Lars, that is exactly why I am hesitant to use one the core level
generic approaches (apart from having difficulties to identify the still
active projects): I have doubts I can sufficiently explain to myself
when and where they fail.
With "toolbox approach" I meant to say that turning entity data into
index data is not done generically but rather involving domain specific
application code that
- indicates what makes an index key given an entity
- indicates whether an index entry is still valid given an entity
That code is also used during the index rebuild and trimming (an M/R Job)
So validating whether an index entry is valid means to load the entity
pointed to and - before considering it a valid result - validating
whether values of the entity still match with the index.
The entity is written last, hence when the client dies halfway through
the update you may get stale index entries but nothing else should break.
For scanning along the index, we are using a chunk iterator that is, we
read n index entries ahead and then do point look ups for the entities.
How would you avoid point-gets when scanning via an index (as most
likely, entities are ordered independently from the index - hence the
index)?
Something really important to note is that there is no intention to
build a completely generic solution, in particular not (this time -
unlike the other post of mine you responded to) taking row versioning
into account. Instead, row time stamps are used to delete stale entries
(old entries after an index rebuild).
Thanks a lot for your blog pointers. Haven't had time to study in depth
but at first glance there is lot of overlap of what you are proposing
and what I ended up doing considering the first post.
On the second post: Indeed I have not worried too much about
transactional isolation of updates. If index update and entity update
use the same HBase time stamp, the result should at least be consistent,
right?
Btw. in no way am I claiming originality of my thoughts - in particular
I read
http://jyates.github.io/2012/07/09/consistent-enough-secondary-indexes.html
a while back.
Thanks,
Henning
Ps.: I might write about this discussion later in my blog
On 22.12.2013 23:37, lars hofhansl wrote:
The devil is often in the details. On the surface it looks simple.
How specifically are the stale indexes ignored? Are the guaranteed to be no
races?
Is deletion handled correctly?Does it work with multiple versions?
What happens when the client dies 1/2 way through an update?
It's easy to do eventually consistent indexes. Truly consistent indexes without
transactions are tricky.
Also, scanning an index and then doing point-gets against a main table is slow
(unless the index is very selective. The Phoenix team measured that there is
only an advantage if the index filters out 98-99% of the data).
So then one would revert to covered indexes and suddenly is not so easy
to detect stale index entries.
I blogged about these issues here:
http://hadoop-hbase.blogspot.com/2012/10/musings-on-secondary-indexes.html
http://hadoop-hbase.blogspot.com/2012/10/secondary-indexes-part-ii.html
Phoenix has a (pretty involved) solution now that works around the fact that
HBase has no transactions.
-- Lars
________________________________
From: Henning Blohm <[email protected]>
To: user <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, December 22, 2013 2:11 AM
Subject: secondary index feature
Lately we have added a secondary index feature to a persistence tier
over HBASE. Essentially we implemented what is described as "Dual-Write
Secondary Index" in http://hbase.apache.org/book/secondary.indexes.html.
I.e. while updating an entity, actually before writing the actual
update, indexes are updated. Lookup via the index ignores stale entries.
A recurring rebuild and clean out of stale entries takes care the
indexes are trimmed and accurate.
None of this was terribly complex to implement. In fact, it seemed like
something you could do generically, maybe not on the HBASE level itself,
but as a toolbox / utility style library.
Is anybody on the list aware of anything useful already existing in that
space?
Thanks,
Henning Blohm
*ZFabrik Software KG*
T: +49 6227 3984255
F: +49 6227 3984254
M: +49 1781891820
Lammstrasse 2 69190 Walldorf
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
Linkedin <http://www.linkedin.com/pub/henning-blohm/0/7b5/628>
ZFabrik <http://www.zfabrik.de>
Blog <http://www.z2-environment.net/blog>
Z2-Environment <http://www.z2-environment.eu>
Z2 Wiki <http://redmine.z2-environment.net>
--
Henning Blohm
*ZFabrik Software KG*
T: +49 6227 3984255
F: +49 6227 3984254
M: +49 1781891820
Lammstrasse 2 69190 Walldorf
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
Linkedin <http://www.linkedin.com/pub/henning-blohm/0/7b5/628>
ZFabrik <http://www.zfabrik.de>
Blog <http://www.z2-environment.net/blog>
Z2-Environment <http://www.z2-environment.eu>
Z2 Wiki <http://redmine.z2-environment.net>
