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Reducing logging cost by two orders of magnitude using CLP

uber.com

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Re: Reducing logging cost by two orders of magnitude using CLP

#21

Post by gtowey »

polotics wrote: post #4
hobs wrote: post #2

This just in, Uber rediscovers what all us database people already knew, structured data is usually way easier to compress and store and index and query than unstructured blobs of text, which is why we kept telling you to stop storing json in your databases.

Word! Storing JSON is so often the most direct and explicit way of accruing technical debt: "We don't really know what structure the data we'll get should have, just specify that it's going to be JSON"...

I like to say that when you try to make a "schemaless" database, you've just made 1000 different schemas instead.

Re: Reducing logging cost by two orders of magnitude using CLP

#22

Post by benmanns »

gdcohen wrote: post #14
twunde wrote: post #13

Original CLP Paper: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi21-rodrigues.pdf Github project for CLP: https://github.com/y-scope/clp The interesting part about the article isn't that structured data is easier to compress and store, its that there's a relatively new way to efficiently transform unstructured logs to structured data. For those shipping unstructured logs to an observability backend this could be a way to…

Does anyone have a simple explanation of how it structures the log data?

Figure 2[2] from the article is pretty good.

[2]: https://blog.uber-cdn.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=2216,quality=8...

Re: Reducing logging cost by two orders of magnitude using CLP

#23

Post by jodrellblank »

hobs wrote: post #2

This just in, Uber rediscovers what all us database people already knew, structured data is usually way easier to compress and store and index and query than unstructured blobs of text, which is why we kept telling you to stop storing json in your databases.

This just in: “I knew that already hahaha morons” still as unhelpful and uninteresting a comment as ever.

Re: Reducing logging cost by two orders of magnitude using CLP

#24

Post by groestl »

hobs wrote: post #2

This just in, Uber rediscovers what all us database people already knew, structured data is usually way easier to compress and store and index and query than unstructured blobs of text, which is why we kept telling you to stop storing json in your databases.

I think it's important to note the difference between unstructured and schemaless. JSON is very much not a blob of text. One layer's structured data is another layer's opaque blob.

Re: Reducing logging cost by two orders of magnitude using CLP

#26

Post by stingraycharles »

beckingz wrote: post #15
stingraycharles wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t have a use case yet, but let’s just collect all the data and figure out what to do with it later! It’s funny how these cliches repeat everywhere in the industry, and it’s almost impossible for people to figure this out beforehand. It seems like everyone needs to deal with data lakes (at scale) at least once in their life before they truly appreciate the costs of the flexibility they offer.

The Data Exhaust approach is simultaneously bad and justifiable. You should measure what matters and think about what you want to measure and why before collecting data. On the other hand, collecting data in case what you want to measure changes later is a usually lowish cost way of maybe having the right data in advance later.

Oh I agree, that's why I was careful to put "at scale" in there -- these types of approaches are typically good when you're still trying to understand your problem domain, and have not yet hit production scale.

But I've met many a customer that's spending 7-figures on a yearly basis on data that they have yet to extract value from. The rationale is typically "we don't know yet what parameters are important to the model we come up with later", but even then, you could do better than store everything in plaintext JSON on S3.

Re: Reducing logging cost by two orders of magnitude using CLP

#28

Post by hknmtt »

SkeuomorphicBee wrote: post #12

"Page not found" Apparently the Uber site noticed I'm not in the USA and automatically redirects to a localized version, which doesn't exist. If their web-development capabilities are any indication I'll skip their development tips.

yep

Re: Reducing logging cost by two orders of magnitude using CLP

#29

Post by kazinator »

hobs wrote: post #2

This just in, Uber rediscovers what all us database people already knew, structured data is usually way easier to compress and store and index and query than unstructured blobs of text, which is why we kept telling you to stop storing json in your databases.

Maybe people do things like that because:

- their application parses and generates JSON already, so it's low-effort.

- the JSON can have various shapes: database records generally don't do that.

- even if it has the same shape, it can change over time; they don't want to deal with the insane hassle of upgrade-time DB schema changes in existing installations

The alternative to JSON-in-DB is to have a persistent object store. That has downsides too.

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