Hive Metastore Configuration

Recently I wrote a post for Bad performance of Hive meta store for tables with large number of partitions. I did tests in our environment. Here is what I found:

• Don't configure a hive client to access remote MySQL database directly as follows. The performance is really bad, especially when you query a table with a large number of partitions.

javax.jdo.option.ConnectionURL
jdbc:mysql://mysql_server/hive_meta


javax.jdo.option.ConnectionDriverName
com.mysql.jdbc.Driver


javax.jdo.option.ConnectionUserName
hive_user


javax.jdo.option.ConnectionPassword
password

hive --service metastore
# If use CDH
yum install hive-metastore
/sbin/service hive-metastore start

hive.metastore.uris
thrift://mysql_server:9083

ERROR conf.HiveConf: Found both hive.metastore.uris and javax.jdo.option.ConnectionURL Recommended to have exactly one of those config keyin configuration

1. Get a list of partition names using db.getPartitionNames()
2. Then call db.getPartitionsByName(List<Strin> partNames). If the list is too large, it will load in multiple times, 300 for each load by default. The JDO calls like this
   • For one MPartition object.
   • Send 1 query to retrieve MPartition basic fields.
   • Send 1 query to retrieve MStorageDescriptors
   • Send 1 query to retrieve data from PART_PARAMS.
   • Send 1 query to retrieve data from PARTITION_KEY_VALS.
   • ...
   • Totally 10 queries for one MPartition. Because MPartition will be converted into Partition before send by, all fields will be populated
3. If one query takes 40ms in my environment. And you can calculate how long does it take for thousands partitions.
4. Using remote Hive metastore service, all those queries happens locally, it won't take that long for each query, so you can get performance improved significantly. But there are still a lot of queries.

I also wrote ObjectStore using EclipseLink JPA with @BatchFetch. Here is the test result, it will at least 6 times faster than remote metastore service. It will be even faster.