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Who needs MLflow when you have SQLite?

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Re: Who needs MLflow when you have SQLite?

#11

Yeah, MLFlow is a shitshow. The docs seem designed to confuse, the API makes Pandas look good and the internal data model is badly designed and exposed, as the article says. But, hordes of architects and managers who almost have a clue have been conditioned to want l and expect mlflow. And it's baked into databricks too, so for most purposes you'll be stuck with it. Props to the author for daring to challenge the sta…

How many data scientists that use Databricks for modeling do you know?

Re: Who needs MLflow when you have SQLite?

#13

Yeah, MLFlow is a shitshow. The docs seem designed to confuse, the API makes Pandas look good and the internal data model is badly designed and exposed, as the article says. But, hordes of architects and managers who almost have a clue have been conditioned to want l and expect mlflow. And it's baked into databricks too, so for most purposes you'll be stuck with it. Props to the author for daring to challenge the sta…

"the API makes Pandas look good"

It sparks joy in my heart whenever I see shade cast against pandas.

Re: Who needs MLflow when you have SQLite?

#14
post #11

Yeah, MLFlow is a shitshow. The docs seem designed to confuse, the API makes Pandas look good and the internal data model is badly designed and exposed, as the article says. But, hordes of architects and managers who almost have a clue have been conditioned to want l and expect mlflow. And it's baked into databricks too, so for most purposes you'll be stuck with it. Props to the author for daring to challenge the sta…

How many data scientists that use Databricks for modeling do you know?

its forced upon many of them that are in finance, banking, insurance, ...

Mainly because those tend to run on Microsoft Azure, which has no decent analytics offering, and are pushing Databricks extremely hard. The CTO or whatever just pushes databricks. On paper it checks all the boxes. Mlops, notebooks, experiment management. It just does all of those things very badly, but the exec doesn't care. They only care about the microsoft credits. Just to avoid using Jupyter so the compliance teams stay happy as well because Microsoft sales people scared them away from from open source.

Re: Who needs MLflow when you have SQLite?

#15
post #13

Yeah, MLFlow is a shitshow. The docs seem designed to confuse, the API makes Pandas look good and the internal data model is badly designed and exposed, as the article says. But, hordes of architects and managers who almost have a clue have been conditioned to want l and expect mlflow. And it's baked into databricks too, so for most purposes you'll be stuck with it. Props to the author for daring to challenge the sta…

"the API makes Pandas look good" It sparks joy in my heart whenever I see shade cast against pandas.

Every time I open up pandas I jealously remember the expressive beauty of R for these tasks. But because we're all "serious" of course we must use Python for production lest we not be serious.

Re: Who needs MLflow when you have SQLite?

#16
post #13

Yeah, MLFlow is a shitshow. The docs seem designed to confuse, the API makes Pandas look good and the internal data model is badly designed and exposed, as the article says. But, hordes of architects and managers who almost have a clue have been conditioned to want l and expect mlflow. And it's baked into databricks too, so for most purposes you'll be stuck with it. Props to the author for daring to challenge the sta…

"the API makes Pandas look good" It sparks joy in my heart whenever I see shade cast against pandas.

I have never seen a worse documented library. Initially I thought that they were lazy, now I realize that it cannot be documented because it is a total mess of a library held together with tape.

Close second is the plotly library.

Re: Who needs MLflow when you have SQLite?

#18
I think MLflow is a good idea (very) badly executed. I would like to have a library that combines:

- simple logging of (simple) metrics during and after training

- simple logging of all arguments the model was created with

- simple logging of a textual representation of the model

- simple logging of general architecture details (number of parameters, regularisation hyperparameters, learning rate, number of epochs etc.)

- and of course checkpoints

- simple archiving of the model (and relevant data)

and all that without much (coding) overhead and only using a shared filesystem (!) And with an easy notebook integration. MLflow just has way to many unnecessary features and is unreliable and complicated. When it doesn't work it's so frustrating, it's also quite often super slow. But I always end up creating something like MLflow when working on an architecture for a long time.

EDIT: having written this...I fell like trying to write my own simple library after finishing the paper. A few ideas have already accumulated in my notes that would make my life easier.

EDIT2: I actually remember trying to use SQLite to manage my models! But the server I worked on was locked down and going through the process to get somebody to install me SQLite was just not worth it. It's also was not available on the cluster for big experiments, where it would be even more work to get it, so I gave up on the idea of trying SQLite.

Re: Who needs MLflow when you have SQLite?

#19
I work in an environment where there are multiple tech teams developing models for multiple use cases on VMs and GPU clusters spread across our corporate intranet. Once you move beyond a single dev working on a model on their laptop, you absolutely need something that can handle not just metrics tracking, but making the model binaries available and providing a means to ensure reproducibility by the rest of the team. That's what MLFlow is providing for us. The API is a mess, but at least we didn't have to code up some bespoke in-house framework, we just put some engineers on task to play around with it for a few hours and figure out the nuances of basic interactions and deployed it.

Re: Who needs MLflow when you have SQLite?

#20
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the API makes Pandas look good" It sparks joy in my heart whenever I see shade cast against pandas.

Every time I open up pandas I jealously remember the expressive beauty of R for these tasks. But because we're all "serious" of course we must use Python for production lest we not be serious.

To be fair, taking R to production is a goddamn nightmare.
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