How do you rapidly derive complex insights on top of really big data sets in Cassandra? This session draws upon Evan's experience building a distributed, interactive, columnar query engine on top of Cassandra and Spark. We will start by surveying the existing query landscape of Cassandra and discuss ways to integrate Cassandra and Spark. We will dive into the design and architecture of a fast, column-oriented query architecture for Spark, and why columnar stores are so advantageous for OLAP workloads. I will present a schema for Parquet-like storage of analytical datasets onCassandra. Find out why Cassandra and Spark are the perfect match for enabling fast, scalable, complex querying and storage of big analytical data.

1. OLAP WITH SPARK AND
CASSANDRA
EVAN CHAN
JULY 2014

2. WHO AM I?
PrincipalEngineer,
@evanfchan
Creator of
Socrata, Inc.
http://github.com/velvia
Spark Job Server

3. WE BUILD SOFTWARE TO MAKE DATA USEFUL TO MORE
PEOPLE.
data.edmonton.cafinances.worldbank.orgdata.cityofchicago.org
data.seattle.govdata.oregon.govdata.wa.gov
www.metrochicagodata.orgdata.cityofboston.gov
info.samhsa.govexplore.data.govdata.cms.govdata.ok.gov
data.nola.govdata.illinois.govdata.colorado.gov
data.austintexas.govdata.undp.orgwww.opendatanyc.com
data.mo.govdata.nfpa.orgdata.raleighnc.govdati.lombardia.it
data.montgomerycountymd.govdata.cityofnewyork.us
data.acgov.orgdata.baltimorecity.govdata.energystar.gov
data.somervillema.govdata.maryland.govdata.taxpayer.net
bronx.lehman.cuny.edu data.hawaii.govdata.sfgov.org

4. WE ARE SWIMMING IN DATA!

5. BIG DATA AT OOYALA
2.5 billionanalytics pings aday= almostatrillionevents a
year.
Rollup tables -30 million rows per day

6. BIG DATA AT SOCRATA
Hundreds of datasets, each one up to 30 million rows
Customer demand for billion row datasets

7. HOW CAN WE ALLOW CUSTOMERS TO QUERY A
YEAR'S WORTH OF DATA?
Flexible -complex queries included
Sometimes you can'tdenormalize your dataenough
Fast-interactive speeds

8. RDBMS? POSTGRES?
Starthittinglatencylimits at~10 million rows
No robustand inexpensive solution for queryingacross shards
No robustwayto scale horizontally
Complex and expensive to improve performance (egrollup
tables)

9. OLAP CUBES?
Materialize summaryfor everypossible combination
Too complicated and brittle
Takes forever to compute
Explodes storage and memory

10. When in doubt, use brute force
- Ken Thompson

12. CASSANDRA
Horizontallyscalable
Veryflexible datamodelling(lists, sets, custom datatypes)
Easyto operate
No fear of number of rows or documents
Bestof breed storage technology, huge community
BUT: Simplequeries only

13. APACHE SPARK
Horizontallyscalable, in-memoryqueries
FunctionalScalatransforms -map, filter, groupBy, sort
etc.
SQL, machine learning, streaming, graph, R, manymore plugins
allon ONE platform -feed your SQL results to alogistic
regression, easy!
THE Hottestbigdataplatform, huge community, leaving
Hadoop in the dust
Developers love it

14. SPARK PROVIDES THE MISSING FAST, DEEP
ANALYTICS PIECE OF CASSANDRA!

15. INTEGRATING SPARK AND CASSANDRA
Scalasolutions:
Datastax integration:
(CQL-based)
https://github.com/datastax/cassandra-
driver-spark
Calliope

16. Abitmore work:
Use traditionalCassandraclientwith RDDs
Use an existingInputFormat, like CqlPagedInputFormat

17. EXAMPLE CUSTOM INTEGRATION USING
ASTYANAX
valcassRDD=sc.parallelize(rowkeys).
flatMap{rowkey=>
columnFamily.get(rowkey).execute().asScala
}

18. A SPARK AND CASSANDRA
OLAP ARCHITECTURE

19. SEPARATE STORAGE AND QUERY LAYERS
Combine bestof breed storage and queryplatforms
Take fulladvantage of evolution of each
Storage handles replication for availability
Querycan replicate datafor scalingread concurrency-
independent!

