Creating Pinot segments

Pinot segments can be created offline on Hadoop, or via command line from data files. Controller REST endpoint can then be used to add the segment to the table to which the segment belongs. Pinot segments can also be created by ingesting data from realtime resources (such as Kafka).

Creating segments using hadoop

Offline Pinot workflow

To create Pinot segments on Hadoop, a workflow can be created to complete the following steps:

1. Pre-aggregate, clean up and prepare the data, writing it as Avro format files in a single HDFS directory

2. Create segments

3. Upload segments to the Pinot cluster

Step one can be done using your favorite tool (such as Pig, Hive or Spark), Pinot provides two MapReduce jobs to do step two and three.

Configuring the job

Create a job properties configuration file, such as one below:

Executing the job

The Pinot Hadoop module contains a job that you can incorporate into your workflow to generate Pinot segments.

You can then use the SegmentTarPush job to push segments via the controller REST API.

Creating Pinot segments outside of Hadoop

Here is how you can create Pinot segments from standard formats like CSV/JSON/AVRO.

1. Follow the steps described in the section on to build pinot. Locate pinot-admin.sh in pinot-tools/target/pinot-tools=pkg/bin/pinot-admin.sh.

2. Create a top level directory containing all the CSV/JSON/AVRO files that need to be converted into segments.

Run the pinot-admin command to generate the segments. The command can be invoked as follows. Options within “[ ]” are optional. For -format, the default value is AVRO.

To configure various parameters for CSV a config file in JSON format can be provided. This file is optional, as are each of its parameters. When not provided, default values used for these parameters are described below:

1. fileFormat: Specify one of the following. Default is EXCEL.

   1. EXCEL

   2. MYSQL

Below is a sample config file.

Sample Schema:

Pushing offline segments to Pinot

You can use curl to push a segment to pinot:

Alternatively you can use the pinot-admin.sh utility to upload one or more segments:

The command uploads all the segments found in segmentDirectoryPath. The segments could be either tar-compressed (in which case it is a file under segmentDirectoryPath) or uncompressed (in which case it is a directory under segmentDirectoryPath).

Segment Fetchers

When pinot segment files are created in external systems (hadoop/spark/etc), there are several ways to push those data to pinot Controller and Server:

1. push segment to shared NFS and let pinot pull segment files from the location of that NFS.

2. push segment to a Web server and let pinot pull segment files from the Web server with http/https link.

3. push segment to HDFS and let pinot pull segment files from HDFS with hdfs location uri.

4. push segment to other system and implement your own segment fetcher to pull data from those systems.

The first two options should be supported out of the box with pinot package. As long your remote jobs send Pinot controller with the corresponding URI to the files it will pick up the file and allocate it to proper Pinot Servers and brokers. To enable Pinot support for HDFS, you will need to provide Pinot Hadoop configuration and proper Hadoop dependencies.

HDFS segment fetcher configs

In your Pinot controller/server configuration, you will need to provide the following configs:

or

This path should point the local folder containing core-site.xml and hdfs-site.xml

Implement your own segment fetcher for other systems

You can also implement your own segment fetchers for other file systems and load into Pinot system with an external jar. All you need to do is to implement a class that extends the interface of and provides config to Pinot Controller and Server as follows:

or

You can also provide other configs to your fetcher under config-root pinot.server.segment.fetcher.<protocol>