Hive - Bucketing and Partitioning

Question

What should be basis for us to narrow down whether to use partition or bucketing on a set of columns in Hive?

Suppose we have a huge data set, where we have two columns which are queried most often - so my obvious choice might be to make the partition based on these two columns, but also if this would result into a huge number of small files created in huge number of directories, than it would be a wrong decision to partition data based on these columns, and may be bucketing would have been a better option to do.

Can we define a methodology using which we can decide if we should go for bucketing or partitioning?

Answer 1

Bucketing and partitioning are not exclusive, you can use both.

My short answer from my fairly long hive experience is "you should ALWAYS use partitioning, and sometimes you may want to bucket too".

If you have a big table, partitioning helps reducing the amount of data you query. A partition is usually represented as a directory on HDFS. A common usage is to partition by year/month/day, since most people query by date. The only drawback is that you should not partition on columns with a big cardinality. Cardinality is a fundamental concept in big data, it's the number of possible values a column may have. 'US state' for instance has a low cardinality (around 50), while for instance 'ip_number' has a large cardinality (2^32 possible numbers). If you partition on a field with a high cardinality, hive will create a very large number of directories in HDFS, which is not good (extra memory load on namenode).

Bucketing can be useful, but you also have to be disciplined when inserting data into a table. Hive won't check that the data you're inserting is bucketed the way it's supposed to. A bucketed table has to do a CLUSTER BY, which may add an extra step in your processing. But if you do lots of joins, they can be greatly sped up if both tables are bucketed the same way (on the same field and the same number of buckets). Also, once you decide the number of buckets, you can't easily change it.

Answer 2

Partioning :

Partioning is decomposing/dividing your input data based on some condition e.g: Date, Country here.

CREATE TABLE logs (ts BIGINT, line STRING) PARTITIONED BY (dt STRING, country STRING);

LOAD DATA LOCAL INPATH 'input/hive/partitions/file1' INTO TABLE logs PARTITION (dt='2012-01-01', country='GB');

Files created in warehouse as below after loading data:

/user/hive/warehouse/logs/dt=2012-01-01/country=GB/file1/

/user/hive/warehouse/logs/dt=2012-01-01/country=GB/file2/

/user/hive/warehouse/logs/dt=2012-01-01/country=US/file3/

/user/hive/warehouse/logs/dt=2012-01-02/country=GB/file4/

/user/hive/warehouse/logs/dt=2012-01-02/country=US/file5/

/user/hive/warehouse/logs/dt=2012-01-02/country=US/file6

SELECT ts, dt, line FROM logs WHERE country='GB';

This query will only scan file1, file2 and file4.

Bucketing :

Bucketing is further Decomposing/dividing your input data based on some other conditions.

There are two reasons why we might want to organize our tables (or partitions) into buckets.

The first is to enable more efficient queries. Bucketing imposes extra structure on the table, which Hive can take advantage of when performing certain queries. In particular, a join of two tables that are bucketed on the same columns – which include the join columns – can be efficiently implemented as a map-side join.

The second reason to bucket a table is to make sampling more efficient. When working with large datasets, it is very convenient to try out queries on a fraction of your dataset while you are in the process of developing or refining them.

Let’s see how to tell Hive that a table should be bucketed. We use the CLUSTERED BY clause to specify the columns to bucket on and the number of buckets:

CREATE TABLE student (rollNo INT, name STRING) CLUSTERED BY (id) INTO 4 BUCKETS;

SELECT * FROM student TABLESAMPLE(BUCKET 1 OUT OF 4 ON rand());