20. SCALE NODES, NOT
DEVELOPER TIME!!

21. KEEPING IT SIMPLE
Maximize row scan speed
Columnar representation for efficiency
Compressed bitmap indexes for fastalgebra
Functionaltransforms for easymemoization, testing,
concurrency, composition

22. SPARK AS CASSANDRA'S CACHE

23. EVEN BETTER: TACHYON OFF-HEAP CACHING

24. INITIAL ATTEMPTS
valrows=Seq(
Seq("Burglary","19xxHurston",10),
Seq("Theft","55xxFloatillaAve",5)
)
sc.parallelize(rows)
.map{values=>(values[0],values)}
.groupByKey
.reduce(_[2]+_[2])

25. No existinggeneric queryengine for Spark when we started
(Shark was in infancy, had no indexes, etc.), so we builtour own
For everyrow, need to extractoutneeded columns
Abilityto selectarbitrarycolumns means usingSeq[Any], no
type safety
Boxingmakes integer aggregation veryexpensive and memory
inefficient

26. COLUMNAR STORAGE AND QUERYING

27. The traditional row-based datastorage
approach is dead
- Michael Stonebraker

28. TRADITIONAL ROW-BASED STORAGE
Same layoutin memoryand on disk:
Name Age
Barak 46
Hillary 66
Each row is stored contiguously. Allcolumns in row 2 come after
row 1.

29. COLUMNAR STORAGE (MEMORY)
Namecolumn
0 1
0 1
Dictionary: {0: "Barak", 1: "Hillary"}
Agecolumn
0 1
46 66

30. COLUMNAR STORAGE (CASSANDRA)
Review: each physicalrow in Cassandra(e.g. a"partition key")
stores its columns together on disk.
SchemaCF
Rowkey Type
Name StringDict
Age Int
DataCF
Rowkey 0 1
Name 0 1
Age 46 66

31. ADVANTAGES OF COLUMNAR STORAGE
Compression
Dictionarycompression -HUGE savings for low-cardinality
stringcolumns
RLE
Reduce I/O
Onlycolumns needed for queryare loaded from disk
Can keep strongtypes in memory, avoid boxing
Batch multiple rows in one cellfor efficiency

32. ADVANTAGES OF COLUMNAR QUERYING
Cache localityfor aggregatingcolumn of data
Take advantage of CPU/GPUvector instructions for ints /
doubles
avoid row-ifyinguntillastpossible moment
easyto derive computed columns
Use vector data/linear math libraries

33. COLUMNAR QUERY ENGINE VS ROW-BASED IN
SCALA
Custom RDD of column-oriented blocks of data
Uses ~10xless heap
10-100xfaster for group by's on asingle node
Scan speed in excess of 150M rows/sec/core for integer
aggregations

34. SO, GREAT, OLAP WITH CASSANDRA AND
SPARK. NOW WHAT?

36. DATASTAX: CASSANDRA SPARK INTEGRATION
Datastax Enterprise now comes with HASpark
HAmaster, thatis.
cassandra-driver-spark

37. SPARK SQL
Appeared with Spark 1.0
In-memorycolumnar store
Can read from Parquetnow; Cassandraintegration coming
Queryingis notcolumn-based (yet)
No indexes
Write custom functions in Scala.... take thatHive UDFs!!
Integrates wellwith MLBase, Scala/Java/Python

38. WORK STILL NEEDED
Indexes
Columnar queryingfor fastaggregation
Efficientreadingfrom columnar storage formats

39. GETTING TO A BILLION ROWS / SEC
Benchmarked at20 million rows/sec, GROUP BY on two
columns, aggregatingtwo more columns. Per core.
50 cores needed for parallellocalized groupingthroughputof
1 billion rows
~5-10 additionalcores budgetfor distributed exchange and
groupingof locallyagggregated groups, dependingon result
size and network topology
Above is acustom solution, NOTSpark SQL.
Look for integration with Spark/SQL for aproper solution

40. LESSONS
Extremelyfastdistributed queryingfor these use cases
Datadoesn'tchange much (and onlybulk changes)
Analyticalqueries for subsetof columns
Focused on numericalaggregations
Smallnumbers of group bys, limited network interchange of
data
Spark abitrough around edges, butevolvingfast
Concurrentqueries is afrontier with Spark. Use additional
Spark contexts.

41. THANK YOU!

42. SOME COLUMNAR
ALTERNATIVES
Monetdb and Infobright-true columnar stores (storage +
querying)
Cstore-fdw for PostGres -columnar storage only
VoltDB-in-memorydistributed columnar database (butneed
to recompile for DDL changes)
Google BigQuery-columnar cloud database, Dremelbased
Amazon RedShift