Category: Data Warehouse

Database Supercomputing in the Cloud

This post will combine the information in the last two posts to show how the cloud might be used as a database supercomputer at no extra cost. 

To quickly recap: in the post here, you saw a simple model that shows how a cluster dedicated to a single query uses the on-demand resources of cloud computing to provide a 10X-100X performance boost over a multitasking cluster running many queries at once. Note that this model did not account for the start-up time of spinning up a new cluster instance for each query, but we assume that there is still a significant saving for queries that run for several minutes. Further, we believe that queries can be queued and run one at a time on clusters to reduce the start-up costs whenever there is work queued. 

The next post here reminded us of the cost of populating cache from DRAM whenever there is a multitask context switch from one query to the next. You also saw how supercomputing SIMD instructions further accelerate processing. Finally, we discussed how modern columnar databases store data as vectors in a way that allows compressed columnar data to be loaded directly into cache to optimize the use of that memory. 

One last note: all the cores share the L3 cache in a chip. On a 4-CPU processor, this means that you could run 4 parallel processes, all on compressed vectorized data. 

So how might the cloud help here? First, if we dedicate a cluster to query processing where “dedicate” means that the hardware is dedicated to a single queue of queries, then once the query data is loaded in memory and the cache is primed, the performance can be 1000X the speed of an alternative configuration where the hardware is shared both by a multitasking DBMS and that DBMS is sharing the cluster with other cloud workloads dispatched by the cloud operating system. Better still, since in the cloud using fine-grained billing, you pay only for what you use, so this extra performance is nearly free. 

When SAP HANA was introduced, SAP published amazing 1000X benchmarks using in-memory supercomputing instructions. Unfortunately, the technology did not quite exist to deploy queries on-demand on tens or hundreds or thousands of dedicated cloud computers. I imagine that we are not too far from this today. 

The bottom line is that multitasking has never been efficient. When you swap context in and out of cache, you are just wasting resources. It made sense when computing was expensive, and you swapped context to take advantage of the time it took to perform I/O to disk or tape. For analytic workloads where the data is columnar and vectorized, you can fit multiple terabytes of compressed data in memory and stream it to supercomputing instructions quickly.  

I imagine a time when simple, very high performance, single-threaded database processing units, similar in architecture to GPUs, will handle queries in a dedicated manner, fetching vectorized data from products like Apache Arrow, and 1000X speed-up at a very low cost will be the standard. 

Numbers Every Database Professional Should Know

Latency Estimates in a Processor

In this post I will setup the next post by reminding you of these numbers every programmer should know. The picture shows the latency to access data across the three levels of cache in a modern processor, and across the memory bus to DRAM, and then across to an SSD or spinning disk drive. 

These numbers are the key to in-memory database performance. L1 cache is expensive and small. All data and all instructions are fed to the core through the L1 cache and typically the instruction and the data it will operate on are each fetched independently. If the data (or instruction… but I will just talk about the data from here on out) is not found in the small L1 cache the L2 cache is searched. Likewise, if the data is not in the L2 cache the L3 cache is searched and then DRAM. As you can see there is a 200X performance difference between a fetch from L1 cache and a fetch from DRAM. If the data must be fetched from SSD or disk, there is a 1000X penalty. 

Databases work to mitigate the 1000X penalty by pre-fetching data into DRAM. Modern processors mitigate the penalty between cache and DRAM by trying to anticipate the data required and pre-fetching it into L3 cache. This is a gamble and the likelihood of winning the pre-fetch bet varies with your DBMS and with the workload. More simultaneous queries against many tables puts pressure on the memory and lessens the effectiveness of data pre-fetch. 

Databases also mitigate the 1000X penalty by compressing data so that each fetch of a block from disk captures more data. For tabular (not columnar) data each block must be decompressed before it can be used. Decompression steals CPU cycles from query processing but mitigates some of the cost of I/O to disk. Columnar databases fetch compressed data and, if the databases use modern vector processing techniques, they operate directly on the compressed vector data without decompression. This is especially powerful as these vectorized columnar databases can push compressed data into cache and use that memory more effectively. 

