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State of Data Engineering Q3 2024

Here is this quarter’s state of data engineering newsletter. There is only a little chat about AI this time, and a focus on Open Table Formats, the Apache Iceberg Rest Spec, Open Table Format updates, and new updates in the Amazon Data Engineering ecosystem.

Prompt Engineering – Meta Analysis Whitepaper


One of my favorite AI podcasts, Latent Space, recently featured Sander Schulhoff, one of the authors of a comprehensive research paper on prompt engineering. This meta-study reviews over 1,600 published papers, with co-authors from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Stanford. 
 
[podcast] 
https://www.latent.space/p/learn-prompting 

 
[whitepaper] 
https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06608 

 
The whitepaper is an interesting academic deep dive into prompting, and how to increase the quality of it through exemplars (examples provided into an LLM), but not providing too many (more than 20 hurts quality), and strange things like Minecraft agents are tools to understand how this ecosystem works. 
 
Other practical tips are given where asking for data in JSON and XML generally is more accurate and results formatted based of the LLM’s training data is better.  That does kind of lead to a problem if you don’t know what the training data is based off 
 
It provides a wide range of tools outside of the two common ones we use the most – chain of thought – which is a multi turn conversation, and retrieval augmented generation (RAG). 
 
We can expect in the next couple of years where LLMs themselves will integrate these workflows so we don’t care about it anymore, but if you want to squeak out some better performance this paper is worth reading. 

Open Table Format Wars – Continued

As a quick refresher, the history of data engineering kind of goes like this in 30 seconds

  1. 1980s – big data warehouses exist.  SQL is lingua franca
  2. 2000s – Apache Hadoop ecosystem comes out to address limitations of data warehouses to cope with size and processing
  3. 2010s – Datalakes emerge where data is still in cloud storage (E.G. Amazon S3)
  4. 2020ish – Datalakehouses or Transactional Datalakes come out to address limitations of Datalakes capability to be ACID compliant
  5. 2023 –  Consensus emerges over the term Open Table Format (OTF) with three contenders
    • Apache Hudi
    • Databrick Deltalake
    • Apache Iceberg
  6. Mid 2024s
    • June 3, 2024 – Snowflake announces Polaris catalog support for Apache Iceberg
    • June 4, 2024 – Databricks buys Tabular (thereby bringing in the founders of Apache Iceberg)

Historically, we see a major shift in technology about every 20 years, with older systems being overhauled to meet new paradigms. Consider the companies that fully embraced Apache Hadoop in the 2000s—they’re now in the process of rebuilding their systems. Right now we are in the middle of the maturing of open table formats.

Data has always kind challenging to deal with because the nature of data is messy, and moving data from one system to another seems simple, but is quite a bit of work as we know most ETL rarely is straight forward when taking into accounts SLAs, schema changes, data volumes, etc.

OTFs really matter for us when we deal with big data, and especially for extremely large data (think Uber or Netflix size data).  Databases usually can handle the blue and green without problem, but break at the yellow and red.

When working with your data platform, these are key questions you should be asking to help in refining your technology stack.

  • How much data is being processed (are we talking hundreds of gigabytes, terabytes, or petabytes?)
  • What is the SLA the data needs to be queried?
  • What is the existing data foot print in your organization (are you using a lot of MySQL, Microsoft, etc)
  • Does the organization have the capability to own the engineering effort of an OTF platform?
  • Do any of the customer’s data sources work for ZeroETL (like Salesforce, Aurora MySQL/Postgres, RDS?)
  • Is the customer already using Databricks, Hudi, Snowflake, Iceberg, Redshift, or Big Query?

The Future: Interoperability via the Apache Iceberg Catalog API

Apache Iceberg, which emerged from Netflix recently has recently been making a lot of news lately. From the acquisition of Tabular (basically the guys who founded Iceberg), to Snowflake open sourcing the Polaris catalog, to Databricks support in private preview, many signs are pointing to a more cross compatible future if certain conditions are met.

