Lightweight Stack for Big Data Analytics. Department of Computer Science University of St Andrews

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1 Lightweight Stack for Big Data Analytics Muhammad Asif Saleem Dissertation 2014 Erasmus Mundus MSc in Dependable Software Systems Department of Computer Science University of St Andrews A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment Of the requirements for the Erasmus Mundus MSc in Dependable Software Systems Head of Department: Dr. Steve Linton Supervisor: Dr. Adam Barker June 2014

2 Declaration I hereby certify that this material, which I now submit for assessment of the program of study leading to the award of Master of Science in Dependable Software Systems, is entirely my own work and has not been taken from the work of others save and to the extent that such work has been cited and acknowledged within the text of my work and was performed during the current academic year except where otherwise stated. The main text of this project report is words long. In submitting this project report to the University of St Andrews, I give permission for it to be made available for use in accordance with the regulations of the University Library. I also give permission for the title and abstract to be published and for copies of the report to be made and supplied at cost to any bona fide library or research worker, and to be made available on the World Wide Web. I retain the copyright in this work. If there is a strong case for the protection of confidential data, the parts of the declaration, giving permission for its use and publication may be omitted by prior permission of the Erasmus Mundus DESEM Program Coordinator.

3 Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Adam Barker for his keen attention, guidance and encouragement. I am also thankful for my co-supervisor Dr. Blesson Varghese for his creative ideas, suggestions and moral support over the duration of this work. I would also like to extend my gratitude to all of my lecturers in the university, for their knowledge, skills and support they imparted to me.

4 Abstract A wide variety of Big Data sets are employed in social science, physical science and the business world. Analytics on such data can predict and make estimations that were not previously possible. While there are technologies to support big data analytics, but it is not easy for a nonspecialist computer user, whether it be a social scientist or a physical scientist or a business analyst, to easily make use of the technology without significant big data expertise. The aim of this project is to develop a lightweight stack that supports technologies for big data analytics.

5 Contents 1 :-: Introduction Big Data Problem Description Motivation Goals of this research Contribution of this thesis Overview of the thesis 4 2 :-: Related Work HIVE Web based interface IBM InfoSphere BigInsights SAP Big Data Analytics TERADATA Big Data Analytics Cloudera Big Data Solutions HortonWorks Amazon Big Data Analytics Platform data Big Data Platform Oracle Big Data Platform Hewlett Packard Big Data Platform Summary 10 3 :-: Big Data Processing Technologies Hadoop Hive Summary 18 4 :-: Development Process & Solution Design Problem statement Revist Development Process Solution Requirements Specifications 20

6 4.4 Solution Design Solution and Research Objectives Summary 24 5 :-: Solution Implementation Implementation Decisions & Development Web Services Data Browser Implementation (User Interaction Layer) Query Management Layer Implementation Summary 32 6 :-: Case Studies and Experiments Case Study Case Study Summary 45 7 :-:Evaluation Comparison with related work Performance Evaluation Summary 50 8 :-: Conclusion & Future Work Conclusions Future Work 52

7 List of Figures Figure I MapReduce Programming Model 12 Figure II Hadoop Architecture with two Nodes 15 Figure III Hive Architecture [Ref Figure II] 16 Figure IV Hive Map Reduce Job Process [25] 17 Figure V Web based framework for Big Data exploration in real time 22 Figure VI Buzz Score From May Figure VII Buzz Score From June Figure VIII Daily Aggregated Buzz Scores From 01 April 2005 to 31 July Figure IX Comparison of Actual and Predicted Buzz Scores using EP technique 37 Figure X Comparison of Actual and Predicted Buzz Scores using RP technique 38 Figure XI Actual and Predicted Score with 4 week sample 40 Figure XII Actual and Predicted Score with 8 week sample 41 Figure XIII Number of bird flu related statements found in the corpus 43 Figure XIV Frequency of related statement found from the corpus 44 Figure XV Frequency of related statement found from the corpus 45 List of Tables Table 2-1 Comparison of different Big Data Platofroms/Frameworks 11 Table 4-1 Research Goals and proposed solution 24 Table 5-1 REST Vs SOAP [35] 26 Table 6-1 % Error between predicted and actual buzz score 38 Table 6-2 Correlation between actual and predicted scores 41 Table 7-1 Comparisons between related and Big Excel 48 Table 7-2 Performance Analysis 50