Vectorized data can use the supercomputing instruction set that includes SIMD instructions. SIMD stands for Single Instruction; Multiple Data and these instructions fetch a single instruction from L1 cache and reuse it on the vectorized data over and over with pausing to fetch new instructions. Note that in a modern processor waiting for instructions or data to be fetched from cache or DRAM appears as CPU busy time. When the processor is stalled waiting for data to be fetched from disk the query/job gives up the CPU and dispatches a new query/job. 

Finally, for the longer-running queries associated with analytics and business intelligence (where long-running means a few seconds or more… “long” in CPU instruction time), it is highly likely that the L1 and L2 cache in each core will be flushed and new data will be fetched. It is even likely that all the data in L3 cache will be flushed. In this case most of the goodness associated with compression and vectorization is flushed with it. The vectors must be fetched again from L3 and DRAM. Further, note that when you run in a virtual machine or in the cloud you may think that you are the only user but other virtual machines other containers, or other serverless processes may be flushing you out of memory all the time. 

This is important. Until we swapped out a query for a new one it looked like in-memory vector processing might be 200X-1000X faster than a tabular query; but in an environment where tens or hundreds of queries are running concurrently the pressure on memory keeps flushing the cache and the advantage of vectorized query processing is reduced. Reduced, not eliminated. We would still expect the advantages of compressed data in cache and SIMD supercomputing instructions to provide much more than a 10X speedup. 

As mentioned, this post is a detailed review of material I covered years ago when HANA was introduced. In the next post I will add some new thinking. 

Here is more information on processor architecture and cache usage.

DW Cloud Economics – The Model

This post describe the model used to generate the content from the DW Cloud Economics – A Do Over post incase you want to check the numbers…

First, keep in mind that the numbers in this model are relative and indicative, not absolute. Here are the fixed parameters I used to generate these indicative numbers:

Cost per server per hour: $4.00 This could be any number or any currency and it would not matter.

Runtime per job with no contention: 3 hours This could be any duration and it would not change the relative results. If the number was well below an hour, it would increase the hour-based billing costs.

Jobs per Workload: 6 Again any number works.

Baseline Configuration: 24 Servers

Contention between 6 jobs on 24 Servers: 50% This sets the average amount of time a job will wait for resources. So, a job that runs for 3 hours with no contention will run in 4.5 hours with 50% contention. As the number of servers goes up the contention comes down for a fixed workload.

Baseline Performance: 2000 A completely arbitrary number that allows the model to calculate a relative price/performance. Relative “Performance” is calculated by dividing the Baseline Performance by the actual runtime. This means that a workload that takes 5 hours will yield a performance of 400 and a workload that take 2 hours will yield a performance number of 1000.

There are also a series of calculated values:

Total Servers / Workload is equal to Servers/Job for the Multi-tasking and Serial Execution configurations. It is equal to Servers/Job * Number of Jobs for the dedicated server per job configuration.

Scaleup is the ratio between the number of Total Servers / Workload and the Baseline Configuration. It is used to scale down the runtime and the contention.

Runtime / Job is the number of hours per job with no contention scaled down based on the Scaleup plus the time the Job is waiting due to contention. Contention scales down as the number of servers scales up.

Actual Runtime / Workload is Runtime / Job plus contention. Note that in the Serial Configuration and the Dedicated Server configuration there is no contention.

Paid Runtime / Workload is the Actual Runtime / Workload rounded to the nearest hour for the hourly billing table and equal to the Actual Runtime / Workload for the billing per minute table.

Cost / Workload is the Cost per Server per Hour parameter times the Paid Runtime / Hour value times the Total Servers / Workload value.

Price / Performance is the Cost / Workload divided by the Actual Runtime / Workload times the Baseline Performance parameter divided by the Cost / Workload value as noted above.

DB Cloud Economics – A Do Over

Here is a better model that demonstrates how cloudy databases can provide dramatic performance increases without increasing costs.