In this article

https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/introducing-polaris-catalog/

There is a pretty important diagram where it shows cross compatibility of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. We aren’t here yet, but if all 3 vendors move towards implementing the Apache Iceberg HTTP Catalog API spec, that means cross federated querying will be possible.

I’m hopeful, because ETL’ing data from one place to another place has always been a huge hassle. This type of future really opens up interesting workloads where compute really can be separate even from your cloud.

Everything is a little strange to me, because moving towards the future really isn’t a technology problem, but more of a political one if each cloud choose to move that direction. We are getting signs, but I would say by this time next year, we will learn the intentions of all players. Meanwhile, stay tuned.


New emerging technology: DuckDB

DuckDB was created in 2018 and is a fast in-process analytical database.  There is a hosted version called MotherDuck, which is based off a serverless offering. DuckDB takes a different approach where you can run analysis on a large data set either via a CLI or your favorite programming language.  The mechanisms are slightly different where the compute runs closer to your application itself.


Article: Running Iceberg and Serverless DuckDB in AWS

https://www.definite.app/blog/cloud-iceberg-duckdb-aws

In this article, DuckDB can query Iceberg tables stored in S3.  Also, as an alternative it describes deploying DuckDB in a serverless environment using ECS with custom containers via HTTP requests.

In the future, I expect AWS to take more notice and integrate DuckDB in the ecosystem in the next couple of years. 

ChatGPT even has a DuckDB analyst ready

https://chatgpt.com/g/g-xRmMntE3W-duckdb-data-analyst

Use Cases:

  • Say you have a lot of log data in EC2.  Typically, you would load it into S3 and query via Athena.  Instead you could  load the data in EC2, and then load a DuckDB instance there where you can query it without penalty for exploration
  • Preprocessing and pre-cleaning of user-generated data for machine learning training
  • Any type of system that previously used SQLite
  • Exploration of any data sets if it is on your laptop – this one is a no brainer.

— Iceberg Updates:



[Article]: The AWS Glue Data Catalog now supports storage optimization of Apache Iceberg tables


TLDR: Iceberg now supports snapshot and orphan file removal
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/the-aws-glue-data-catalog-now-supports-storage-optimization-of-apache-iceberg-tables/

Amazon previously tackled the issue of small file accumulation in Apache Iceberg tables by introducing automatic compaction. This feature consolidated small files into larger ones, improving query performance and reducing metadata overhead, ultimately optimizing storage and enhancing analytics workloads.

Building on this, Amazon has now released a new feature in AWS Glue Data Catalog that automatically deletes expired snapshots and removes orphan files. This addition helps control storage costs and maintain compliance with data retention policies by cleaning up unnecessary data, offering a more complete solution for managing Iceberg tables efficiently.

[Feature]: Accelerate query performance with Apache Iceberg statistics on the AWS Glue Data Catalog

TLDR: If you want faster SLA in Iceberg tables, run the table statistics feature for a potential of 24 –> 80% in improvement in query time

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/accelerate-query-performance-with-apache-iceberg-statistics-on-the-aws-glue-data-catalog

Column-level statistics are a method for enhancing the query performance of Iceberg tables in Amazon Redshift Spectrum and Athena. These statistics are based on the Puffin file format and allow query engines to optimize SQL operations more effectively. You can enable this feature via the AWS Console or by running an AWS Glue job. According to the performance data in the blog post, improvements range from 24% to 83%, simply by running a job to store metadata.

Summary:

  • Use this if you have large datasets and need consistent query performance. Small datasets may not benefit enough to justify the effort.
  • Be aware of the overhead involved in running and maintaining statistics jobs.
  • Since data will likely change over time, you should set up automated jobs to periodically regenerate the statistics to maintain performance gains. While manual effort is required now, this feature could be more integrated into the platform in the future.

