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Fusion Parallel Bulk Loader (PBL) jobs enable bulk ingestion of structured and semi-structured data from big data systems, NoSQL databases, and common file formats like Parquet and Avro. The Parallel Bulk Loader leverages the popularity of Spark as a prominent distributed computing platform for big data. A number of companies invest heavily in building production-ready Spark SQL data source implementations for big data and NoSQL systems, much as Lucidworks has done for Solr. The Parallel Bulk Loader uses connectors provided by the experts who develop these complex systems.

Available data sources

The Parallel Bulk Loader can load documents from any system that implements the Data Sources API for Spark SQL 2.2.1 or later. These are data sources that the Parallel Bulk Loader can use. For data sources that use Spark SQL connectors, the source of the connector is indicated.
  • Solr databases
    Connector (Lucidworks): spark-solr
  • Files in these common formats: JSON, CSV, XML, Apache Avro, and Apache Parquet
  • JDBC-compliant databases
  • Apache HBase databases
    Connector (Hortonworks): Apache Spark - Apache HBase Connector
    Spark-on-HBase
  • Datasets accessible through Apache Hive
  • Apache Cassandra NoSQL databases
    Connector (DataStax): Spark-Cassandra connector
  • Elastic databases
    Connector: Elasticsearch-Hadoop connector
    Use the package: org.elasticsearch:elasticsearch-spark-20_2.11:6.2.2
  • MongoDB databases
  • Riak databases
  • Couchbase NoSQL databases
    Connector: Couchbase-Spark connector
    Use the package: com.couchbase.client:spark-connector_2.11:2.2.0
  • Redis in-memory data structure stores
  • Google data sources, including Google Analytics, Sheets, and BigQuery
    Connectors:
    Analytics Sheets Big Query
  • Microsoft Azure DataLake, Cosmos DB, and SQL Database

Key features

Key features of the Parallel Bulk Loader are:
  • Load distribution. To distribute load and maximize performance, the Parallel Bulk Loader parallelizes operations and distributes them across the Fusion Spark cluster.
  • No parsing. No parsing is needed. The Spark Data Sources API returns a DataFrame (RDD + schema) that has an easy-to-use tabular format.
  • Dynamic resolution of dependencies. There is nothing to download or install. Users just provide the Maven coordinates of dependencies during configuration, and Spark distributes the necessary JAR files to worker nodes.
  • Leverage integration libraries. Similar to JDBC, the Parallel Bulk Loader leverages integration libraries built by the experts of the underlying systems, for example, Databricks, DataStax, Hortonworks, Elastic, Lucidworks, Microsoft, and so forth.
  • Direct write operations. The Parallel Bulk Loader writes directly to Solr (for maximum performance) or to Fusion Server index pipelines (for maximum flexibility).
  • Solr atomic updates. The Parallel Bulk Loader uses atomic updates to update existing documents in Solr.
  • Incremental queries. To obtain the latest changes to data sources, macros built into the Parallel Bulk Loader use timestamps to filter queries.
  • Seamless integration with Spark-NLP. Do natural language processing, including part-of-speech tagging, stemming or lemmatization, sentiment analysis, named-entity recognition, and other NLP tasks.
  • SQL joins. Use SQL to join data from multiple Solr collections.
  • Load Fusion ML models. To classify incoming documents, load Fusion Machine Learning models stored in the Fusion blob store.
  • SQL transformations. Leverage the full power of the Spark Scala’s DataFrame APIs and SQL to filter and transform data.
  • UDF and UDAF functions. Select from hundreds of user-defined functions and user-defined aggregate functions.

