Hy Jacques, It's good to hear from you, thanks for the pointer to Iceberg. I am aware of it as well as other similar projects, including Delta Lake, which my team is already using. Unfortunately even with Delta, there is only a placeholder in the project currently where they will be tracking file level statistics at some point in the future, we are also evaluating the possibility of implementing this in delta itself. While it and Iceberg aren't quite the same architecturally, I think there is enough overlap that it might be a bit awkward to use the two in conjunction with one another.
>From my testing so far, it appears that delta pretty easily can operate alongside these older metadata summary files without the two fighting with each other. Delta is responsible for maintaining a transactionally consistent list of files, and this file can coexist in the directory just to allow efficient pruning on the driver side on a best effort basis, as it can gracefully fall back to the FS if it is missing a newer file. We are somewhat nervous about depending on something that is marked deprecated, but as it is so close to a "just works" state for our needs, I was hoping to confirm with the community if there were other risks I was missing. Jason Altekruse On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 6:29 PM Jacques Nadeau <jacq...@apache.org> wrote: > Hey Jason, > > I'd suggest you look at Apache Iceberg. It is a much more mature way of > handling metadata efficiency issues and provides a substantial superset of > functionality over the old metadata cache files. > > On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 4:16 PM Jason Altekruse <altekruseja...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > Hello again, > > > > I took a look through the mail archives and found a little more > information > > in this and a few other threads. > > > > > > > http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox//parquet-dev/201707.mbox/%3CCAO4re1k8-bZZZWBRuLCnm1V7AoJE1fdunSuBn%2BecRuFGPgcXnA%40mail.gmail.com%3E > > > > While I do understand the benefits for federating out the reading of > > footers for the sake of not worrying about synchronization between the > > cached metadata and any changes to the files on disk, it does appear > there > > is still a use case that isn't solved well with this design, needle in a > > haystack selective filter queries, where the data is sorted by the filter > > column. For example in the tests I ran with queries against lots of > parquet > > files where the vast majority are pruned by a bunch of small tasks, it > > takes 33 seconds vs just 1-2 seconds with driver side pruning using the > > summary file (requires a small spark changet). > > > > In our use case we are never going to be replacing contents of existing > > parquet files (with a delete and rewrite on HDFS) or appending new row > > groups onto existing files. In that case I don't believe we should > > experience any correctness problems, but I wanted to confirm if there is > > something I am missing. I am > > using readAllFootersInParallelUsingSummaryFiles which does fall back to > > read individual footers if they are missing from the summary file. > > > > I am also curious if a solution to the correctness problems could be to > > include a file length and/or last modified time into the summary file, > > which could confirm against FS metadata that the files on disk are still > in > > sync with the metadata summary relatively quickly. Would it be possible > to > > consider avoiding this deprecation if I was to work on an update to > > implement this? > > > > - Jason Altekruse > > > > > > On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 8:52 PM Jason Altekruse < > altekruseja...@gmail.com> > > wrote: > > > > > Hello all, > > > > > > I have been working on optimizing reads in spark to avoid spinning up > > lots > > > of short lived tasks that just perform row group pruning in selective > > > filter queries. > > > > > > My high level question is why metadata summary files were marked > > > deprecated in this Parquet changeset? There isn't much explanation > given > > > or a description of what should be used instead. > > > https://github.com/apache/parquet-mr/pull/429 > > > > > > There are other members of the broader parquet community that are also > > > confused by this deprecation, see this discussion in an arrow PR. > > > https://github.com/apache/arrow/pull/4166 > > > > > > In the course of making my small prototype I got an extra performance > > > boost by making spark write out metadata summary files, rather than > > having > > > to read all footers on the driver. This effect would be even more > > > pronounced on a completely remote storage system like S3. Writing these > > > summary files was disabled by default in SPARK-15719, because of the > > > performance impact of appending a small number of new files to an > > existing > > > dataset with many files. > > > > > > https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-15719 > > > > > > This spark JIRA does make decent points considering how spark operates > > > today, but I think that there is a performance optimization opportunity > > > that is missed because the row group pruning is deferred to a bunch of > > > separate short lived tasks rather than done upfront, currently spark > only > > > uses footers on the driver for schema merging. > > > > > > Thanks for the help! > > > Jason Altekruse > > > > > >