

For those in the .NET world, Pig Latin is very similar syntactically to LINQ.

Okay, my head is now spinning, where does Hive and HBase fit in?

Describing Hive and HBase requires full articles of their own. A very brief intro

to them is as follows:

HBase

HBase is a key value store that sits on top of HDFS. It is a NOSql Database.

It has a very thin veneer over raw HDFS where in it mandates that data is

grouped in a Table that has rows of data.

Each row can have multiple ‘Column Families’ and each ‘Column Family’ can

contain multiple columns.

Each column name is the key and it has it’s corresponding column value.

So a column of data can be represented as

row[family][column] = value

Each row need not have the same number of columns. Think of each row as a

horizontal linked list, that links to a column family and then each column

family links to multiple columns as <Key, Value> pairs.

row1 -> family1 -> col A = val A

-> family2 -> col B = val B

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and so on.

Hive

Hive is a little closer to traditional RDBMS systems. In fact it is a Data

Warehousing system that sits on top of HDFS but maintains a meta layer that

helps data summation, ad-hoc queries and analysis of large data stores in

HFDS.

Hive supports a high level language called Hive Query Language, that looks like

SQL but restricted in a few ways like no, Updates or Deletes are allowed.

However Hive has this concept of partitioning that can be used to update

information, which is essentially re-writing a chunk of data whose granularity

depends on the schema design.

Hive can actually sit on top of HBase and perform join operations between

HBase tables.

I heard Hadoop only requires ‘Commodity Hardware’ to run. Can I bunch

together the 486 machines gathering dust in my garage and bring up a

Hadoop cluster?

In short: NO!

When Google originally set out to build it’s search index ‘powerful’ computers

implied room sized Cray Super Computers that costed a pretty penny and

available only to the CIA!

So commodity hardware implies ‘non-supercomputers’ that can be purchased

by everybody. Today you can string together 10-12 high end blade servers each

with about 24Gb of RAM and 12-24 TB disk space and as many cores each as you

can get, to build an entry level production ready Hadoop cluster.

That’s a different point you can run code samples on a VM that will run ok on a

laptop with the latest core processors and approx 8 Gigs of RAM. But that’s

only good for code samples! Even for PoCs spinning up a EC2 cluster is the best

way to go.

Okay, with that I conclude this article. In upcoming articles we’ll see

installation as well as some real world use cases of big data on Hadoop!

4 comments so far

Ellie K on January 4, 2012

This is just the most awesome and accessible explanation I have ever read!

You did a great job here. I liked your @SignalR article, but this is the kind of

post that an actual user in the real world can enjoy and understand. You

mention flat files! Yay! I know about those from SAS (that’s not SaaaaaaS

software as a service but SAS 4th gen language for statistical analysis and


4 of 6 8/11/2012 12:54 AM

data management).

Also, you explained what Pig does! And Pig Latin is the query syntax! So cute!

I love piggies (my avatar is a very special type of piggy). You don’t disdain

RDBMS, columns, rows or blade servers. You explained Hive too.

But here’s a thought, a concern: I am a Data Governess (data governance

person, small joke), an upholder of consistency, benchmarks, scenario

analysis and standards. Hadoop works with a world of unstructured data, no

hard bindings, and you’re on your own for data cleansing, correct?. Doesn’t

this lead to big problems with referential integrity?

At my last job, I designed and maintained an Oracle RDBMS that supported all

medical, accounting and regulatory aspects of a drug formulary for a

pediatric managed care program. Lots of details, reports, data integrity

issues etc. Is that something that could be done with Hadoop instead of

Oracle, SQL (and Toad)? And SAS?

Reply

Sumit on January 5, 2012

Hello Ellie,

Glad you enjoyed the article and really appreciate the feedback.

Let me try and answer your questions one by one.

1. Data Consistency: Yes. All Big Data platforms at the moment have

come to accept that it is not possible to achieve the ACID properties of

traditional RDBMS systems. Instead their design and architecture goes by

what’s referred to as the CAP Theorem and try to achieve BASE

properties. Moral of the story if you are looking for a strictly

transactional and mission critical system then Big Data is not a good

starting point.

The above, kind of makes all further arguments in favor of Big Data

sound lame. That’s when Use cases come into picture. Big Data use cases

invariably involve very high volume and very high velocity e.g. log files

from networking gear, streaming data (like twitter stream), click stream

data (every click on every link from a site or group of sites) or historical

data being moved from traditional data warehouses. Typically we are

looking at beyond terrabyte data volumes. In fact Big Data is suggested

when you know your data volume is eventually going to go petabyte

scale. Once you think in those terms you will realize for that volume of

data, couple of lines out of order or corrupted don’t even register

statistically.

2. Data Cleansing/Referential Integrity: Most of the time data in Big Data

stores are denormalized data and analysis is performed pretty much by

the brute force of map-reduce jobs. As of now these jobs are low level

and written in code. So data cleansing is a matter of handling errors

correctly.

3. Statistical Analysis on Hadoop can be done through specialized version

of SAS tools. I believe there is a version of R that can deal with Big Data.

Eventually the tool will generate a bunch of Map Reduce jobs.

4. The System you are describing is a typical OTLP system and is not quite

suitable for Hadoop because of a combination of the reasons I quoted

above but mostly due to lack of ACID support and the query response

times from a Big Data system (which is computed in minutes and hours


5 of 6 8/11/2012 12:54 AM

instead of milliseconds and seconds). But what might be a close match

would be a system that collects Genome data and pushes all it’s variables

into a Big Data system. Then uses the power of the cluster to compute

Genome Maps (if that’s even a term …)

Hope this helps.

Regards.

Reply

Ellie K on January 8, 2012

Thank you so much for such a detailed and complete response. And

yes, that does help quite a bit!

Kiran My on January 18, 2012

Thanks for detailed article on Hadoop. hadoop can also be used olap and oltp

processing.

Please click Why Hadoop is introduced to know more on Basics of Hadoop

Reply

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