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Apache iceberg the Hadoop of the modern-data-stack?

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Re: Apache iceberg the Hadoop of the modern-data-stack?

#2
This is a huge challenge with Iceberg. I have found that there is substantial bang for your buck in tuning how parquet files are written, particularly in terms of row group size and column-level bloom filters. In addition to that, I make heavy use of the encoding options (dictionary/RLE) while denormalizing data into as few files as possible. This has allowed me to rely on DuckDB for querying terabytes of data at low cost and acceptable performance.

What we are lacking now is tooling that gives you insight into how you should configure Iceberg. Does something like this exist? I have been looking for something that would show me the query plan that is developed from Iceberg metadata, but didn’t find anything. It would go a long way to showing where the bottleneck is for queries.

Re: Apache iceberg the Hadoop of the modern-data-stack?

#3

This is a huge challenge with Iceberg. I have found that there is substantial bang for your buck in tuning how parquet files are written, particularly in terms of row group size and column-level bloom filters. In addition to that, I make heavy use of the encoding options (dictionary/RLE) while denormalizing data into as few files as possible. This has allowed me to rely on DuckDB for querying terabytes of data at low…

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Re: Apache iceberg the Hadoop of the modern-data-stack?

#4
Does anyone have a good alternative for storing large amounts of very small files that need to be individually queriable? We are dealing with a large amount of sensor readings that we need to be able to query on a per sensor basis and a timespan, and we are dealing with the problem mentioned in the article, that storing millions of small files in S3 is expensive.

Re: Apache iceberg the Hadoop of the modern-data-stack?

#6
post #4

Does anyone have a good alternative for storing large amounts of very small files that need to be individually queriable? We are dealing with a large amount of sensor readings that we need to be able to query on a per sensor basis and a timespan, and we are dealing with the problem mentioned in the article, that storing millions of small files in S3 is expensive.

If you want to keep them in S3, consolidate into sorted parquet files. You get random access to row groups, and only the columns you need are read so it’s very efficient. DuckDB can both build and access these files efficiently. You could compact files hourly/nightly/weekly whatever

Of course you could also use Aurora for a clean scalable Postgres that can survive zone failures for a simpler solution

Re: Apache iceberg the Hadoop of the modern-data-stack?

#7
Most of these issues will be ring true to lots of folk using Iceberg at the moment. But this does not:

> Yet, competing table formats like Delta Lake and Hudi mirror this fragmentation. [ ... ] > Just as Spark emerged as the dominant engine in the Hadoop ecosystem, a dominant table format and catalog may appear in the Iceberg era.

I think extremely few people are making bets on any other open source table format now - that consolidation has already happened in 2023-2024 (see e.g. Databricks who have their own competing format leaning heavily into iceberg; or adoption from all of the major data warehouse providers).

Re: Apache iceberg the Hadoop of the modern-data-stack?

#8
post #4

Does anyone have a good alternative for storing large amounts of very small files that need to be individually queriable? We are dealing with a large amount of sensor readings that we need to be able to query on a per sensor basis and a timespan, and we are dealing with the problem mentioned in the article, that storing millions of small files in S3 is expensive.

If you want to keep them in S3, consolidate into sorted parquet files. You get random access to row groups, and only the columns you need are read so it’s very efficient. DuckDB can both build and access these files efficiently. You could compact files hourly/nightly/weekly whatever Of course you could also use Aurora for a clean scalable Postgres that can survive zone failures for a simpler solution

The problem is that the initial writing is already so expensive, I guess we'd have to write multiple sensors into the same file instead of having one file per sensor per interval. I'll look into parquet access options, if we could write 10k sensors into one file but still read a single sensor from that file that could work.

Re: Apache iceberg the Hadoop of the modern-data-stack?

#9

Most of these issues will be ring true to lots of folk using Iceberg at the moment. But this does not: > Yet, competing table formats like Delta Lake and Hudi mirror this fragmentation. [ ... ] > Just as Spark emerged as the dominant engine in the Hadoop ecosystem, a dominant table format and catalog may appear in the Iceberg era. I think extremely few people are making bets on any other open source table format now…

Microsoft is right now making a huge bet on Delta by way of their “Microsoft Fabric” initiative (as always with Microsoft: Is it a product? Is it a branding scheme? Yes.)

They seem to be the only vendor crazy enough to try to fast-follow Databricks, who is clearly driving the increasingly elaborate and sophisticated Delta ecosystem (check the GitHub traffic…)

But Microsoft + Databricks is a lot of momentum for Delta.

On the merits of open & simple, I agree, better for everyone if Iceberg wins out—as Iceberg and not as some Frankenstandard mashed together with Delta by the force of 1,000 Databricks engineers.

Re: Apache iceberg the Hadoop of the modern-data-stack?

#10
post #4

Does anyone have a good alternative for storing large amounts of very small files that need to be individually queriable? We are dealing with a large amount of sensor readings that we need to be able to query on a per sensor basis and a timespan, and we are dealing with the problem mentioned in the article, that storing millions of small files in S3 is expensive.

SeaweedFS? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39235593
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