> Over the last few week I¹ve been trying to use cross joins/cartesian >products and was wondering why, exactly, this all gets sent to one >reducer. All I¹ve heard or read is that Hive can¹t/doesn¹t parallelize >the job.
The hashcode of the shuffle key is 0, since you need to process every row against every key - there's no possibility of dividing up the work. Tez will actually have a cross-product edge (TEZ-2104), which is a distributed cross-product proposal but wasn't picked up in the last Google Summer of Code. The real trouble is that MapReduce cannot re-direct data at all (there's only shuffle edges). > Does anyone have a workaround? I use a staged partitioned table as a workaround for this, hashed on a high nDV key - the goal of the Tez edge is to shuffle the data similarly at runtime. For instance, this python script makes a query with a 19x improvement in distribution for a cross-product which generates 50+Gb of data from a ~10Mb input. https://gist.github.com/t3rmin4t0r/cfb5bb4f7094d595c1e8 It is possible for Hive-Tez to actually generate UNION VertexGroups, but it's much more efficient to do this as a edge with a custom EdgeManager, since that opens up potentially implementing ThetaJoins in hive using that. Cheers, Gopal