We Keep Coding

How to get the total count of entities in a kind in Google Cloud Datastore

I have a kind having around 5 Million entities in the Google Cloud Datastore. I want to get this count programmatically using Java. I tried following code but it work upto certain threshold (800K).
When i ran query for 5 M records, it goes into infinite loop (my guess) since it doesn't returns any count. How to get the count of entities for this big data? I would not like to use Google App Engine API since it requires to setup environment.
private static Datastore datastore;
datastore = DatastoreOptions.getDefaultInstance().getService();
Query query = Query.newKeyQueryBuilder().setKind(kind).build();
int count = Iterators.size(datastore.run(query)); //count has the entities count

How accurate do you need the count to be? For an slightly out of date count you can use a stats entity to fetch the number of entities for a kind.
If you can't use the stale counts from the stats entity, then you'll need to keep counter entities for the real time counts that you need. You should consider using a sharded counter.

Check out Google Dataflow. A pipeline like the following should do it:
def send_count_to_call_back(callback_url):
def f(record_count):
r = requests.post(callback_url, data=json.dumps({
'record_count': record_count,
}))
return f
def run_pipeline(project, callback_url)
pipeline_options = PipelineOptions.from_dictionary({
'project': project,
'runner': 'DataflowRunner',
'staging_location':'gs://%s.appspot.com/dataflow-data/staging' % project,
'temp_location':'gs://%s.appspot.com/dataflow-data/temp' % project,
# .... other options
})
query = query_pb2.Query()
query.kind.add().name = 'YOUR_KIND_NAME_GOES HERE'
p = beam.Pipeline(options=pipeline_options)
_ = (p
| 'fetch all rows for query' >> ReadFromDatastore(project, query)
| 'count rows' >> apache_beam.combiners.Count.Globally()
| 'send count to callback' >> apache_beam.Map(send_count_to_call_back(callback_url))
)
I use python, but they have a Java sdk too https://beam.apache.org/documentation/programming-guide/
The only issue is your process will have to trigger this pipeline, let it run on its own for a few minutes, and then let it hit a callback URL to let you know it's done

How to access the entries in every row and apply custom functions?

My input was a kafka-stream with only one value which is comma-separated. It looks like this.
"id,country,timestamp"
I already splitted the dataset so that i have something like the following structured stream
Dataset<Row> words = df
.selectExpr("CAST (value AS STRING)")
.as(Encoders.STRING())
.withColumn("id", split(col("value"), ",").getItem(0))
.withColumn("country", split(col("value"), ",").getItem(1))
.withColumn("timestamp", split(col("value"), ",").getItem(2));
+----+---------+----------+
|id |country |timestamp |
+----+---------+----------+
|2922|de |1231231232|
|4195|de |1231232424|
|6796|fr |1232412323|
+----+---------+----------+
Now I have a dataset with 3 columns. Now i want to use the entries in each row in a custom function e.g.
Dataset<String> words.map(row -> {
//do something with every entry of each row e.g.
Person person = new Person(id, country, timestamp);
String name = person.getName();
return name;
};
In the end i want to sink out again a comma-separated String.

Data frame has a schema so you cant just call a map function on it without defining a new schema.
You can either cast to RDD and use a map , or use a DF map with encoder.
Another option is I think you can use spark SQL with user defined functions, you can read about it.
If your use case is really simple as you are showing, doing something like :
var nameRdd = words.rdd.map(x => {f(x)})
which seems like is all you need
if you still want a dataframe you can use something like:
val schema = StructType(Seq[StructField](StructField(dataType = StringType, name = s"name")))
val rddToDf = nameRdd.map(name => Row.apply(name))
val df = sparkSession.createDataFrame(rddToDf, schema)
P.S dataframe === dataset

If you have a custom function that is not available by composing functions in the existing spark API[1], then you can either drop down to the RDD level (as #Ilya suggested), or use a UDF[2].
Typically I'll try to use the spark API functions on a dataframe whenever possible, as they generally will be the best optimized.
If thats not possible I will construct a UDF:
import org.apache.spark.sql.functions.{col, udf}
val squared = udf((s: Long) => s * s)
display(spark.range(1, 20).select(squared(col("id")) as "id_squared"))
In your case you need to pass multiple columns to your UDF, you can pass them in comma separated squared(col("col_a"), col("col_b")).
Since you are writing your UDF in Scala it should be pretty efficient, but keep in mind if you use Python, in general there will be extra latency due to data movements between JVM and Python.
[1]https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/api/scala/index.html#package
[2]https://docs.databricks.com/spark/latest/spark-sql/udf-scala.html