Mea culpa… I was going to extend the year-old series of posts on the economics of cloud computing and recognized that I poorly described the simple model I used, and worse, made some mistakes in the model. It was very lame. I’m so sorry… That said, I hope that you will like the extension to the model and the new conclusions.

I’ll get to those conclusions in a few short paragraphs and add a new post to explain the model.

If we imagine a workload consisting of 6 “jobs” that would execute on a dedicated cluster of 24 servers in 3 hours each with no contention, we can build a simple model to determine the price performance of the workload for three different configurations:

  1. M1: The usual configuration where all six jobs run together and share the configuration, multitasking and contending for the resources. As the configuration scales up the cost goes up, the runtime goes down, and the contention drops.
  2. M2: A silly model where each job runs serially on the configuration with no contention. As the configuration scales up the costs go up, the runtime goes down.
  3. M3: A model where each job runs independently, simultaneously, on its own cluster with no contention.

If we pay for servers by the hour the model shows that there is an opportunity to deploy many more servers, as many as one per “job”, to reduce the runtime and the cost. Here are the results:

ConfigServers DeployedActual Runtime / Workload (Hours)Paid Runtime / Workload
(Hours)		Cost / WorkloadPrice / Performance
Multitasking244.55$480444
 483.84$768533
 963.44$1,536593
Serial Execution2418.018$1,728111
 489.09$1,728222
 964.54.5$1,920444
Dedicated Server per Job1440.51$5764000
 2880.31$1,1528000
 5760.11$2,30416000
Table 1. Costs with Hourly Billing

Note that the price/performance metric is relative across the models. You can see the dramatic performance and price/performance increases using a configuration where each unit of work gets a dedicated set of resources. But the more dramatic picture is exposed in Table 2.

ConfigurationServers DeployedActual Runtime / Workload (Hours)Paid Runtime / Workload (Hours)Cost / WorkloadPrice / Performance
Multitasking244.54.5$432444
 483.83.8$720533
 963.43.4$1,296593
Serial Execution2418.018.0$1,728111
 489.099.0$1,728222
 964.54.5$1,728444
Dedicated Server per Job1440.50.5$2884000
 2880.30.3$2888000
 5760.10.1$28816000
Table 2. Costs with per Minute Billing

Here the granular billing reduces the total cost with the same dramatic price and price/performance increases. This was the point I was trying to make in my earlier posts. Note that this point, that fine-grained billing can be used to significantly reduce costs, is why deploying work in containers, or better still as serverless transactions, is so cost-effective. It is why deploying virtual machines in the cloud misses the real cost savings. In other words, it is why building cloud-native implementations is so important and why cloud-native databases will quickly overcome databases that cannot get there.

I also was trying to show that work deployed across these configurations, what I call a “job”, can be ETL jobs or single queries or a set of queries or a Spark job. If you have lots of smaller work, it may be best to run them in a multitasking configuration to avoid the cost of tearing down and starting up new configurations. But even here there is a point where the tear down cost can be mitigated across multiple semi-dedicated configurations.

A Segue from ETL to DB

This is a short post to segue to point where I’ve been headed all along. Figure 1 recasts the picture from the last post, showing storage separated from compute from ETL/ELT to a data warehouse. It should be a familiar picture to Snowflake architects who may have implemented multiple DW instances against a single storage layer.

Decoupled Multi Instance DW
Figure 1. Multiple DW Compute Instances Decoupled from Shared Storage

I’ll not give away the next article, other than to say that it derives from the same concepts just discussed.

Since this is so short, I will add a tangent just-for-fun.

Here is a post from seven years ago that anticipates how the cloud impacts DW performance. When you combine this with the economics presented in the last two posts (here and here), suggesting that performance is free, you can begin to see why database tuning is no longer an urgent requirement for a data warehouse.

When you tune, you specialize for a particular workload, and if your workload changes, the tuning wears thin. In other words, I now believe that you should build a robust data warehouse with minimal tuning and use cloud compute to get performance. No tuning lets you add a new workload without adjusting. Tuning makes your database fragile in the face of change.

