NullPointerException when writing parquet - scala

I am trying to measure how long does it take me to read and write parquet files in Amazon s3 (under a specific partition)
For that I wrote a script that simply reads the files and than write them back:
val df = sqlContext.read.parquet(path + "p1.parquet/partitionBy=partition1")
df.write.mode("overwrite").parquet(path + "p1.parquet/partitionBy=partition1")
However I get a null pointer exception. I tried to add df.count in between, but got the same error.

The reason for the error is that Spark only reads the data when it is going to be used. This results in Spark reading data from the file at the same time as trying to overwrite the file. This causes an issue since data can't be overwritten while reading.
I'd recommend saving to a temporary location as this is for timing purposes. An alternative would be to use .cache() on the data when reading, perform an action to force the read (as well as actually cache the data), and then overwrite the file.

Related

DeltaFileNotFoundException: No file found in the directory DataBricks

I would like to request you for your help.
I have been working with DataBricks.
We developed some scrips and they are working in streaming.
Let's suppose that we have two jobs running and writing data to one general local dataset.
This means notebook1 and notebook2 writing data at the same LDS.
Each notebook read data from different origins and write the data to the same LDS in an standard format. To avoid problems we made use of partitions at the LDS.
This means that in this case the LDS have one partition for notebook1 and other partition for notebook2.
This implementation has been working well for almost 5 months.
However, today we just faced the following error:
com.databricks.sql.transaction.tahoe.DeltaFileNotFoundException: No file found in the directory: dbfs:/mnt/streaming/streaming1/_delta_log.
I have been looking for information for some way to solve it and the solutions that I found have been:
Solution 1 Which explain some reasons why this situations could happen and they say we should use a new checkpoint directory, or set the Spark property spark.sql.files.ignoreMissingFiles to true in the cluster’s Spark Config.
The first solution of using a new checkpoints directory is not possible for us to use due the requeriments that we need to satisfy because using a new checkpoints would mean for us to process the whole data again that has been processed.
You may ask why? In a summary we get updates from a database that is saved in a delta table that contais the raw data and is where we consume the data, so using a new checkpoint or deleting it would mean for us consume the whole data.
This only allow us to use the solution of applying the property of spark.sql.files.ignoreMissingFiles. However, my question here is: If we set this property, Would we be processing the data from the beginning? Or it would resume to process where the last checkpoints was?
Solution 2 I found a similar case here, however I didn't understand it at all, what they suggest is to change the parent directory, however we do have something similar to that which could not satisfy our problem and also add the directory in the start() option?
We have our mains streaming like this:
spark.readStream.format("delta") \
.option("readChangeFeed", "true") \
.option("maxFilesPerTrigger", 250) \
.option("maxBytesPerTrigger", 536870912)\
.option("failOnDataLoss", "true")\
.load(DATA_PATH)\
.filter(expr("_change_type not in ('delete', 'update_preimage')"))\
.writeStream\
.queryName(streamQueryName)\
.foreachBatch(MainFunctionstoprocess)\
.option("checkpointLocation", checkpointLocation)\
.option("mergeSchema", "true")\
.trigger(processingTime='1 seconds')\
.start()
Does anyone have some idea how we could solve this problem without deleting the checkpoints so we can resume the data in the last checkpoint it failed, or some way to get back to one checkpoint so we can only reprocess some part of the data?

"sqlContext.read.json" takes very long time to read 30,000 small JSON files (400 Kb) from S3

I get stuck with the following problem. I have around 30,000 JSON files stored in S3 inside a particular bucket. These files are very small; each one takes only 400-500 Kb, but their quantity is not so small.
I want to create DataFrame based on all these files. I am reading JSON files using wildcard as follows:
var df = sqlContext.read.json("s3n://path_to_bucket/*.json")
I also tried this approach since json(...) is deprecated:
var df = sqlContext.read.format("json").load("s3n://path_to_bucket/*.json")
The problem is that it takes a very long time to create df. I was waiting 4 hours and the Spark job was still running.
Is there any more efficient approach to collect all these JSON files and create a DataFrame based on them?
UPDATE:
Or at least is it possible to read last 1000 files instead of reading all files? I found out that one can pass options as follows sqlContext.read.format("json").options, however I cannot figure out how to read only N newest files.
If you can get the last 1000 modified file names into a simple list you can simply call:
sqlContext.read.format("json").json(filePathsList: _*)
Please note that the .option call(s) are usually used to configure schema options.
Unfortunately, I haven't used S3 before, but I think you can use the same logic in the answer to this question to get the last modified file names:
How do I find the last modified file in a directory in Java?
You are loading like 13Gb of information. Are you sure that it takes a long time in just to create the DF? Maybe it's running the rest of the application but the UI shows that.
Try just to load and print the first row of the DF.
Anyway, what is the configuration of the cluster?