Can not modify value in JavaRDD

I have a question about how to update JavaRDD values.
I have a JavaRDD<CostedEventMessage> with message objects containing information about to which partition of kafka topic it should be written to.
I'm trying to change the partitionId field of such objects using the following code:
rddToKafka = rddToKafka.map(event -> repartitionEvent(event, numPartitions));
where the repartitionEvent logic is:
costedEventMessage.setPartitionId(1);
return costedEventMessage;
But the modification does not happen.
Could you please advice why and how to correctly modify values in a JavaRDD?

Spark is lazy, so from the code you pasted above it's not clear if you actually performed any action on the JavaRDD (like collect or forEach) and how you came to the conclusion that data was not changed.
For example, if you assumed that by running the following code:
List<CostedEventMessage> messagesLst = ...;
JavaRDD<CostedEventMessage> rddToKafka = javaSparkContext.parallelize(messagesLst);
rddToKafka = rddToKafka.map(event -> repartitionEvent(event, numPartitions));
Each element in messagesLst would have partition set to 1, you are wrong.
That would hold true if you added for example:
messagesLst = rddToKafka.collect();
For more details refer to documentation

Kafka GroupTable tests generating extra messages when using ProcessorTopologyTestDriver

I've written a stream that takes in messages and sends out a table of the keys that have appeared. If something appears, it will show a count of 1. This is a simplified version of my production code in order to demonstrate the bug. In a live run, a message is sent out for each message received.
However, when I run it in a unit test using ProcessorTopologyTestDriver, I get a different behavior. If a key that has already been seen before is received, I get an extra message.
If I send messages with keys "key1", then "key2", then "key1", I get the following output.
key1 - 1
key2 - 1
key1 - 0
key1 - 1
For some reason, it decrements the value before adding it back in. This only happens when using ProcessorTopologyTestDriver. Is this expected? Is there a work around? Or is this a bug?
Here's my topology:
final StreamsBuilder builder = new StreamsBuilder();
KGroupedTable<String, String> groupedTable
= builder.table(applicationConfig.sourceTopic(), Consumed.with(Serdes.String(), Serdes.String()))
.groupBy((key, value) -> KeyValue.pair(key, value), Serialized.with(Serdes.String(), Serdes.String()));
KTable<String, Long> countTable = groupedTable.count();
KStream<String, Long> countTableAsStream = countTable.toStream();
countTableAsStream.to(applicationConfig.outputTopic(), Produced.with(Serdes.String(), Serdes.Long()));
Here's my unit test code:
TopologyWithGroupedTable top = new TopologyWithGroupedTable(appConfig, map);
Topology topology = top.get();
ProcessorTopologyTestDriver driver = new ProcessorTopologyTestDriver(config, topology);
driver.process(inputTopic, "key1", "theval", Serdes.String().serializer(), Serdes.String().serializer());
driver.process(inputTopic, "key2", "theval", Serdes.String().serializer(), Serdes.String().serializer());
driver.process(inputTopic, "key1", "theval", Serdes.String().serializer(), Serdes.String().serializer());
ProducerRecord<String, Long> outputRecord = driver.readOutput(outputTopic, keyDeserializer, valueDeserializer);
assertEquals("key1", outputRecord.key());
assertEquals(Long.valueOf(1L), outputRecord.value());
outputRecord = driver.readOutput(outputTopic, keyDeserializer, valueDeserializer);
assertEquals("key2", outputRecord.key());
assertEquals(Long.valueOf(1L), outputRecord.value());
outputRecord = driver.readOutput(outputTopic, keyDeserializer, valueDeserializer);
assertEquals("key1", outputRecord.key());
assertEquals(Long.valueOf(1L), outputRecord.value()); //this fails, I get 0. If I pull another message, it shows key1 with a count of 1
Here's a repo of the full code:
https://bitbucket.org/nsinha/testtopologywithgroupedtable/src/master/
Stream topology: https://bitbucket.org/nsinha/testtopologywithgroupedtable/src/master/src/main/java/com/nick/kstreams/TopologyWithGroupedTable.java
Test code: https://bitbucket.org/nsinha/testtopologywithgroupedtable/src/master/src/test/java/com/nick/kstreams/TopologyWithGroupedTableTests.java

