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Segment

Discover the segment component in Apache Pinot for efficient data storage and querying within Pinot clusters, enabling optimized data processing and analysis.

Pinot tables are stored in one or more independent shards called segments. A small table may be contained by a single segment, but Pinot lets tables grow to an unlimited number of segments. There are different processes for creating segments (see ingestion). Segments have time-based partitions of table data, and are stored on Pinot servers that scale horizontally as needed for both storage and computation.

Pinot achieves this by breaking the data into smaller chunks known as segments (similar to shards/partitions in relational databases). Segments can be seen as time-based partitions.

A segment is a horizontal shard representing a chunk of table data with some number of rows. The segment stores data for all columns of the table. Each segment packs the data in a columnar fashion, along with the dictionaries and indices for the columns. The segment is laid out in a columnar format so that it can be directly mapped into memory for serving queries.

Columns can be single or multi-valued and the following types are supported: STRING, BOOLEAN, INT, LONG, FLOAT, DOUBLE, TIMESTAMP or BYTES. Only single-valued BIG_DECIMAL data type is supported.

Columns may be declared to be metric or dimension (or specifically as a time dimension) in the schema. Columns can have default null values. For example, the default null value of a integer column can be 0. The default value for bytes columns must be hex-encoded before it's added to the schema.

Pinot uses dictionary encoding to store values as a dictionary ID. Columns may be configured to be “no-dictionary” column in which case raw values are stored. Dictionary IDs are encoded using minimum number of bits for efficient storage (e.g. a column with a cardinality of 3 will use only 2 bits for each dictionary ID).

A forward index is built for each column and compressed for efficient memory use. In addition, you can optionally configure inverted indices for any set of columns. Inverted indices take up more storage, but improve query performance. Specialized indexes like Star-Tree index are also supported. For more details, see Indexing.

Creating a segment

Once the table is configured, we can load some data. Loading data involves generating pinot segments from raw data and pushing them to the pinot cluster. Data can be loaded in batch mode or streaming mode. For more details, see the ingestion overview page.

Load data in batch

Prerequisites

  1. Set up a cluster

  2. Create broker and server tenants

  3. Create an offline table

Below are instructions to generate and push segments to Pinot via standalone scripts. For a production setup, you should use frameworks such as Hadoop or Spark. For more details on setting up data ingestion jobs, see Import Data.

Job Spec YAML

To generate a segment, we need to first create a job spec YAML file. This file contains all the information regarding data format, input data location, and pinot cluster coordinates. Note that this assumes that the controller is RUNNING to fetch the table config and schema. If not, you will have to configure the spec to point at their location. For full configurations, see Ingestion Job Spec.

job-spec.yml
executionFrameworkSpec:
  name: 'standalone'
  segmentGenerationJobRunnerClassName: 'org.apache.pinot.plugin.ingestion.batch.standalone.SegmentGenerationJobRunner'
  segmentTarPushJobRunnerClassName: 'org.apache.pinot.plugin.ingestion.batch.standalone.SegmentTarPushJobRunner'
  segmentUriPushJobRunnerClassName: 'org.apache.pinot.plugin.ingestion.batch.standalone.SegmentUriPushJobRunner'

jobType: SegmentCreationAndTarPush
inputDirURI: 'examples/batch/baseballStats/rawdata'
includeFileNamePattern: 'glob:**/*.csv'
excludeFileNamePattern: 'glob:**/*.tmp'
outputDirURI: 'examples/batch/baseballStats/segments'
overwriteOutput: true

pinotFSSpecs:
  - scheme: file
    className: org.apache.pinot.spi.filesystem.LocalPinotFS

recordReaderSpec:
  dataFormat: 'csv'
  className: 'org.apache.pinot.plugin.inputformat.csv.CSVRecordReader'
  configClassName: 'org.apache.pinot.plugin.inputformat.csv.CSVRecordReaderConfig'
  configs:

tableSpec:
  tableName: 'baseballStats'
  schemaURI: 'http://localhost:9000/tables/baseballStats/schema'
  tableConfigURI: 'http://localhost:9000/tables/baseballStats'
  
segmentNameGeneratorSpec:

pinotClusterSpecs:
  - controllerURI: 'http://localhost:9000'

pushJobSpec:
  pushParallelism: 2
  pushAttempts: 2
  pushRetryIntervalMillis: 1000

Create and push segment

To create and push the segment in one go, use the following:

docker run \
    --network=pinot-demo \
    --name pinot-data-ingestion-job \
    ${PINOT_IMAGE} LaunchDataIngestionJob \
    -jobSpecFile examples/docker/ingestion-job-specs/airlineStats.yaml

