Tenzing: A SQL Implementation On The MapReduce Framework

http://research.google.com/pubs/pub37200.html

by motter • 15 years ago

75 16 15 years ago

research.google.com

JoachimSchipper• 15 years ago

> Tenzing is currently used internally at Google by 1000+ employees and serves 10000+ queries per day

So that's 10 queries/employee/day. That screams "experimental". Still, this would be very nice.

willvarfar2• 15 years ago

that doesn't say how big these queries are

and this was quite a while ago

civild3• 15 years ago

It would be interesting to know the identity of the vendor for "DBMS-X". I work in the "enterprise" data warehouse space and I'm trying to advocate moving away from "database appliances" towards distributed computing, and having a quotable source from Google would be very compelling.

pwang• 15 years ago

I'm curious - what sorts of work do you do in the data warehousing space? Do you work as a consultant, or as an implementor at a customer of data warehouse products?

It seems to me that that whole industry (DW & ETL) is a dinosaur whose lunch is about to get eaten by some upstarts.

jaylevitt• 15 years ago

I've read a few books on data warehousing, and maybe you can confirm my suspicion:

Isn't ETL just an acronym that means "I wrote this Perl script to populate the database"?

How on earth is that even an industry?

jackowayed• 15 years ago

Eh. Even if growth slows a lot because more and more new systems are Hadoop/etc, big companies are so tied to their legacy systems that they basically never get rid of what they have, so those companies will have significant recurring revenue from their current customers for the foreseeable future.

I also get the impression that Exadata is a pretty impressive feat of engineering and, if you need to do what it's optimized for and are prepared to pay a few million per rack, it's a very good option.

civild3• 15 years ago

Both, really. I work as a consultant for a company that provides consultancy for clients that use ETL products (software/'appliances' etc).

Your second comment is true, however the DW industry has in the last year figured this out and started to embrace the "Big Data" movement. Informatica (the largest player in the DW space according to Gartner) added HDFS connectors to its latest release, for instance.

matclayton• 15 years ago

Isn't this a Google version of Hive, which was open sourced by Facebook and provides an SQL style syntax to Hadoop. Queries aren't quick, it just allows offline data crunching to be coded quickly with out users having to code lots of map reduce. Cool concept but dont expect to see the online part of web apps powered by this.

wyuenho• 15 years ago

Well this is pretty much a given isn't it? It's just a SQL implementation. It doesn't say anything about the underlying storage and guarantees. Given that it runs on GFS and Bigtable, unless these tech supports ACID, don't expect Tenzing to be able to support it either. Here's a quote from the paper:

    Tenzing is not ACID compliant - specifically, we are atomic, consistent and
    durable, but do not support isolation.

sigil• 15 years ago

How does this relate to Dremel? I thought Dremel had a SQL frontend to MapReduce that was already in wide use at Google.

http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36632.html

benmccann• 15 years ago

Dremel is mostly used for SQL-like queries in logs processing while Tenzing is largely used to run SQL-like queries on BigTable.

seporaitis• 15 years ago

That's exactly the question I have. There seems to be couple of hints about it, e.g. in section #4.8:

"Tenzing has read-only support for structured (nested and repeated) data formats such as complex protocol buffer struc- tures. <...> The engine itself can only deal with flat relational data, unlike Dremel [17]"

And from section #5.4 I assume that currently they use Dremel query engine, but are in the works of creating another one.

yaroslavvb• 15 years ago

Dremel aka BigQuery has a dedicated execution engine, roughly an order of magnitude faster than MapReduce for typical SQL queries

willvarfar2• 15 years ago

(Related article the likely prompted this link, but has since fallen off the HN front-page just in time for the American audience is:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503866 )

Tenzing: A SQL Implementation On The MapReduce Framework

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