It's not a bug, but behavior by design (c.f. explanation below).
The difference in behavior is due to KTable state store caching (cf. https://docs.confluent.io/current/streams/developer-guide/memory-mgmt.html). When you run the unit test, the cache is flushed after each record, while in your production run, this is not the case. If you disable caching in your production run, I assume that it behaves the same as in your unit test.
Side remark: ProcessorTopologyTestDriver is an internal class and not part of public API. Thus, there is no compatibility guarantee. You should use the official unit-test packages instead: https://docs.confluent.io/current/streams/developer-guide/test-streams.html
Why do you see two records:
In your code, you are using a KTable#groupBy() and in your specific use case, you don't change the key. However, in general, the key might be changed (depending on the value of the input KTable. Thus, if the input KTable is changed, the downstream aggregation needs to remove/subtract the old key-value pair from the aggregation result, and add the new key-value pair to the aggregation result—in general, the key of the old and new pair are different and thus, it's required to generate two records because the subtraction and addition could happen on different instances as different keys might be hashed differently. Does this make sense?
Thus, for each update of the input KTable, two updates two the result KTable on usually two different key-value pairs need to be computed. For you specific case, in which the key does not change, Kafka Stream does the same thing (there is no check/optimization for this case to "merge" both operations into one if the key is actually the same).

How could a distributed queue-like-thing be implemented on top of a RBDMS or NOSQL datastore or other messaging system (e.g., rabbitmq)?

From the wouldn't-it-be-cool-if category of questions ...
By "queue-like-thing" I mean supports the following operations:
append(entry:Entry) - add entry to tail of queue
take(): Entry - remove entry from head of queue and return it
promote(entry_id) - move the entry one position closer to the head; the entry that currently occupies that position is moved in the old position
demote(entry_id) - the opposite of promote(entry_id)
Optional operations would be something like:
promote(entry_id, amount) - like promote(entry_id) except you specify the number of positions
demote(entry_id, amount) - opposite of promote(entry_id, amount)
of course, if we allow amount to be positive or negative, we can consolidate the promote/demote methods with a single move(entry_id, amount) method
It would be ideal if the following operations could be performed on the queue in a distributed fashion (multiple clients interacting with the queue):
queue = ...
queue.append( a )
queue.append( b )
queue.append( c )
print queue
"a b c"
queue.promote( b.id )
print queue
"b a c"
queue.demote( a.id )
"b c a"
x = queue.take()
print x
"b"
print queue
"c a"
Are there any data stores that are particularly apt for this use case? The queue should always be in a consistent state even if multiple users are modifying the queue simultaneously.
If it weren't for the promote/demote/move requirement, there wouldn't be much of a problem.
Edit:
Bonus points if there are Java and/or Python libraries to accomplish the task outlined above.
Solution should scale extremely well.

Redis supports lists and ordered sets: http://redis.io/topics/data-types#lists
It also supports transactions and publish/subscribe messaging. So, yes, I would say this can be easily done on redis.
Update: In fact, about 80% of it has been done many times: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=python+redis+queue
Several of those hits could be upgraded to add what you want. You would have to use transactions to implement the promote/demote operations.
It might be possible to use lua on the server side to create that functionality, rather than having it in client code. Alternatively, you could create a thin wrapper around redis on the server, that implements just the operations you want.