Sample Console Output

SegmentGenerationJobSpec:
!!org.apache.pinot.spi.ingestion.batch.spec.SegmentGenerationJobSpec
excludeFileNamePattern: null
executionFrameworkSpec: {extraConfigs: null, name: standalone, segmentGenerationJobRunnerClassName: org.apache.pinot.plugin.ingestion.batch.standalone.SegmentGenerationJobRunner,
  segmentTarPushJobRunnerClassName: org.apache.pinot.plugin.ingestion.batch.standalone.SegmentTarPushJobRunner,
  segmentUriPushJobRunnerClassName: org.apache.pinot.plugin.ingestion.batch.standalone.SegmentUriPushJobRunner}
includeFileNamePattern: glob:**/*.avro
inputDirURI: examples/batch/airlineStats/rawdata
jobType: SegmentCreationAndTarPush
outputDirURI: examples/batch/airlineStats/segments
overwriteOutput: true
pinotClusterSpecs:
- {controllerURI: 'http://pinot-controller:9000'}
pinotFSSpecs:
- {className: org.apache.pinot.spi.filesystem.LocalPinotFS, configs: null, scheme: file}
pushJobSpec: {pushAttempts: 2, pushParallelism: 1, pushRetryIntervalMillis: 1000,
  segmentUriPrefix: null, segmentUriSuffix: null}
recordReaderSpec: {className: org.apache.pinot.plugin.inputformat.avro.AvroRecordReader,
  configClassName: null, configs: null, dataFormat: avro}
segmentNameGeneratorSpec: null
tableSpec: {schemaURI: 'http://pinot-controller:9000/tables/airlineStats/schema',
  tableConfigURI: 'http://pinot-controller:9000/tables/airlineStats', tableName: airlineStats}

Trying to create instance for class org.apache.pinot.plugin.ingestion.batch.standalone.SegmentGenerationJobRunner
Initializing PinotFS for scheme file, classname org.apache.pinot.spi.filesystem.LocalPinotFS
Finished building StatsCollector!
Collected stats for 403 documents
Created dictionary for INT column: FlightNum with cardinality: 386, range: 14 to 7389
Using fixed bytes value dictionary for column: Origin, size: 294
Created dictionary for STRING column: Origin with cardinality: 98, max length in bytes: 3, range: ABQ to VPS
Created dictionary for INT column: Quarter with cardinality: 1, range: 1 to 1
Created dictionary for INT column: LateAircraftDelay with cardinality: 50, range: -2147483648 to 303
......
......
Pushing segment: airlineStats_OFFLINE_16085_16085_29 to location: http://pinot-controller:9000 for table airlineStats
Sending request: http://pinot-controller:9000/v2/segments?tableName=airlineStats to controller: a413b0013806, version: Unknown
Response for pushing table airlineStats segment airlineStats_OFFLINE_16085_16085_29 to location http://pinot-controller:9000 - 200: {"status":"Successfully uploaded segment: airlineStats_OFFLINE_16085_16085_29 of table: airlineStats"}
Pushing segment: airlineStats_OFFLINE_16084_16084_30 to location: http://pinot-controller:9000 for table airlineStats
Sending request: http://pinot-controller:9000/v2/segments?tableName=airlineStats to controller: a413b0013806, version: Unknown
Response for pushing table airlineStats segment airlineStats_OFFLINE_16084_16084_30 to location http://pinot-controller:9000 - 200: {"status":"Successfully uploaded segment: airlineStats_OFFLINE_16084_16084_30 of table: airlineStats"}

Alternately, you can separately create and then push, by changing the jobType to SegmentCreation or SegmenTarPush.

Templating Ingestion Job Spec

The Ingestion job spec supports templating with Groovy Syntax.

This is convenient if you want to generate one ingestion job template file and schedule it on a daily basis with extra parameters updated daily.

e.g. you could set inputDirURI with parameters to indicate the date, so that the ingestion job only processes the data for a particular date. Below is an example that templates the date for input and output directories.

inputDirURI: 'examples/batch/airlineStats/rawdata/${year}/${month}/${day}'
outputDirURI: 'examples/batch/airlineStats/segments/${year}/${month}/${day}'

You can pass in arguments containing values for ${year}, ${month}, ${day} when kicking off the ingestion job: -values $param=value1 $param2=value2...

docker run \
    --network=pinot-demo \
    --name pinot-data-ingestion-job \
    ${PINOT_IMAGE} LaunchDataIngestionJob \
    -jobSpecFile examples/docker/ingestion-job-specs/airlineStats.yaml
    -values year=2014 month=01 day=03

This ingestion job only generates segments for date 2014-01-03

Load data in streaming

Prerequisites

  1. Set up a cluster

  2. Create broker and server tenants

  3. Create a real-time table and set up a real-time stream

Below is an example of how to publish sample data to your stream. As soon as data is available to the real-time stream, it starts getting consumed by the real-time servers.

Kafka

Run below command to stream JSON data into Kafka topic: flights-realtime

docker run \
  --network pinot-demo \
  --name=loading-airlineStats-data-to-kafka \
  ${PINOT_IMAGE} StreamAvroIntoKafka \
  -avroFile examples/stream/airlineStats/sample_data/airlineStats_data.avro \
  -kafkaTopic flights-realtime -kafkaBrokerList kafka:9092 -zkAddress pinot-zookeeper:2181/kafka
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