Differences between the Parallel Bulk Loader and Fusion classic connectors

The primary difference between the Bulk Loader and Fusion classic connectors is that the Bulk Loader uses Spark SQL and Spark/Solr integration to perform distributed reads from data sources. Here are some examples of how the Parallel Bulk Loader performs distributed reads:
  • HBase table. To support high-volume data ingestion into Solr, the Parallel Bulk loader can distribute queries sent to HBase tables across multiple region servers.
  • Parquet files. The Parallel Bulk loader processes a directory of Parquet files in HDFS in parallel using the built-in support for computing splits in HDFS files.
  • Spark/Solr integration. With Spark/Solr integration, the Parallel Bulk Loader uses a Spark-Solr data source to send queries to all replicas of a collection, so it can read from Solr in parallel across the Spark cluster.
This diagram depicts how the Spark-Solr data source partitions queries across all shards/replicas of a Solr collection to better utilize cluster resources and to improve read performance. Most Spark-SQL data sources do something similar for their respective databases, which is one of the main benefits of using the Parallel Bulk Loader job. SolrRDD diagram In contrast, most classic connectors have only a single-fetcher mode. To scale the fetching with classic connectors, you must distribute the connector itself, which differs from relying on the built-in parallelization of Spark. Also, most classic connectors rely on Fusion parsers and index pipelines to prepare data for indexing, whereas no parsing is needed for the Parallel Bulk Loader, which can achieve maximum indexing performance by writing directly to Solr.

Learn more

Create and run Parallel Bulk Loader jobs

Use the Jobs manager to create and run Parallel Bulk Loader jobs. You can also use the Scheduler to schedule jobs.In the procedures, select Parallel Bulk Loader as the job type and configure the job as needed.

Configuration settings for the Parallel Bulk Loader job

This section provides configuration settings for the Parallel Bulk Loader job. Also see configuration properties in the Jobs Configuration Reference.

Read settings

Transformation settings

Function for transformScala:

Output settings

Tune performance

As the name of the Parallel Bulk Loader job implies, it is designed to ingest large amounts of data into Fusion by parallelizing the work across your Spark cluster. To achieve scalability, you might need to increase the amount of memory and/or CPU resources allocated to the job.By default, Fusion’s Spark configuration settings control the resources allocated to Parallel Bulk Loader jobs.You can pass these properties in the job configuration to override the default Spark shell options:Spark shell options

Examples

Here we provide screenshots and example JSON job definitions to illustrate key points about how to load from different data sources.

Use NLP during indexing

In this example, we leverage the John Snow labs NLP library during indexing. This is just quick-and-dirty to show the concept.Also see:Use this transform Scala script:
Be sure to add the JohnSnowLabs:spark-nlp:1.4.2 package using Spark Shell Options.

Clean up data with SQL transformations

Fusion has a Local Filesystem connector that can handle files such as CSV and JSON files. Using the Parallel Bulk Loader lets you leverage features that are not in the Local Filesystem connector, such as using SQL to clean up the input data.SQL transformation of CSV dataUse the following SQL to clean up the input data before indexing:

Read from S3

It is easy to read from an S3 bucket without pulling data down to your local workstation first. To avoid exposing your AWS credentials, add them to a file named core-site.xml in the apps/spark-dist/conf directory, such as:
Then you can load files using the S3a protocol, such as: s3a://sstk-dev/data/u.user. If you are running a Fusion cluster then each instance of Fusion will need a core-site.xml file. S3a is the preferred protocol for reading data into Spark because it uses Amazon’s libraries to read from S3 instead of the legacy Hadoop libraries. If you need other S3 protocols (for example, s3 or s3n) you will need to add the equivalent properties to core-site.xml.S3 Read OptionsYou will need to add the org.apache.hadoop:hadoop-aws:2.7.3 package to the job using the --packages Spark option. Also, you will need to exclude the com.fasterxml.jackson.core:jackson-core,joda-time:joda-time packages using the --exclude-packages option.S3 Spark Shell OptionsYou can also read from Google Cloud Storage (GCS), but you will need a few more properties in your core-site.xml; see Installing the Cloud Storage connector.

Read from Parquet

Reading from parquet files is built into Spark using the “parquet” format. For additional read options, see Configuration of Parquet.Read signals from parquet fileJob JSON:
This example also uses the transformScala option to filter and transform the input DataFrame into a better form for indexing using the following Scala script:

Read from JDBC tables

You can use the Parallel Bulk Loader to parallelize reads from JDBC tables, if the tables have numeric columns that can be partitioned into relatively equal partition sizes. In the example below, we partition the employees table into 4 partitions using the emp_no column (int). Behind the scenes, Spark sends four separate queries to the database and processes the result sets in parallel.

