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- Streaming ingest of data. Many users have tools such as Apache Flume, Apache Storm, or Apache Kafka that they use to stream data into their Hadoop cluster. While these tools can write data at rates of hundreds or more rows per second, Hive can only add partitions every fifteen minutes to an hour. Adding partitions more often leads quickly to an overwhelming number of partitions in the table. These tools could stream data into existing partitions, but this would cause readers to get dirty reads (that is, they would see data written after they had started their queries) and leave many small files in their directories that would put pressure on the NameNode. With this new functionality this use case will be supported while allowing readers to get a consistent view of the data and avoiding too many files.
- Slow changing dimensions. In a typical star schema data warehouse, dimensions tables change slowly over time. For example, a retailer will open new stores, which need to be added to the stores table, or an existing store may change its square footage or some other tracked characteristic. These changes lead to inserts of individual records or updates of records (depending on the strategy chosen). Starting with 0.14, Hive is able to support this.
- Data restatement. Sometimes collected data is found to be incorrect and needs correction. Or the first instance of the data may be an approximation (90% of servers reporting) with the full data provided later. Or business rules may require that certain transactions be restated due to subsequent transactions (e.g., after making a purchase a customer may purchase a membership and thus be entitled to discount prices, including on the previous purchase). Or a user may be contractually required to remove their customer’s data upon termination of their relationship. Starting with Hive 0.14 these use cases can be supported via INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE.
- Bulk updates using SQL MERGE statement.
Limitations
- BEGIN, COMMIT, and ROLLBACK are not yet supported. All language operations are auto-commit. The plan is to support these in a future release.
- Only ORC file format is supported in this first release. The feature has been built such that transactions can be used by any storage format that can determine how updates or deletes apply to base records (basically, that has an explicit or implicit row id), but so far the integration work has only been done for ORC.
- By default transactions are configured to be off. See the Configuration section below for a discussion of which values need to be set to configure it.
- Tables must be bucketed to make use of these features. Tables in the same system not using transactions and ACID do not need to be bucketed. External tables cannot be made ACID tables since the changes on external tables are beyond the control of the compactor (HIVE-13175).
- Reading/writing to an ACID table from a non-ACID session is not allowed. In other words, the Hive transaction manager must be set to org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.lockmgr.DbTxnManager in order to work with ACID tables.
- At this time only snapshot level isolation is supported. When a given query starts it will be provided with a consistent snapshot of the data. There is no support for dirty read, read committed, repeatable read, or serializable. With the introduction of BEGIN the intention is to support snapshot isolation for the duration of transaction rather than just a single query. Other isolation levels may be added depending on user requests.
- The existing ZooKeeper and in-memory lock managers are not compatible with transactions. There is no intention to address this issue. See Basic Design below for a discussion of how locks are stored for transactions.
Schema changes using ALTER TABLE is NOT supported for ACID tables. HIVE-11421 is tracking it.Fixed in 1.3.0/2.0.0.- Using Oracle as the Metastore DB and "datanucleus.connectionPoolingType=BONECP" may generate intermittent "No such lock.." and "No such transaction..." errors. Setting "datanucleus.connectionPoolingType=DBCP" is recommended in this case.
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