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9 Introduction 1 :-: Introduction Big Data technologies are transforming the way data is used to be analyzed. One reason is the massive amount of data that is being generated from different sources such as social networks, sensors, search engines, banks, telecommunication and web, handling this massive amount of data take us in the era of Big Data. According to the YouTube statistics 100 hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube [1] servers in every minute. Facebook is dealing with more than 500 terabytes of data daily [2], companies such as a google and yahoo are recording search engine results for analyzing the searching trends; crawling different web sources to analyze for any important events; gathering marketing data for analyzing the current and future trends which all results the generation of large data sets also referred to as Big Data. Data is everywhere, from social sciences to physical science, business and commercial world, for example, digitizing the past fifty year's newspapers will results the massive amount of data, in astronomy storing billions of astronomical objects, in biology storing genes, proteins and small molecules results in massive amounts of data. In business world such as handling millions of call data records in telecommunication, handling millions of transactions in banking and handling millions of transactions for multinational grocery store results in large data sets. Analyzing these large datasets and getting out meaningful information from it is a challenging in itself. 1.1 Big Data Big Data can be described in 3 V s such as variety, volume and velocity [3] Variety Data has different variations, for example semi-structured or unstructured, such as data, generated from web sites, social networks, s, sensors and web logs is unstructured. Structured data refers to as data generated in result of conversion from call data record to tabular format in order to calculate the monetary value out of it or banks transactions data or data generated from the airline ticketing system are different varieties in the data Volume Volume refers to the amount of data or size of the data set. Nowadays figures are in Tera and Peta bytes. For instance Airbus can generate half of terabytes of data in one flight [4]. 1

10 Introduction Velocity Velocity refers to the speed of data generation which is very fast nowadays. For example weather sensors are kept on generating data as new updates comes, Twitter is generating data at 9100 tweets per second and on Facebook users is sending 3 million messages to each other every 20 minutes [5]. There are different technologies to analyze the Big Data. Hadoop [6] is one of the most popular among them. There are many others, such as MongoDB [7] which is NoSQL database and technologies for warehousing such as Hive and HBase [6] which can be used in conjunction with Hadoop to ease the analysis and provides the abstraction over Hadoop platform. 1.2 Problem Description There are different technologies to deal with Big Data analysis, but most of them are complex and requires expertise to deal with them. Especially for non-computer scientists such as social scientists, they require good programming skills and knowledge of configuring and maintaining the infrastructure which almost makes it impossible for them to explore the large data sets or to perform ad hoc analytics on it. For example, how a social scientist can explore the data to find an event in 1975 by having the previous fifty years of newspaper data? Or how a social scientist can predict the human behavior by analyzing its previous 5 years of data gathered from different sources such as cell phone records with GPS tracking, search engine queries, internet transaction data, consumer behavior or its social network activity? [8] There are plenty of Big Data analysis platforms or frameworks are available nowadays in the market, but the problem for non-computer scientists is to master them because of the complexity involves with them and where necessary to take training in order to use them for exploring Big Data in adhoc manners and doing analytics on large data sets. These systems inherit the problem of maintaining them as well, which might include at application or infrastructure level. 1.3 Motivation The motivation behind this research is to assist non-computer scientists such as social scientists to explore large data sets and to perform adhoc analytics without having any technical expertise in Big Data technologies as well as in maintaining and configuring underlying infrastructure. Nowadays Big Data is an important area to look at in within every field, whether it is social or scientific. Experts such as social scientist who do not have a technical background for handling computer software systems, especially Big Data analytics platforms, can not get insights into large data sets as they do not have enough technical expertise to deal with these systems. One of 2