Load the JDBC driver JAR file into the Blob store

Before you ingest from a JDBC data source, you need to use the Fusion Admin UI to upload the JDBC driver JAR file into the blob store.Alternatively, you can add the JAR file to the Fusion blob store with resourceType=spark:jar; for example:
At runtime, Fusion’s Spark job management framework knows how to add any JAR files with resourceType=spark:jar from the blob store to the appropriate classpaths before running a Parallel Bulk Loader job.

Read from a table

Read from JDBC tablesFor more information on reading from JDBC-compliant databases, see:
Notice the use of the $MIN(emp_no) and $MAX(emp_no) macros in the read options. These are macros offered by the Parallel Bulk Loader to help configure parallel reads of JDBC tables. Behind the scenes, the macros are translated into SQL queries to get the MAX and MIN values of the specified field, which Spark uses to compute splits for partitioned queries. As mentioned above, the field must be numeric and must have a relatively balanced distribution of values between MAX and MIN; otherwise, you are unlikely to see much performance benefit to partitioning.

Index HBase tables

To index an HBase table, use the Hortonworks connector.
The Parallel Bulk Loader lets us replace the HBase Indexer.
You will need to add an hbase-site.xml (and possibly core-site.xml) to apps/spark-dist/conf in Fusion, for example:
For this example, we will create a test table in HBase. If you already have a table in HBase, feel free to use that table instead.
  1. Launch the HBase shell and create a table named fusion_nums with a single column family named lw:
  2. Do a list command to see your table:
  3. Fill the table with some data:
  4. Scan the fusion_nums table to see your data:
The HBase connector requires a catalog read option that defines the columns you want to read and how to map them into a Spark DataFrame. For our sample table, the following suffices:
Index HBase tablesNotice the use of the $lastTimestamp macro in the read options. This lets us filter rows read from HBase using the timestamp of the last document the Parallel Bulk Loader wrote to Solr, that is, to get the newest updates from HBase only (incremental updates). Most Spark data sources provide a way to filter results based on timestamp.Job JSON:

Index Elastic data

With Elasticsearch 6.2.2 using the org.elasticsearch:elasticsearch-spark-20_2.11:6.2.1 package, here is a Scala script to run in bin/spark-shell to index some test data:
ElasticJob JSON:

Read from Couchbase

To index a Couchbase bucket, use the official Couchbase Spark connector found here.For example, we will create a test bucket in Couchbase. If you already have a bucket in Couchbase, feel free to use that and skip to the test data setup section. This test was performed using Couchbase Server 6.0.0.
  1. Create a bucket test in the Couchbase admin UI. Give access to a system account user to use in the Parallel Bulk Loader job config.
  2. Connect to Couchbase using the command line client cbq. For example, cbq -e=http://<host>:8091 -u <user> -p <password>. Ensure the provided user is an authorized user of the test bucket.
  3. Create a primary index on the test bucket: CREATE PRIMARY INDEX 'test-primary-index' ON 'test' USING GSI;.
  4. Insert some data: INSERT INTO 'test' ( KEY, VALUE ) VALUES ( "1", { "id": "01", "field1": "a value", "field2": "another value"} ) RETURNING META().id as docid, *;.
  5. Verify you can query the document just inserted: select * from 'test';.
To ingest from this bucket with the Parallel Bulk Loader, use the Couchbase Spark connector by specifying the format com.couchbase.spark.sql.DefaultSource. Then specify the com.couchbase.client:spark-connector_2.11:2.2.0 package as the spark shell --packages option, as well as a few spark settings that direct the connector to a particular Couchbase server and bucket to connect to using the provided credentials. See here for all of the available Spark configuration settings for the Couchbase Spark connector.Putting it all together:Couchbase

XML setup

XML is a supported format that requires settings for format and --packages. In addition, you must specify the filepath in the readOptions section. For example: