So there may be a bit of confusion with storing index and data in the same
row. By "row" I just mean the logical Accumulo unit, not a "row" as in
"thing in my relational table." Synonyms for "row" in this scheme are
"shard" and "document partition".
You can store multiple documents and indices for those documents in
different column families within the same row. You then have separate
readers for the indices and document data ("sources" in Iterator terms).
Point and range queries are still possible in this fashion, and are made
even easier if there's another level that maps terms to
rows/shards/partition. The wikisearch example is an (admittedly rough)
implementation of this.
I think looking at how "buddy" regions work may help clarify things, since
I imagine it works similarly. If the coprocessor is just reading from a
region "I", that that contains index data for only region "D", then that
maps pretty well to an iterator scanning index data from a column family
"I" and fetching documents from a column family "D".
On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 1:09 AM, James Taylor <jamestay...@apache.org> wrote:
> Sorry for the delay in getting back to you - things got a bit crazy with
> our graduation and HBaseCon happening at the same time.
>
> @Josh & Bill - r.e. Co-locating indices within the same row simplifies this
> a bit.
> The secondary indexes need to be in row key order by the indexed columns,
> so co-locating them in the data table wouldn't allow the lookup and range
> scan abilities we'd need. The advantage of the index is that you don't need
> to look at all the data, but can do a point lookup or range scan based on
> the usage of the indexed columns in a query.
>
> @Josh - r.e. Assuming I understand properly, you don't need to be cognizant
> of the splits. You just specify the Ranges (where each Range is a start key
> and end key) and the Accumulo client API does the rest.
>
> Typically the Ranges are merge sorted on the client, so this might require
> an extension to the Accumulo client.
>
> r.e. Next steps.
>
> We'd definitely need an expert on the Accumulo side to proceed. I'm happy
> to help on the Phoenix side - I'll post a note on our dev list too to see
> if there are other folks interested as well. Given the similarities between
> Accumulo and HBase and the abstraction Phoenix already has in place, I
> don't think the effort would be large to get something up and running.
> Maybe a phased approach, would make sense: first with query support and
> next with secondary index support?
>
> Not sure where this stacks up in terms of priority for you all. At
> Salesforce, we saw a specific need for this with HBase, the "big data
> store" on top of which we'd choose to standardize. We realized early on
> that we'd never get the adoption we wanted without providing a different,
> more familiar programming model: namely SQL. Since we were targeting
> supporting interactive web-based applications, anything map/reduce based
> wasn't a fit which led us to create Phoenix. Perhaps there are members in
> your community in the same boat?
>
> Thanks,
> James
>
>
>
> On Fri, May 2, 2014 at 1:44 PM, Josh Elser <josh.el...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On 5/1/14, 2:24 AM, James Taylor wrote:
> >
> >> Thanks for the explanations, Josh. This sounds very doable. Few more
> >> comments inline below.
> >>
> >> James
> >>
> >>
> >> On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 8:37 AM, Josh Elser <josh.el...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>
> >>> On 4/30/14, 3:33 AM, James Taylor wrote:
> >>>
> >>> On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Josh Elser <josh.el...@gmail.com>
> >>>> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> @Josh - it's less baked in than you'd think on the client where the
> >>>> query
> >>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> parsing, compilation, optimization, and orchestration occurs. The
> >>>>>> client/server interaction is hidden behind the
> ConnectionQueryServices
> >>>>>> interface, the scanning behind ResultIterator (in
> >>>>>> particular ScanningResultIterator), the DML behind MutationState,
> and
> >>>>>> KeyValue interaction behind KeyValueBuilder. Yes, though, it would
> >>>>>> require
> >>>>>> some more abstraction, but probably not too bad, though. On the
> >>>>>> server-side, the entry points would all be different and that's
> where
> >>>>>> I'd
> >>>>>> need your insights for what's possible.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Definitely. I'm a little concerned about what's expected to be
> >>>>> provided
> >>>>> by
> >>>>> the "database" (HBase, Accumulo) as I believe HBase is a little more
> >>>>> flexible in allowing writes internally where Accumulo has thus far
> said
> >>>>> "you're gonna have a bad time".
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> Tell me more about what you mean by "allowing writes internally".
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>> Haha, sorry, that was a sufficiently ominous statement with
> insufficient
> >>> context.