11 Introduction the motivations behind this research is to give access of Big Data exploration to scientists who want to analyze the information for cutting edge research or want to predict future trends in their respective fields by analyzing the large data sets generated from a particular event or from group of events. Technological advancements in Big Data technologies give the opportunity to computer scientists and commercial companies to look inside large data sets, but these are too complex for non-computer scientists which leads us the need to come up with simple to use and understandable framework that can hide the complexity of Big Data technologies for exploration and analytics. 1.4 Goals of this research The goals of this research are to explore Big Data in an adhoc manner by facilitating the management of user interaction with large data sets and providing the abstraction over deployment, configuration and maintenance of the underlying infrastructure and Big Data technologies. Frameworks such as BigExcel 1 will help non-expert users such as social scientist to harness the Big Data in just a few clicks with less effort. For instance, if a social scientist wants to explore a language dataset of one year gathered from different web sources to explore what was the most popular event happened in that year to use in his research to draw some conclusion, so the scientist can do it by just accessing a simple application by taking simple steps for loading and analyzing. All state-of-the-art Big Data platforms or frameworks are either commercial or very complex to be used for non-technical users and hence they are out of reach from non-computer scientists without taking any considerable training. The goal of BigExcel is to address this issue by developing a framework for non-computer scientists. 1.5 Contribution of this thesis The contributions of thesis are 1- A lightweight web based framework for large data sets, exploration and analytics in an adhoc manner 2- Abstraction for a non - computer scientist such as a social scientist for using Big Data technologies 3- Abstraction for a non - computer scientist such as a social scientist for configuring and maintaining underlying infrastructure for Big Data technologies 4- Access to Big data exploration to non-computer scientists such as social scientists 5- Real time analytics on large data sets 1 Framework developed under this research 3

12 Introduction 1.6 Overview of the thesis In this chapter, we discussed what is Big Data and how it is being generated and the challenges Big Data inherits with it. We discussed the problem statement, research goals and contribution of this work. In the next chapter we will present the related work and comparison between different Big Data platforms/frameworks followed by an overview of Big Data Technologies (Hadoop 2 and Hive 3 ) in chapter three. In chapter four we will present the design of the lightweight web based framework BigExcel followed by the implementation of the framework in chapter five. In chapter six we will present the two case studies. One will demonstrate the predictive analytics use case and one will demonstrate the exploration of a large language corpus use case. These two data sets are taken from yahoo research labs sandbox [9]. In chapter seven we evaluate our work by comparing it with the related work and by providing the performance analysis and usability of the framework. In chapter eight, we will conclude our work and provides the future direction of this research. 2 Big Data Processing Technology based on MapReduce Programming Model 3 Database for handling large data sets with SQL as an interfacing language 4

13 Related Work 2 :-: Related Work In this chapter, we will discuss the related work by analyzing tools and framework which are available to explore Big Data and are capable to perform analytics. We look at these tools and framework with respect to difficulty and expertise require in using them by non-expert users and also whether they support the exploration of Big Data or not. 2.1 HIVE Web based interface Hive has an interactive web interface which is designed for the administration purpose of the Hive and as well as for querying the database. User can create and delete tables and browse the database schema. In addition, users can execute the queries by supplying it from the web based interface. It is not really an analytical platform, but it was developed to work with Hive easily and interactively by using the web interface. The web interface is easy to use, but it is too technical for non-technical users to create and browser schema and other tasks such as starting and stoping the Hive. Also for Hive web interface to work, the user should have Hive configured and deployed on the computer system which requires Hadoop as well for processing, hence makes it very complex for non-expert users with no support of analytics. 2.2 IBM InfoSphere BigInsights InfoSphere BigInsights is a Big Data analytics platform from IBM, which support different type of analytics under one roof. InfoSphere is built on top of Hadoop to enhance its capabilities and provides an interactive interface on it for analyzing the Big Data. InfoSphere has built-in analytics capability, including text analytics for getting insights from large textual data, social data analyzer for analyzing social media data, machine data analytics for analyzing machine data such as data from sensors and GPS and InfoSphere also supports the integration with other Big Data technologies. In addition InfoSphere provides a SQL interface, namely as BigSQL and also a spreadsheet like interface called BigSheets for analyzing and exploring Big Data easily with development tools analytics and security for Big Data operations. BigSheets and BigSQL modules of InfoSphere are some of the core components of the system. BigSQL provides the facility to user to explore the database schema and provide access to analytics using structured query language. BigSheets provide Big Data analysis, exploration and manipulation for non-programmers or non-technical users. The system can load data from multiple sources such as databases, web crawlers, text files, Json, csv files etc. and can store it in 5