Python: "Batteries Included"
Rather than looking to a data store like RabbitMQ, Redis, or an RDBMS, I think python and a couple libraries have more than enough to solve this problem. Some may complain that this do-it-yourself approach is re-inventing the wheel but I prefer running a hundred lines of python code over managing another data store.
Implementing a Priority Queue
The operations that you define: append, take, promote, and demote, describe a priority queue. Unfortunately python doesn't have a built-in priority queue data type. But it does have a heap library called heapq and priority queues are often implemented as heaps. Here's my implementation of a priority queue meeting your requirements:
class PQueue:
"""
Implements a priority queue with append, take, promote, and demote
operations.
"""
def __init__(self):
"""
Initialize empty priority queue.
self.toll is max(priority) and max(rowid) in the queue
self.heap is the heap maintained for take command
self.rows is a mapping from rowid to items
self.pris is a mapping from priority to items
"""
self.toll = 0
self.heap = list()
self.rows = dict()
self.pris = dict()
def append(self, value):
"""
Append value to our priority queue.
The new value is added with lowest priority as an item. Items are
threeple lists consisting of [priority, rowid, value]. The rowid
is used by the promote/demote commands.
Returns the new rowid corresponding to the new item.
"""
self.toll += 1
item = [self.toll, self.toll, value]
self.heap.append(item)
self.rows[self.toll] = item
self.pris[self.toll] = item
return self.toll
def take(self):
"""
Take the highest priority item out of the queue.
Returns the value of the item.
"""
item = heapq.heappop(self.heap)
del self.pris[item[0]]
del self.rows[item[1]]
return item[2]
def promote(self, rowid):
"""
Promote an item in the queue.
The promoted item swaps position with the next highest item.
Returns the number of affected rows.
"""
if rowid not in self.rows: return 0
item = self.rows[rowid]
item_pri, item_row, item_val = item
next = item_pri - 1
if next in self.pris:
iota = self.pris[next]
iota_pri, iota_row, iota_val = iota
iota[1], iota[2] = item_row, item_val
item[1], item[2] = iota_row, iota_val
self.rows[item_row] = iota
self.rows[iota_row] = item
return 2
return 0
The demote command is nearly identical to the promote command so I'll omit it for brevity. Note that this depends only on python's lists, dicts, and heapq library.
Serving our Priority Queue
Now with the PQueue data type, we'd like to allow distributed interactions with an instance. A great library for this is gevent. Though gevent is relatively new and still beta, it's wonderfully fast and well tested. With gevent, we can setup a socket server listening on localhost:4040 pretty easily. Here's my server code:
pqueue = PQueue()
def pqueue_server(sock, addr):
text = sock.recv(1024)
cmds = text.split(' ')
if cmds[0] == 'append':
result = pqueue.append(cmds[1])
elif cmds[0] == 'take':
result = pqueue.take()
elif cmds[0] == 'promote':
result = pqueue.promote(int(cmds[1]))
elif cmds[0] == 'demote':
result = pqueue.demote(int(cmds[1]))
else:
result = ''
sock.sendall(str(result))
print 'Request:', text, '; Response:', str(result)
if args.listen:
server = StreamServer(('127.0.0.1', 4040), pqueue_server)
print 'Starting pqueue server on port 4040...'
server.serve_forever()
Before that runs in production, you'll of course want to do some better error/buffer handling. But it'll work just fine for rapid-prototyping. Notice that this doesn't require any locking around the pqueue object. Gevent doesn't actually run code in parallel, it just gives that impression. The drawback is that more cores won't help but the benefit is lock-free code.
Don't get me wrong, the gevent SocketServer will process multiple requests at the same time. But it switches between answering requests through cooperative multitasking. This means you have to yield the coroutine's time slice. While gevents socket I/O functions are designed to yield, our pqueue implementation is not. Fortunately, the pqueue completes it's tasks really quickly.
A Client Too
While prototyping, I found it useful to have a client as well. It took some googling to write a client so I'll share that code too:
if args.client:
while True:
msg = raw_input('> ')
sock = gsocket.socket(gsocket.AF_INET, gsocket.SOCK_STREAM)
sock.connect(('127.0.0.1', 4040))
sock.sendall(msg)
text = sock.recv(1024)
sock.close()
print text
To use the new data store, first start the server and then start the client. At the client prompt you ought to be able to do:
> append one
1
> append two
2
> append three
3
> promote 2
2
> promote 2
0
> take
two
Scaling Extremely Well
Given your thinking about a data store, it seems you're really concerned with throughput and durability. But "scale extremely well" doesn't quantify your needs. So I decided to benchmark the above with a test function. Here's the test function:
def test():
import time
import urllib2
import subprocess
import random
random = random.Random(0)
from progressbar import ProgressBar, Percentage, Bar, ETA
widgets = [Percentage(), Bar(), ETA()]
def make_name():
alphabet = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
return ''.join(random.choice(alphabet)
for rpt in xrange(random.randrange(3, 20)))
def make_request(cmds):
sock = gsocket.socket(gsocket.AF_INET, gsocket.SOCK_STREAM)
sock.connect(('127.0.0.1', 4040))
sock.sendall(cmds)
text = sock.recv(1024)
sock.close()
print 'Starting server and waiting 3 seconds.'
subprocess.call('start cmd.exe /c python.exe queue_thing_gevent.py -l',
shell=True)
time.sleep(3)
tests = []
def wrap_test(name, limit=10000):
def wrap(func):
def wrapped():
progress = ProgressBar(widgets=widgets)
for rpt in progress(xrange(limit)):
func()
secs = progress.seconds_elapsed
print '{0} {1} records in {2:.3f} s at {3:.3f} r/s'.format(
name, limit, secs, limit / secs)
tests.append(wrapped)
return wrapped
return wrap
def direct_append():
name = make_name()
pqueue.append(name)
count = 1000000
#wrap_test('Loaded', count)
def direct_append_test(): direct_append()
def append():
name = make_name()
make_request('append ' + name)
#wrap_test('Appended')
def append_test(): append()
...
print 'Running speed tests.'
for tst in tests: tst()
Benchmark Results
I ran 6 tests against the server running on my laptop. I think the results scale extremely well. Here's the output:
Starting server and waiting 3 seconds.
Running speed tests.
100%|############################################################|Time: 0:00:21
Loaded 1000000 records in 21.770 s at 45934.773 r/s
100%|############################################################|Time: 0:00:06
Appended 10000 records in 6.825 s at 1465.201 r/s
100%|############################################################|Time: 0:00:06
Promoted 10000 records in 6.270 s at 1594.896 r/s
100%|############################################################|Time: 0:00:05
Demoted 10000 records in 5.686 s at 1758.706 r/s
100%|############################################################|Time: 0:00:05
Took 10000 records in 5.950 s at 1680.672 r/s
100%|############################################################|Time: 0:00:07
Mixed load processed 10000 records in 7.410 s at 1349.528 r/s
Final Frontier: Durability
Finally, durability is the only problem I didn't completely prototype. But I don't think it's that hard either. In our priority queue, the heap (list) of items has all the information we need to persist the data type to disk. Since, with gevent, we can also spawn functions in a multi-processing way, I imagined using a function like this:
def save_heap(heap, toll):
name = 'heap-{0}.txt'.format(toll)
with open(name, 'w') as temp:
for val in heap:
temp.write(str(val))
gevent.sleep(0)
and adding a save function to our priority queue:
def save(self):
heap_copy = tuple(self.heap)
toll = self.toll
gevent.spawn(save_heap, heap_copy, toll)
You could now copy the Redis model of forking and writing the data store to disk every few minutes. If you need even greater durability then couple the above with a system that logs commands to disk. Together, those are the AFP and RDB persistence methods that Redis uses.