spark save simple string to text file

I have a spark job that needs to store the last time it ran to a text file.
This has to work both on HDFS but also on local fs (for testing).
However it seems that this is not at all so straight forward as it seems.
I have been trying with deleting the dir and getting "can't delete" error messages.
Trying to store a simple sting value into a dataframe to parquet and back again.
this is all so convoluted that it made me take a step back.
What's the best way to just store a string (timestamp of last execution in my case) to a file by overwriting it?
EDIT:
The nasty way I use it now is as follows:
sqlc.read.parquet(lastExecution).map(t => "" + t(0)).collect()(0)
and
sc.parallelize(List(lastExecution)).repartition(1).toDF().write.mode(SaveMode.Overwrite).save(tsDir)
This sounds like storing simple application/execution metadata. As such, saving a text file shouldn't need to be done by "Spark" (ie, it shouldn't be done in distributed spark jobs, by workers).
The ideal place for you to put it is in your driver code, typically after constructing your RDDs. That being said, you wouldn't be using the Spark API to do this, you'd rather be doing something as trivial as using a writer or a file output stream. The only catch here is how you'll read it back. Assuming that your driver program runs on the same computer, there shouldn't be a problem.
If this value is to be read by workers in future jobs (which is possibly why you want it in hdfs), and you don't want to use the Hadoop API directly, then you will have to ensure that you have only one partition so that you don't end up with multiple files with the trivial value. This, however, cannot be said for the local storage (it gets stored on the machine where the worker executing the task is running), managing this will simply be going overboard.
My best option would be to use the driver program and create the file on the machine running the driver (assuming it is the same that will be used next time), or, even better, to put it in a database. If this value is needed in jobs, then the driver can simply pass it through.

Append new data to partitioned parquet files

I am writing an ETL process where I will need to read hourly log files, partition the data, and save it. I am using Spark (in Databricks).
The log files are CSV so I read them and apply a schema, then perform my transformations.
My problem is, how can I save each hour's data as a parquet format but append to the existing data set? When saving, I need to partition by 4 columns present in the dataframe.
Here is my save line:
data
.filter(validPartnerIds($"partnerID"))
.write
.partitionBy("partnerID","year","month","day")
.parquet(saveDestination)
The problem is that if the destination folder exists the save throws an error.
If the destination doesn't exist then I am not appending my files.
I've tried using .mode("append") but I find that Spark sometimes fails midway through so I end up loosing how much of my data is written and how much I still need to write.
I am using parquet because the partitioning substantially increases my querying in the future. As well, I must write the data as some file format on disk and cannot use a database such as Druid or Cassandra.
Any suggestions for how to partition my dataframe and save the files (either sticking to parquet or another format) is greatly appreciated.
If you need to append the files, you definitely have to use the append mode. I don't know how many partitions you expect it to generate, but I find that if you have many partitions, partitionBy will cause a number of problems (memory- and IO-issues alike).
If you think that your problem is caused by write operations taking too long, I recommend that you try these two things:
1) Use snappy by adding to the configuration:
conf.set("spark.sql.parquet.compression.codec", "snappy")
2) Disable generation of the metadata files in the hadoopConfiguration on the SparkContext like this:
sc.hadoopConfiguration.set("parquet.enable.summary-metadata", "false")
The metadata-files will be somewhat time consuming to generate (see this blog post), but according to this they are not actually important. Personally, I always disable them and have no issues.
If you generate many partitions (> 500), I'm afraid the best I can do is suggest to you that you look into a solution not using append-mode - I simply never managed to get partitionBy to work with that many partitions.
If you're using unsorted partitioning your data is going to be split across all of your partitions. That means every task will generate and write data to each of your output files.
Consider repartitioning your data according to your partition columns before writing to have all the data per output file on the same partitions:
data
.filter(validPartnerIds($"partnerID"))
.repartition([optional integer,] "partnerID","year","month","day")
.write
.partitionBy("partnerID","year","month","day")
.parquet(saveDestination)
See: DataFrame.repartition

how to cache data in apache spark that can be used by other spark job

I have a simple spark code in which I read a file using SparkContext.textFile() and then doing some operations on that data, and I am using spark-jobserver for getting output.
In code I am caching the data but after job ends and I execute that spark-job again then it is not taking that same file which is already there in cache. So, every time file is getting loaded which is taking more time.
Sample Code is as:
val sc=new SparkContext("local","test")
val data=sc.textFile("path/to/file.txt").cache()
val lines=data.count()
println(lines)
Here, if I am reading the same file then when I execute it second time then it should take data from cache but it is not taking that data from cache.
Is there any way using which I can share the cached data among multiple spark jobs?
Yes - by calling persist/cache on the RDD you get and submitting additional jobs on the same context