Hadoop and Company Financial Performance

I have posted several times about the impact of the Hadoop eco-system on a several companies (here, here, here, for example). The topic cam up in a tweet thread a few weeks back… which prompts this quick note.

Fours years ago the street price for a scalable, parallel, enterprise data warehouse platform was $US25K-$US35K per terabyte. This price point provided vendors like Teradata, Netezza, and Greenplum reasonable, lucrative, margins. Hadoop entered the scene and captured the Big Data space from these vendors by offering 20X slower performance at 1/20th the price: $US1K-$US5K per terabyte. The capture was immediate and real… customers who were selecting these products for specialized, very large, 1PB and up deployments switched to Hadoop as fast as possible.

Now, two trends continue to eat at the market share of parallel database products.

First, relational implementations on HDFS continue to improve in performance and they are now 4X-10X slower than the best parallel databases at 1/10th-1/20th the street price. This puts pressure on prices and on margins for these relational vendors and this pressure is felt.

In order to keep their installed base of customers in the fold these vendors have built ever more sophisticated integration between their relational products and Hadoop. This integration, however, allows customers to significantly reduce expense by moving large parts of their EDW to an Annex (see here)… and this trend has started. We might argue whether an EDW Annex should store the coldest 80% or the coldest 20% of the data in your EDW… but there is little doubt that some older data could satisfy SLAs by delivering 4X-10X slower performance.

In addition, these trends converge. If you can only put 20% of your old, cold data in an Annex that is 10X slower than your EDW platform then you might put 50% of your data into an Annex that is only 4X slower. As the Hadoop relational implementations continue to add columnar, in-memory, and other accelerators… ever more data could move to a Hadoop-based EDW Annex.

I’ll leave it to the gamblers who read this to guess the timing and magnitude of the impact of Hadoop on the relational database markets and on company financial performance. I cannot see how it cannot have an impact.

Well, actually I can see one way out. If the requirement for hot data that requires high performance accelerates faster than the high performance advances of Hadoop then the parallel RDBMS folks will hold their own or advance. Maybe the Internet of Things helps here…. but I doubt it.

Database Super-computing

Today I am going to focus on a topic that I’ve suggested previously without the right emphasis: the new database architecture that uses vector processing on compressed columns to significantly accelerate performance.

The term “super-computing” was coined to describe the extreme hardware and software optimization developed to crunch numbers in scientific applications. As these technologies developed super-computer hardware evolved to leverage parallel microcomputers, software evolved to better leverage parallelism. Recently, microcomputers have started to incorporate the specialized instructions that support advanced mathematical applications. These super-computer instructions directly support vector algebra by manipulating strings of bits, vectors, in a single instruction. Finally, application developers recognized that these bit strings, these vectors, could be loaded into the microprocessors in a more effective manner to optimize their applications to the bare metal.

The effect of these optimizations accumulate for these applications as vectors compress and use memory more effectively, vectors load into processor cache more effectively, and vector instructions dramatically outperform integer instructions. The cumulative effect is that super-computer programs may be 10X-100X faster than commercial applications that provide the same result.

As this evolution progressed there was a similar evolution changing the architecture of database technology. Databases actually leveraged microcomputers before the high performance space made the move. But databases focused on the benefits of massively parallel I/O more than on the benefits of parallel compute. The drive to minimize the cost of I/O eventually led database developers to implement column store and then a very interesting discovery was made. Engineers recognized that a highly compressed column, a string of bits, could be processed as a vector.

Let’s see if we can make this 10X-100X number more than marketing foam. We can do this by roughly comparing the low-level processing of a chunk of data in integer and then in vector formats.

Let’s skip I/O processing and just focus on internals. This simplification greatly favors our integer DBMS. Keep in mind that the vector DBMS will process compressed vector data directly while the integer DBMS will expend resources to uncompress data and then take up 4X or more memory. This less efficient memory utilization will increase the chance that an I/O may be required and I/O is very expensive in the scenario we will discuss. Even an I/O on 1% of the time by the integer DBMS will provide a 1000X-100,000X advantage to the vector DBMS (see Figure 8 to gauge the latency to SSD or to disk).