Websphere MQ can do almost all of this.
The promote/demote is almost possible, by removing the message from the queue and putting it back on with a higher/lower priority, or, by using the "CORRELID" as a sequence number.

What's wrong with RabbitMQ? It sounds exactly like what you need.
We extensively use Redis as well in our Production environment, but it doesn't have some of the functionality Queues usually have, like setting a task as complete, or re-sending the task if it isn't completed in some TTL. It does, on the other hand, have other features a Queue doesn't have, like it is a generic storage, and it is REALLY fast.

Use Redisson it implements familiar List, Queue, BlockingQueue, Deque java interfaces in distributed approach provided by Redis. Example with a Deque:
Redisson redisson = Redisson.create();
RDeque<SomeObject> queue = redisson.getDeque("anyDeque");
queue.addFirst(new SomeObject());
queue.addLast(new SomeObject());
SomeObject obj = queue.removeFirst();
SomeObject someObj = queue.removeLast();
redisson.shutdown();
Other samples:
https://github.com/mrniko/redisson/wiki/7.-distributed-collections/#77-list
https://github.com/mrniko/redisson/wiki/7.-distributed-collections/#78-queue https://github.com/mrniko/redisson/wiki/7.-distributed-collections/#710-blocking-queue

If you for some reason decide to use an SQL database as a backend, I would not use MySQL as it requires polling (well and would not use it for lots of other reasons), but PostgreSQL supports LISTEN/NOTIFY for signalling other clients so that they do not have to poll for changes. However, it signals all listening clients at once, so you still would require a mechanism for choosing a winning listener.
As a sidenote I am not sure if a promote/demote mechanism would be useful; it would be better to schedule the jobs appropriately while inserting...