> >>>
> >>> For discussion sake, let's just say HBase coprocessors and Accumulo
> >>> iterators are equivalent, purely in the scope of "running server-side
> >>> code"
> >>> (in the RegionServer/TabletServer). However, there is a notable
> >>> difference
> >>> in the pipeline where each of those are implemented.
> >>>
> >>> Coprocessors have built-in hooks that let you get updates on
> >>> PUT/GET/DELETE/etc as well as pre and post each of those operations. In
> >>> other words, they provide hooks at a "high database level".
> >>>
> >>> Iterators tend to be much closer to the data itself, only dealing with
> >>> streams of data (other iterators stacked on one another). Iterators
> >>> implement versioning, visibilities, and can even implement complex
> >>> searches. The downside of this approach is that iterators lack any
> means
> >>> to
> >>> safely write data _outside of the sorted Key-Value pairs in the tablet
> >>> currently being processed_. It's possible to make in tablet updates,
> but
> >>> sorted order within a large tablet might make this difficult as well.
> >>>
> >>> This is why I was thinking percolator would be a better solution, as
> it's
> >>> meant for handling updates like this server-side. However, I imagine it
> >>> would be possible, in the short-term, to make some separate process
> >>> between
> >>> Phoenix and Accumulo which handles writes.
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >> Another fallback might be to do global index maintenance on the client.
> >> It'd just be more expensive, especially if you want to handle
> out-of-order
> >> updates (which are particularly tricky, as you have to get multiple
> >> versions of the rows to work out all the different scenarios here).
> >>
> >> A second fallback might be to support only local indexing. Does Accumulo
> >> have the concept of a "custom load balancer" that would allow you to
> >> co-locate two regions from different tables? The local-index features
> has
> >> kind of driven some feature requests on that front for HBase - mainly
> >> callbacks when a region is split or re-located. The rows of the local
> >> index
> >> are prefixed with the region start key to keep them together and
> identify
> >> them.
> >>
> >
> > Agreed with what Bill said. Co-locating indices within the same row
> > simplifies this a bit, IMO.
> >
> >
> > <snip/>
> >
> >
> >
> >>>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> There's not a lot of hard/fast requirements. Most of what Phoenix does
> >>>> is
> >>>> to optimize performance by leveraging the capabilities of the server.
> In
> >>>> terms of hard/fast requirements, these come to mind:
> >>>> - data is returned in row key order from range scans
> >>>> - a scan may set a start key/stop key to do a range scan
> >>>> - a row key may be composed of arbitrary bytes
> >>>> - a client may "pre-split" a table by providing the region boundaries
> at
> >>>> table create time (we rely on this for salting to prevent hotspotting:
> >>>> http://phoenix.incubator.apache.org/salted.html).
> >>>> - the client has access to the region boundaries of a table (this
> allows
> >>>> for better parallelization)
> >>>> - the client may issue chunk up a scan into smaller, multiple scans
> and
> >>>> run
> >>>> them in parallel
> >>>> Some of these may be a bit squishy, as there may be existing machinery
> >>>> already in your client programming model that could be leverage. The
> >>>> client
> >>>> API of HBase, for example, does not provide the ability out of the box
> >>>> to
> >>>> parallelize a scan, so this is something Phoenix had to add on top
> >>>> (through
> >>>> chunking up scans at or within region boundaries).
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>> All of these look fine. The Accumulo BatchScanner does that
> >>> parallelization for you which is really nice (handling tablet migration
> >>> and
> >>> all that fun stuff transparently).
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >> That's nice that Accumulo has this built-in. Does it allow the client to
> >> specify the split points for the scan in some way?
> >>
> >
> > Assuming I understand properly, you don't need to be cognizant of the
> > splits. You just specify the Ranges (where each Range is a start key and
> > end key) and the Accumulo client API does the rest. You can be efficient
> by
> > structuring your data so that you don't touch every tabletserver for
> every
> > query -- this seems to be what's being suggested.
> >
> > <snip/>
> >
> > What do you think is next, James?
> >
> > I know I won't have a lot of time to devote into heavy development with
> > what I've already signed up for in the next few months, but I'd still
> like
> > to try to help out where possible. Is anyone else on the Accumulo side
> > interested in getting involved?
> >
>