Figure 8. Some Latency Metrics
Figure 8. Some Latency Metrics

So we’ll start with uncompressed integer data versus compressed vector data. We can assume that both databases are effective at populating cache. But the 4X compression advantage means that the vector processor is more likely to find data in the fast Level 1 cache and in the mid-range L2 cache. Given the characteristics outlined in Figure 8 we might suggest that the vector database is 4X more likely of finding data in cache than the integer database and that if we assume the latency of L2 cache as an estimate this results in a 15X-200X performance advantage.

Since data is in a vector form we can perform relational algebra and basic mathematics using vector algebra and vector addition. This provides another 8X-50X boost to the vector side

When we combine these advantages we see that a 10X-100X advantage is conservative. The bottom line is clear. A columnar database that effectively manages vectors into cache and further utilizes super-computing instructions will significantly out-perform an integer-based product.

The era of database super-computing has begun.

A New Way of Thinking About EDW Federation

There is a new way to think about data warehouse architecture. The Gartner Group calls it a logical data warehouse and it uses database federation to dynamically integrate a universe of data warehouses, operational data stores, and data marts into a single, united, structure. This blog has suggested that there is a special case of the logical data warehouse that uses Hadoop to provide a modern data warehouse architecture with significant economic advantages (see here, here, and here).

This is the second post inspired by my chats with Bityota… and sort of, but not altogether, commercial in nature (the first post is here). That is, Bityota will use these posts in their collateral… but you won’t see foam about their products in the narrative below.

– Rob

The economics are driven by the ability, through database federation, to place tables on a less expensive database platform. In short, the aim is to place data on the least expensive platform that still provides enough performance to satisfy service level agreements (SLAs). In the case of the modern data warehouse architecture this means placing older, colder, data on Hadoop where the costs may be $1000/TB instead of having all of the data in a single data warehouse platform at a parallel RDBMS price point of $35,000/TB. Federation allows these two layers to seem as one to any program or end-user.

This approach may be thought of as a data life cycle infrastructure that has significantly more economic power that the hardware based life cycles suggested by database vendors to date. Let’s consider some of the trade-offs that define the hardware approach and the Hadoop-based approach.

The power of Hadoop federation comes from its ability to manage data placement at a macro level. Here, data is placed appropriately into a separate database management system running on differentiated hardware so that the economics of the entire infrastructure: hardware, software, and network can be optimized. It is even possible to add a third or fourth level to provide more fine-grained economic optimization. But this approach come at a cost. Each separate database optimizes queries at the database level. Despite advances in federation software technology this split optimization cannot optimize many queries. The optimization is not poor, but it is not optimal optimization. The global optimization provided by a single DBMS will almost always out-perform federated optimization.

The temperature-based optimization touted by some warehouse vendors provides good global optimization. To date a single DBMS must run on a homogeneous hardware platform with a single price point. Queries run optimally but the optimization can only twiddle around hardware details placing data in memory or on an SSD device or on the faster portion of a disk platter.

Figure 7. Federated Elastic Shared-nothing IaaS
Figure 7. Federated Elastic Shared-nothing IaaS

To eliminate this unfortunate trade-off: good optimization over minor hardware capabilities or fair optimization over the complete hardware eco-system we need a single DBMS that can run queries over a heterogeneous mix of hardware. We need a single database management system, with global query optimization, that can execute queries over multiple layers of hardware deployed in the cloud. We can easily imagine a multi-layered data warehouse with queries federated over several AWS offerings with hotter data on fast nodes that are always available, with warm data on less expensive nodes that are always available, and with cold historical data on inexpensive nodes that come online in processing windows so that you pay for the nodes only when you need them. Figure 7 shows a modern data warehouse deployed across an Amazon cloud.

This different way of thinking about a logical data warehouse is exciting… and a great example of how cloud computing may change everything in the database and data warehouse space.

How DBMS Vendors Admit to an Architectural Limitation: Part 3 – EDW on IBM z/OS

This is the 3rd and final example of a vendor admitting, without admitting, to an architectural limitation. The first two parts on Exadata and Teradata are here and here.