14 Related Work the distributed file system for processing. BigSheets provide the user with interactive interface like an excel sheet where users can select or import the data for analysis, such as by applying filters, or by using built-in aggregation functions e.g. sum or average. It also supports user defined functions where users can write their own logic for the computation. BigSheets also support the visualization of data and analysis results interactively. It supports multiple chart types for rendering the result, such as line, bar and pie charts. Despite of all these benefits and easiness InfoSphere provides, issue with InfoSphere is that, it is not easy to configure the system, even technical computer scientist needs training to install and configure the system, hence InfoSphere taken away the opportunity from non-expert users such as social scientists to use the system without having technical expertise [10]. 2.3 SAP Big Data Analytics SAP is one of the leading providers of Big Data analytics platforms. It is one of the first company to introduce in-memory database for analytics. The aim of building in-memory database was to provide a single database for both transactional and analytical data processing, commonly refer to as OLTP 4 and OLAP 5 systems. However, any applications can be built on top of SAP HANA 6 in-memory database for analytics. However SAP HANA back-end engine is available for use in the cloud as well, but there are less application exists, which can be used by the non - expert user for analytics. HANA has a strong library called Predictive analytics library (PAL) which can be used by the HANA developers to perform predictive calculations by just invoking the library functions hence providing ease for Big Data analytics. For setting up HANA system for Big Data exploration, the user needs some type of ETL 7 tool for loading the data into the system and then an application which can manipulate that data. Many sample applications exist for demonstration of the HANA power but most of them address the business use cases and designed for expert users or who can use the system by taking the adequate training [11] [12]. 2.4 TERADATA Big Data Analytics The Aster Big Analytics Appliance is solution from TERADATA for Big Data Analytics. Aster is basically a database developed by TERADATA supporting row based and column based storage and it s the key component of their Big Data analytical platform which consists of Aster database, Aster SQL-MapReduce, which is basically an interfacing SQL language for Aster 4 Online Transaction Processing 5 Online Analytical Processing 6 High Performance Analytic Appliance 7 Extraction, Transformation and Load 6

15 Related Work database but includes support for built-in functions for MapReduce using SQL language similarly to Hive which sits on top Hadoop along with their own supplied and tested hardware. We will discuss in detail about the architecture and working of Hive and Hadoop in the next chapter. The Aster Big Analytics Appliance is a combination of software and hardware and the basic idea is to run Big Data technologies on a dedicated and specially designed hardware by connecting multiple nodes with InfniBand [13] instead of running Hadoop on commodity hardware with traditional networconnectionsns. New nodes can be added as needed by using separate dedicated hardware machines. Despite the dedicated hardware and fast speed database, together with built-in functions for MapReduce task and SQL interface for analytics, there are less applications which are available for non-expert users to explore and analyze Big Data. The technology main focus is on the business users and users have to have a physical machine (not commodity hardware) together with front end application to use the system which is not suitable for non-technical users [14]. 2.5 Cloudera Big Data Solutions Cloudera founded in 2008 and was the first enterprise distributors of Apache Hadoop and other Big Data technologies. The contributions of Cloudera to Big Data world is the abstraction over different Big Data technologies such as Hadoop, Hive, HCatalog [15] etc., which provides easiness to users to use these technologies without going into technical details. Cloudera solutions are ready to install on any commodity hardware which hides the technical details of compiling and configuring the Big Data technologies and provides the system management such as configuration, deployment, security management, diagnostics, operational reports generation etc. Cloudera is at forefront of providing back-end solutions for Big Data exploration and analysis but does not provide any tool or framework which actually can be used on top of these technologies especially for non-expert users [16]. 2.6 HortonWorks HortonWorks founded in 2011 by the ex Yahoo engineers. The concept is same as Cloudera to provide different Big Data technologies for enterprise computing and as a result the company developed HortonWork Data Platform for enterprise computing which builds on top of Hadoop and have the capability to provide different type of analysis such as batch, real time and interactive. The platform also supports data management, the facility which is built on top of the Hadoop file system and resource manager. In addition to multiple analysis capabilities of the Horton data platform, it supports different technologies for data integration and data flow 7

