docs/introduction.adoc

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[[introduction]]
= Introducing Kudu
:author: Kudu Team
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Kudu is a columnar storage manager developed for the Hadoop platform.  Kudu shares
the common technical properties of Hadoop ecosystem applications: it runs on commodity
hardware, is horizontally scalable, and supports highly available operation.

Kudu's design sets it apart. Some of Kudu's benefits include:

- Fast processing of OLAP workloads.
- Integration with MapReduce, Spark and other Hadoop ecosystem components.
- Tight integration with Cloudera Impala, making it a good, mutable alternative
  to using HDFS with Parquet.
- Strong but flexible consistency model, allowing you to choose consistency
  requirements on a per-request basis, including the option for strict
  serialized consistency.
- Strong performance for running sequential and random workloads simultaneously.
- Easy to administer and manage with Cloudera Manager.
- High availability. Tablet Servers and Master use the <<raft>>, which ensures
  availability even if _f_ nodes failing, given _2f+1_ nodes in the cluster.
  Reads can be serviced by read-only follower tablets, even in the event of a
  leader tablet failure.
- Structured data model.

By combining all of these properties, Kudu targets support for families of
applications that are difficult or impossible to implement on current generation
Hadoop storage technologies. A few examples of applications for which Kudu is a great
solution are:

* Reporting applications where newly-arrived data needs to be immediately available for end users
* Time-series applications that must simultaneously support:
  - queries across large amounts of historic data
  - granular queries about an individual entity that must return very quickly
* Applications that use predictive models to make real-time decisions with periodic
refreshes of the predictive model based on all historic data

For more information about these and other scenarios, see <<kudu_use_cases>>.

== Concepts and Terms
[[kudu_columnar_data_store]]
.Columnar Data Store

Kudu is a _columnar data store_. A columnar data store stores data in strongly-typed
columns. With a proper design, it is superior for analytical or data warehousing
workloads for several reasons.

Read Effiency:: For analytical queries, you can read a single column, or a portion
of that column, while ignoring other columns. This means you can fulfill your query
while reading a minimal number of blocks on disk. With a row-based store, you need
to read the entire row, even if you only return values from a few columns.

Data Compression:: Because a given column contains only one type of data, pattern-based
compression can be orders of magnitude more efficient than compressing mixed data
types. Combined with the efficiencies of reading data from columns,  compression allows
you to fulfill your query while reading even fewer blocks from disk.

[[raft]]
.Raft Consensus Algorithm

The link:http://raftconsensus.github.io/[Raft consensus algorithm] provides a
way to elect a _leader_ for a distributed cluster from a pool of potential
leaders, or _candidates_. Other cluster members are _followers_, who are not
candidates or leaders, but always look to the current leader for consensus. Kudu
uses the Raft Consensus Algorithm for the election of masters and leader
tablets, as well as determining the success or failure of a given write
operation.

.Table

A _table_ is where your data is stored in Kudu. A table has a schema and
a totally ordered primary key. A table is split into segments called tablets.

.Tablet

A _tablet_ is a contiguous segment of a table. A given tablet is
replicated on multiple tablet servers, and one of these replicas is considered
the leader tablet. Any replica can service reads, and writes require consensus
among the set of tablet servers serving the tablet.

.Tablet Server

A _tablet server_ stores and serves tablets to clients. For a
given tablet, one tablet server serves the lead tablet, and the others serve
follower replicas of that tablet. Only leaders service write requests, while
leaders or followers each service read requests. Leaders are elected using
<<raft>>. One tablet server can serve multiple tablets, and one tablet can be served
by multiple tablet servers.

.Master

The _master_ keeps track of all the tablets, tablet servers, the
<<catalog_table>>, and other metadata related to the cluster. At a given point
in time, there can only be one acting master (the leader). If the current leader
disappears, a new master is elected using <<raft>>.

The master also coordinates metadata operations for clients. For example, when
creating a new table, the client internally sends an RPC to the master. The
master writes the metadata for the new table into the catalog table, and
coordinates the process of creating tablets on the tablet servers.

All the master's data is stored in a tablet, which can be replicated to all the
other candidate masters.

Tablet servers heartbeat to the master at a set interval (the default is once
per second).

[[catalog_table]]
.Catalog Table

The _catalog table_ is the central location for
metadata of Kudu. It stores information about tables and tablets. The catalog
table is accessible to clients via the master, using the client API.

Tables:: table schemas, locations, and states

Tablets:: the list of existing tablets, which tablet servers have replicas of
each tablet, the tablet's current state, and start and end keys.

.Logical Replication

Kudu replicates operations, not on-disk data. This is referred to as _logical
replication_, as opposed to _physical replication_. Physical operations, such as
compaction, do not need to transmit the data over the network. This results in a
substantial reduction in network traffic for heavy write scenarios.

== Architectural Overview
INSERT DIAGRAM HERE

[[kudu_use_cases]]
== Example Use Cases
.Streaming Input with Near Real Time Availability

A common challenge in data analysis is one where new data arrives rapidly and constantly,
and the same data needs to be available in near real time for reads, scans, and
updates. Kudu offers the powerful combination of fast inserts and updates with
efficient columnar scans to enable real-time analytics use cases on a single storage layer.

.Time-series application with widely varying access patterns

A time-series schema is one in which data points are organized and keyed according
to the time at which they occurred. This can be useful for investigating the
performance of metrics over time or attempting to predict future behavior based
on past data. For instance, time-series customer data might be used both to store
purchase click-stream history and to predict future purchases, or for use by a
customer support representative. While these different types of analysis are occurring,
inserts and mutations may also be occurring individually and in bulk, and become available
immediately to read workloads. Kudu can handle all of these access patterns
simultaneously in a scalable and efficient manner.

Kudu is a good fit for time-series workloads for several reasons. With Kudu's support for
hash-based partitioning, combined with its native support for compound row keys, it is
simple to set up a table spread across many servers without the risk of "hotspotting"
that is commonly observed when range partitioning is used. Kudu's columar storage engine
is also beneficial in this context, because many time-series workloads read only a few columns,
as opposed to the whole row.

In the past, you might have needed to use multiple data stores to handle different
data access patterns. This practice adds complexity to your application and operations, and
duplicates storage. Kudu can handle all of these access patterns natively and efficiently,
without the need to off-load work to other data stores.

.Predictive Modeling

Data analysts often develop predictive learning models from large sets of data. The
model and the data may need to be updated or modified often as the learning takes
place or as the situation being modeled changes. In addition, the scientist may want
to change one or more factors in the model to see what happens over time. Updating
a large set of data stored in files in HDFS is resource-intensive, as each file needs
to be completely rewritten. In Kudu, updates happen in near real time. The scientist
can tweak the value, re-run the query, and refresh the graph in seconds or minutes,
rather than hours or days. In addition, batch or incremental algorithms can be run
across the data at any time, with near-real-time results.

.Combining Data In Kudu With Legacy Systems

Companies generate data from multiple sources and store it in a variety of systems
and formats. For instance, some of your data may be stored in Kudu, some in a traditional
RDBMS, and some in files in HDFS. You can access and query all of these sources and
formats using Impala, without the need to change your legacy systems.

== Next Steps
- link:quickstart.html[Get Started With Kudu]
- link:installation.html[Kudu Installation Guide]