Month: <span>January 2016</span>

Published January 29, 2016 by

Hadoop Basics V: Repartition Join in MapReduce

In this part we will see how to perform a Repartition Join in MapReduce. It is also called the Reduce-Side Join because the actual joining of data happens in the reducers. I consider this type of join to be the default and most natural way to join data in MapReduce because :

  • It is a simple use of the MapReduce paradigm, using the joining keys as mapper output keys.
  • It can be used for any type of join (inner, left, right, full outer …).
  • It can join big datasets easily.

Join TypesWe will first create a second dataset, “Projects”, which can be joined to the “Donations” data which we’ve been using since Part I. We will then pose a query that we want to solve. Then we will see how the Repartition Join works and use it to join both datasets and find the result to our query. After that we will see how to optimize our response time.

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Hadoop Basics

Joins MapReduce

Published January 4, 2016 by

Hadoop Basics IV: Total Order Sorting in MapReduce

We saw in the previous part that when using multiple reducers, each reducer receives (key,value) pairs assigned to them by the Partitioner. When a reducer receives those pairs they are sorted by key, so generally the output of a reducer is also sorted by key. However, the outputs of different reducers are not ordered between each other, so they cannot be concatenated or read sequentially in the correct order.

For example with 2 reducers, sorting on simple Text keys, you can have :
– Reducer 1 output : (a,5), (d,6), (w,5)
– Reducer 2 output : (b,2), (c,5), (e,7)
The keys are only sorted if you look at each output individually, but if you read one after the other, the ordering is broken.

The objective of Total Order Sorting is to have all outputs sorted across all reducers :
– Reducer 1 output : (a,5), (b,2), (c,5)
– Reducer 2 output : (d,6), (e,7), (w,5)
This way the outputs can be read/searched/concatenated sequentially as a single ordered output.

In this post we will first see how to create a manual total order sorting with a custom partitioner. Then we will learn to use Hadoop’s TotalOrderPartitioner to automatically create partitions on simple type keys. Finally we will see a more advanced technique to use our Secondary Sort’s Composite Key (from the previous post) with this partitioner to achieve “Total Secondary Sorting“.

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Hadoop Basics

MapReduce Sorting