16 Related Work control. Technologies such as Apache Falcon [17],, Sqoop [18] and Flume [19] are part of the platform and provides easy and systematic access for handling data in and out of Hadoop. Furthermore, the platform provides AAA 8 and data protection by encrypting traffic during transfer between different node such as using remote procedure calls, transferring data over HTTP, JDBC and Data transfer protocol. The platform also supports the management of Hadoop cluster operations. For deploying and configuring Horton data platform requires considerable expertise and training to use it along with other technologies experience for loading data into the distributed file system for processing. Furthermore the system lacks applications where the user can just login to the system and start analyzing the data without having any expert knowledge in system [20]. 2.7 Amazon Big Data Analytics Platform Amazon is a pioneer in cloud computing and provides technological services through web interface usually referred as web services. Amazon elastic map reduce (EMR) is a web service from amazon where we can access Big Data technologies such as Hadoop and Hive via Amazon exposed API s or via launching an EC2 9 instance, where users can deploy map and reduce script for processing on Hadoop and Hive. Hive can be accessed via the amazon exposed API s such as JDBC or by using a Hive compatible client such as Hive command line utility and beeline. Non-expert users which do not have technical grounds to write map and reduce scripts are not able to use this technology and also non-programmer can not work with the exposed API s as they have to be proficient in programming in order to work with them. In addition, users need to build an application on top of Amazon web services to provide the access to non-expert users for big data exploration data Big Data Platform 1010data is a leading provider for big data exploration and analysis, serving multiple industries such as retail, telecom, financial, healthcare, government, etc. 1010data systems can be installed on premises and can be accessed through cloud. The 1010data big data platform has very interactive interface with a spreadsheet like interface called The Trillion-Row Spreadsheet [21]. It is similar to the excel spreadsheet, but it is capable of handling billion or trillion rows of data. The cloud solution can be used by non-expert users as it only requires the authentication for accessing the system to explore the data. In addition platform also provides the facility to import and load the data from multiple sources easily. 8 Authentication, Authroziation and Audit 9 Elastic Compute Cloud by Amazon 8

