I quickly went over the wikipedia page for temporal databases. Just sounds like a slowly changing dimension. Data being valid at different points in time isn’t weird to me. Most where clauses off a data warehouse are going to use the date dimension. What we’re talking about is data that was never correct at any time. After the application has been debugged, there is zero reason to retain invoices (or any other object) that should have never existed in the first place. If you were to just create a view that didn’t expose the bad records, it seems to me that the where clause of that view would grow to unmanageable proportions as various data bugs popped up over the life of the application.
I should put an asterisk by all of this and say that I haven’t mastered all of these various applications yet. My current understanding of Hive is that while it’s a “warehouse solution” it’s not actually separate data. It just stores table metadata and the data itself is stored on HDFS correct? That’s confusing because it talks about loading data into tables but then there is also no row level delete functionality. Side note: There are a lot of books out there on the mechanics of Hadoop and the individual projects, but there is very little on how to actually manage data in Hadoop. Adaryl "Bob" Wakefield, MBA Principal Mass Street Analytics 913.938.6685 www.linkedin.com/in/bobwakefieldmba Twitter: @BobLovesData From: Bertrand Dechoux Sent: Sunday, August 10, 2014 10:04 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Data cleansing in modern data architecture Well, keeping bad data has its use too. I assume you know about temporal database. Back to your use case, if you only need to remove a few records from HDFS files, the easiest might be during the reading. It is a view, of course, but it doesn't mean you need to write it back to HDFS. All your data analysis can be represented as a dataflow. Wether you need to save the data at a given point of the flow is your call. The tradeoff is of course between the time gained for later analysis versus the time required to write the state durably (to HDFS). Bertrand Dechoux On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 4:32 PM, Sriram Ramachandrasekaran <[email protected]> wrote: Ok. If you think, the noise levels in the data is going to be so less, doing the view creation is probably costly and meaningless. HDFS is append-only. So, there's no point writing the transactions as HDFS files and trying to perform analytics on top of it directly. Instead, you could go with HBase, with rowkeys being the keys with which you identify and resolve these transactional errors. i.e., if you had a faulty transaction data being logged, it would have and transaction ID, along with associated data. In case, you found out that a particular invoice is offending, you could just remove it from HBase using the transaction ID (rowkey). But, if you want to use the same table for running different reports, it might not work out. Because, most of the HBase operations depend on the rowkey and in this table containing transaction ID as the rowkey there's no way your reports would leverage it. So, you need to decide which is a costly operation, removing noise or running _more_ adhoc reports and decide to use a different table(which is a view again) for reports, etc. On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 2:02 PM, Adaryl "Bob" Wakefield, MBA <[email protected]> wrote: It’s a lot of theory right now so let me give you the full background and see if we can more refine the answer. I’ve had a lot of clients with data warehouses that just weren’t functional for various reasons. I’m researching Hadoop to try and figure out a way to totally eliminate traditional data warehouses. I know all the arguments for keeping them around and I’m not impressed with any of them. I’ve noticed for a while that traditional data storage methods just aren’t up to the task for the things we’re asking data to do these days. I’ve got MOST of it figured out. I know how to store and deliver analytics using all the various tools within the Apache project (and some NOT in the Apache project). What I haven’t figured out is how to do data cleansing or master data management both of which are hard to do if you can’t change anything. So let’s say there is a transactional system. It’s a web application that is the businesses main source of revenue. All the activity of the user on the website is easily structured (so basically we’re not dealing with un-structured data). The nature of the data is financial. The pipeline is fairly straight forward. The data is extracted from the transactional system and placed into a Hadoop environment. From there, it’s exposed by Hive so non technical business analyst with SQL skills can do what they need to do. Pretty typical right? The problem is the web app is not perfect and occasionally produces junk data. Nothing obvious. It may be a few days before the error is noticed. An example would be phantom invoices. Those invoices get in Hadoop. A few days later an analyst notices that the invoice figures for some period are inflated. Once we identify the offending records there is NO reason for them to remain in the system; it’s meaningless junk data. Those records are of zero value. I encounter this scenario in the real world quite often. In the old world, we would just blow away the offending records. Just write a view to skip over a couple of records or exclude a few dozen doesn’t make much sense. It’s better to just blow these records away, I’m just not certain what the best way to accomplish that is in the new world. Adaryl "Bob" Wakefield, MBA Principal Mass Street Analytics 913.938.6685 www.linkedin.com/in/bobwakefieldmba Twitter: @BobLovesData From: Sriram Ramachandrasekaran Sent: Saturday, August 09, 2014 11:55 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Data cleansing in modern data architecture While, I may not have enough context to your entire processing pipeline, here are my thoughts. 