[Article]: Petabyte-Scale Row-Level Operations in Data Lakehouses
Authors: Apache Foundation, Apple Employees, Founder of Apache Iceberg

TLDR: If you need to do petabyte scale row level changes, read this paper.
https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol17/p4159-okolnychyi.pdf

We rarely have run into the scale of needed to run petabyte row level changes, but it details a strategy with these techniques


    
TechniqueExplanationHudi EquivalentDatabricks Equivalent
Eager MaterializationRewrites entire data files when rows are modified; suitable for bulk updates.Copy-on-Write (COW)Data File Replacement
Lazy MaterializationCaptures changes in delete files, applying them at read time; more efficient for sparse updates.Merge-on-Read (MOR)Delete Vectors
Position DeletesTracks rows for deletion based on their position within data files. Delete Vectors
Equality DeletesDeletes rows based on specific column values, e.g., row ID or timestamp. Delete Vectors
Storage-Partitioned JoinsEliminates shuffle costs by ensuring data is pre-partitioned based on join keys. Low Shuffle MERGE
Runtime FilteringDynamically filters out unnecessary data during query execution to improve performance. Runtime Optimized Filtering
Executor CacheCaches delete files in Spark executors to avoid redundant reads and improve performance.  
Adaptive WritesDynamically adjusts file sizes and data distribution at runtime to optimize storage and prevent skew.  
Minor CompactionMerges delete files without rewriting the base data to maintain read performance.Compaction in MOR 
Hybrid MaterializationCombines both eager and lazy materialization strategies to optimize different types of updates.  

The paper also half reads as a marketing paper for Iceberg, but the interesting aspect is that half of the authors are from Apple.  One of the authors of that paper also made this video on how Apache Iceberg is used at Apple.

Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKrkB8NGwdY

[Article]: Faster EMR 7.1 workloads for Iceberg

TLDR: EMR 7.1 runs faster on its customized Spark runtime onEC2

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/amazon-emr-7-1-runtime-for-apache-spark-and-iceberg-can-run-spark-workloads-2-7-times-faster-than-apache-spark-3-5-1-and-iceberg-1-5-2

This article essentially serves as marketing for Amazon EMR, but it also demonstrates the product team’s commitment to enhancing performance with Apache Iceberg. It’s a slightly curious comparison, as most users on AWS would likely already be using EMR rather than managing open-source Spark on EC2. Nevertheless, the article emphasizes that EMR’s custom Spark runtime optimizations are significantly faster than running open-source Spark (OSS) on EC2.

  1. Optimizations for DataSource V2 (dynamic filtering, partial hash aggregates).
  2. Iceberg-specific enhancements (data prefetching, file size-based estimation).
  3. Better query planning and optimized physical operators for faster execution.
  4. Integration with Amazon S3 for reduced I/O and data scanning.
  5. Java runtime improvements for better memory and garbage collection management.
  6. Optimized joins and aggregations, reducing shuffle and join overhead.
  7. Increased parallelism and efficient task scheduling for better cluster utilization.
  8. Improved resource management and autoscaling for cost and performance optimization.

[Article]: Using Amazon Data Firehose to populate Iceberg Tables
TLDR: Use this technique if you might need Iceberg tables from the raw zone for streaming data and you need ACID guarantees

 https://www.tind.au/blog/firehose-iceberg/

Recently, a sharp-eyed developer spotted an exciting new feature in a GitHub Changelog: Amazon Data Firehose now has the ability to write directly to Iceberg tables. This feature could be hugely beneficialfor anyone working with streaming data and needing ACID guarantees in their data lake architecture.

Warning: This feature isn’t production-ready yet, but it’s promising enough that we should dive into how it works and how it simplifies the data pipeline.

: An Interesting Future: Example of Iceberg being queried from Snowflake and Databricks

Randy Pitcher from Databricks shows an example how an Iceberg table created in Databricks is queried with Snowflake.   As mentioned earlier, the chattering is not all vendors are fully implemented the Catalog API spec (yet), but once this gets mature in 2026-ish, expect the ability to query data across cloud to be possible.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/randypitcherii_snowflake-is-killing-it-with-their-iceberg-ugcPost-7239751397779419136-z1ue

Redshift Updates

Major updates for Zero ETL

All Other AWS Updates:

Other

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