17 Related Work 1010data Big Data platform depends on the underlying high performance database technology which support both row and column based storage. A column based storage is better for set type operations as data is physically present adjacent to each other in the disk and disk takes less time for locating the data when the data retrieval query comes. The database support multiple built in functions for analytics usually refers to as in-database analytics. The functions include grouping functions, statistical functions such as mean, standard deviation, time series functions such as finding regression and correlation coefficient, text functions such as finding a specific text from the data such as finding tweets from a large data set etc. 1010data provides easy to use interface even for non-expert users, but the technology they are using is now outdated. Although they are using the row and column based storage database but there are other databases available such as SAP HANA, which provides faster response to OLAP queries as compared to any other database. Furthermore Hadoop and other Big Data technologies are the forefront in analyzing Big Data and provides a reliable and fastest way to explore Big Data and 1010data platform is not supporting Hadoop and other Big Data technologies, which mean this platform might not be of interest of most of non-technical users [21]. 2.9 Oracle Big Data Platform Oracle is not behind from any other company for Big Data solutions. Oracle has introduced the in memory database option in oracle database version of 12c. Oracle partners with Cloudera to provide Hadoop for Big data analytics. In addition, Oracle has developed its own analytical tools using R [22] for Hadoop together with In-memory and NoSQL databases. In addition the system has a data management facility for moving data in and out of Hadoop and to and from the database with dedicated and tested hardware from Oracle. In addition, Oracle is providing the Big data platform as a service in the cloud so any application can be built on top of the Oracle Big Data platform. Despite the powerful hardware and software capability to deliver real insights into the Big Data there is a need to build a simple application on top of this technology to support non-expert user for exploring the Big Data [23] Hewlett Packard Big Data Platform HP provides analytics through its HP Vertica analytics platform. The product is basically based on Vertica database which is the backbone of the platform. The database provides fast execution of queries and especially for set type queries and for warehouse applications due to its columnar storage structure. In addition database uses advanced compression techniques to compress the data to be stored on the disk along with in-database analytics. Furthermore, the database has integration with Hadoop for processing stored data in the Hadoop File System 9

18 Related Work which can be loaded into the database through Hadoop-Vertica connector. However system does not provide the flexibility to execute MapReduce jobs into the Hadoop instead platform is more interested to get only the data from the Hadoop distributed file system for processing by using rich in-database analytical functions. Despite the fact that the system provides high performance analytics, but it cannot be used by non-expert users as the system has to be configured and deployed on the premise and there less applications exists which can use the platform easily for Big Data exploration. Furthermore, system is not providing MapReduce computation facilities which is a key factor for any Big Data exploration and analytics application nowadays. [24]. Table 2-1 shows the tabular comparison of different technologies and applications that we have discussed above Summary In this chapter, we talked about different Big Data platforms for analyzing and exploring the large data sets and discussed their insights and whether the non-technical users can use those platforms or not. We also provided the tabular comparison between them. In the next chapter, we will discuss the popular Big Data processing technologies Hadoop and Hive. 10

19 Related Work Features InforSphere SAP TERADATA Cloudera HortonWorks Amazon 1010data Oracle HP Hive Analysis Web Interface Yes No No Yes No Yes Yes No No Yes Hadoop Support Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes No No Dedicated Hardware Support Yes Yes Yes No No No No Yes Yes N//A Analytics Yes Yes Yes No No No Yes Yes Yes No Database Support No Yes Yes No No No Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes No Data Management Nonexpert users support Yes (Low) No No No No No Yes (Medium) No No No Bussiness users support Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Table 2-1 Comparison of different Big Data Platofroms/Frameworks 11

20 Big Data Processing Technologies 3 :-: Big Data Processing Technologies In this chapter, we will discuss the big data processing technologies that we have used in developing the framework. We start with Hadoop and describe its programming model and architecture followed by an overview of Hive and its architecture and the benefits Hive provides for analyzing large data sets. 3.1 Hadoop Hadoop is based on the MapReduce Programming Model originally developed by Google in 2004 and currently maintained by an Apache software foundation as an open source software. Hadoop is most widely used Big Data technology for analyzing the large data sets. Hadoop batch and parallel processing nature make it perfect for crunching large amount of data very easily and in cost effective manners. Input Output Split0 Mapper Key-1 Value Reducer Split1 Key-2 Value Split2 Mapper Key-1 Value Reducer Split3... Split4 Mapper Key-1 Value Reducer Figure I MapReduce Programming Model MapReduce Programming Model based on the concept of key / value pairs as shown in the Figure I, where the user inputs data file which splits into multiple chunks of 64 MB in size and passed to the mapper where different chucks of the same file is assigned to different mappers for parallel processing. Mapper parses the input file and convert it to key / value pairs for processing and generates intermediate key /value pairs after processing as shown in the Figure I. Reducer then loads all these key/value pairs and sort it in order to group the related keys 12