1. It's always useful to have raw data, irrespective of if it was right or wrong. The way to look at it is, it's the source of truth at timestamp t. 2. Note that, You only know that the data at timestamp t for an id X was wrong because, subsequent info about X seem to conflict with the one at t or some manual debugging finds it out. All systems that does reporting/analytics is better off by not meddling with the raw data. There should be processed or computed views of this data, that massages it, gets rids of noisy data, merges duplicate entries, etc and then finally produces an output that's suitable for your reports/analytics. So, your idea to write transaction logs to HDFS is fine(unless, you are twisting your systems to get it that way), but, you just need to introduce one more layer of indirection, which has the business logic to handle noise/errors like this. For your specific case, you could've a transaction processor up job which produces a view, that takes care of squashing transactions based on id(something that makes sense in your system) and then handles the business logic of how to handle the bugs/discrepancies in them. Your views could be loaded into a nice columnar store for faster query retrieval(if you have pointed queries - based on a key), else, a different store would be needed. Yes, this has the overhead of running the view creation job, but, I think, the ability to go back to raw data and investigate what happened there is worth it. Your approach of structuring it and storing it in HBase is also fine as long as you keep the concerns separate(if your write/read workloads are poles apart). Hope this helps. On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 9:36 AM, Adaryl "Bob" Wakefield, MBA <[email protected]> wrote: Or...as an alternative, since HBASE uses HDFS to store it’s data, can we get around the no editing file rule by dropping structured data into HBASE? That way, we have data in HDFS that can be deleted. Any real problem with that idea? Adaryl "Bob" Wakefield, MBA Principal Mass Street Analytics 913.938.6685 www.linkedin.com/in/bobwakefieldmba Twitter: @BobLovesData From: Adaryl "Bob" Wakefield, MBA Sent: Saturday, August 09, 2014 8:55 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Data cleansing in modern data architecture Answer: No we can’t get rid of bad records. We have to go back and rebuild the entire file. We can’t edit records but we can get rid of entire files right? This would suggest that appending data to files isn’t that great of an idea. It sounds like it would be more appropriate to cut a hadoop data load up into periodic files (days, months, etc.) that can easily be rebuilt should errors occur.... Adaryl "Bob" Wakefield, MBA Principal Mass Street Analytics 913.938.6685 www.linkedin.com/in/bobwakefieldmba Twitter: @BobLovesData From: Adaryl "Bob" Wakefield, MBA Sent: Saturday, August 09, 2014 4:01 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Data cleansing in modern data architecture I’m sorry but I have to revisit this again. Going through the reply below I realized that I didn’t quite get my question answered. Let me be more explicit with the scenario. There is a bug in the transactional system. The data gets written to HDFS where it winds up in Hive. Somebody notices that their report is off/the numbers don’t look right. We investigate and find the bug in the transactional system. Question: Can we then go back into HDFS and rid ourselves of the bad records? If not, what is the recommended course of action? Adaryl "Bob" Wakefield, MBA Principal Mass Street Analytics 913.938.6685 www.linkedin.com/in/bobwakefieldmba From: Shahab Yunus Sent: Sunday, July 20, 2014 4:20 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Data cleansing in modern data architecture I am assuming you meant the batch jobs that are/were used in old world for data cleansing. As far as I understand there is no hard and fast rule for it and it depends functional and system requirements of the usecase. It is also dependent on the technology being used and how it manages 'deletion'. E.g. in HBase or Cassandra, you can write batch jobs which clean or correct or remove unwanted or incorrect data and than the underlying stores usually have a concept of compaction which not only defragments data files but also at this point removes from disk all the entries marked as deleted. But there are considerations to be aware of given that compaction is a heavy process and in some cases (e.g. Cassandra) there can be problems when there are too much data to be removed. Not only that, in some cases, marked-to-be-deleted data, until it is deleted/compacted can slow down normal operations of the data store as well. One can also leverage in HBase's case the versioning mechanism and the afore-mentioned batch job can simply overwrite the same row key and the previous version would no longer be the latest. If max-version parameter is configured as 1 then no previous version would be maintained (physically it would be and would be removed at compaction time but would not be query-able.) In the end, basically cleansing can be done after or before loading but given the append-only and no hard-delete design approaches of most nosql stores, I would say it would be easier to do cleaning before data is loaded in the nosql store. Of course, it bears repeating that it depends on the use case. Having said that, on a side-note and a bit off-topic, it reminds me of the Lamda Architecture that combines batch and real-time computation for big data using various technologies and it uses the idea of constant periodic refreshes to reload the data and within this periodic refresh, the expectations are that any invalid older data would be corrected and overwritten by the new refresh load. Those basically the 'batch part' of the LA takes care of data cleansing by reloading everything. But LA is mostly for thouse systems which are ok with eventually consistent behavior and might not be suitable for some systems. Regards, Shahab On Sun, Jul 20, 2014 at 2:36 PM, Adaryl "Bob" Wakefield, MBA <[email protected]> wrote: In the old world, data cleaning used to be a large part of the data warehouse load. Now that we’re working in a schemaless environment, I’m not sure where data cleansing is supposed to take place. NoSQL sounds fun because theoretically you just drop everything in but transactional systems that generate the data are still full of bugs and create junk data. My question is, where does data cleaning/master data management/CDI belong in a modern data architecture? Before it hit hits Hadoop? After? B. -- It's just about how deep your longing is! -- It's just about how deep your longing is!