Teradata started to get real traction in the EDW space with a shared-nothing architecture in the late 1980’s. At that time the only real competition was DB2 on an IBM mainframe. From those days until just a couple of years ago IBM insisted that for MVS, then z/OS, customers should stick to the mainframe for their data warehouses and marts. There was some dabbling with sharded data in DB2 for z/OS… and Teradata made some in-roads… as did Netezza… but IBM insisted that there was no reason not to stay Blue. DB2 on AIX and then LINUX appeared… and both offered a better price/performance option than DB2 ob Z/OS… but the faithful stayed faithful for the most part.

Then IBM bought Netezza, a pure shared-nothing microprocessor-based machine, and the recommendation changed. Today IBM recommends the Analytics Accelerator, based on Netezza, to mainframe users who want to deploy an EDW. This is an admission, with no admission at all, that there was all along an architectural advantage to shared-nothingness.

If you search this blog for “Netezza” you can get my perspective on that technology. But to be blunt, the Analytics Accelerator is not IBM’s best EDW platform… DB2 LUW is by far… and with BLU LUW is better still.

I have made it clear in my previous posts that I consider it lazy for an IT shop to commit to a vendor or to a product. As engineers we need to embrace change. For IBM z/OS shops this means a realistic look at non-z/OS alternatives to deploy or to re-deploy an EDW. It makes no sense to build a data warehouse or a data mart directly on z/OS. Use the Analytics Accelerator or, better still, open the competition to better products like DB2 LUW, Teradata, Vertica, etc.

References

Database Fog Blog

Other

Thinking About the Pivotal Announcements…

Yesterday I provided a model for how business sees open source as a means to be profitable (here). This is the game Pivotal seems to be playing with their release of Hadoop, Gemfire, HAWQ, and Greenplum into open source. I do not know their real numbers… so they may need more or fewer additional customers than the mythical company to get back to break-even. But it is unlikely that any company can turn the corner from a license-based revenue stream to a recurring revenue stream in a year… so Pivotal must be looking at a loss. And when losses come it is usual to cut costs… to cut R&D.

There has already been a brain-drain out of the database ranks at Pivotal as they went “all in” on Hadoop. They likely hope for an open source community to pick up the slack… but there is not a body of success I can see in building a community to engineer a commercial product-turned-open. This is especially problematic for Gemfire, an old technology that has been in the commercial space for a very long time. HAWQ has to compete for database resources with the other Hadoop RDBMS technologies… that will be difficult. Greenplum has a chance as it is based on PostgreSQL… but it is a long way away from the current PostgreSQL code base these days. There is danger here.

The bottom line… Greenplum and HAWQ and Gemfire have become risky propositions for both the current customer base and for new customers. I’ll leave it to you to evaluate the risk as this story unfolds. Still, with the risk comes reward… the cost of acquiring Greenplum will drop dramatically and today Greenplum is a competitive product. In addition, if Greenplum gains some traction, it will put price pressure on the other database products. Note that HAWQ was already marked down to open source price levels… and part of Pivotal’s problem was that HAWQ was eating at the Greenplum market. With these products priced at similar levels there becomes some weirdness in choosing… but the advantage is to customers looking at Greenplum.

One great outcome comes for Pivotal Hadoop customers… the fact that Hortonworks will more-or-less subsume Pivotal Hadoop leaves those folks in a better place than before.

If you consider the thought experiment you would have to ask yourself why a company that was breaking even would take this risky route? It could be that they took the route because they were not breaking even and this was a possible path to get even. Also consider… open sourcing code is the modern graceful way to retire an unprofitable product line.

This is sound thinking by Pivotal… during the creation, EMC gave Pivotal several unprofitable troubled assets and these announcements give Pivotal a path forward. If the database product line cannot carry their weight then they will go into maintenance mode and slowly fade. Too bad… as you know I consider Greenplum a solid product whose potential was wasted. But Pivotal has a very nice product in Cloud Foundry… and they clearly see this as their route to profitability and to an IPO… a route that no longer includes a significant contribution from database products.

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