Characterizing BigBench queries, Hive, and Spark in multi-cloud environments

TL;DR

This paper benchmarks and characterizes BigBench queries and the performance of Hive and Spark in multi-cloud PaaS environments, providing insights into resource requirements, scalability, and configuration needs.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive analysis of BigBench queries and compares Hive and Spark performance across major cloud providers, highlighting configuration impacts and resource consumption.

Findings

Hive and Spark have distinct resource usage patterns.

Performance varies significantly with data scale and configuration.

Proper tuning is essential for optimal performance in cloud environments.

Abstract

BigBench is the new standard (TPCx-BB) for benchmarking and testing Big Data systems. The TPCx-BB specification describes several business use cases -- queries -- which require a broad combination of data extraction techniques including SQL, Map/Reduce (M/R), user code (UDF), and Machine Learning to fulfill them. However, currently, there is no widespread knowledge of the different resource requirements and expected performance of each query, as is the case to more established benchmarks. At the same time, cloud providers currently offer convenient on-demand managed big data clusters (PaaS) with a pay-as-you-go model. In PaaS, analytical engines such as Hive and Spark come ready to use, with a general-purpose configuration and upgrade management. The study characterizes both the BigBench queries and the out-of-the-box performance of Spark and Hive versions in the cloud. At the same time, comparing popular PaaS offerings in terms of reliability, data scalability (1GB to 10TB), versions, and settings from Azure HDinsight, Amazon Web Services EMR, and Google Cloud Dataproc. The query characterization highlights the similarities and differences in Hive an Spark frameworks, and which queries are the most resource consuming according to CPU, memory, and I/O. Scalability results show how there is a need for configuration tuning in most cloud providers as data scale grows, especially with Sparks memory usage. These results can help practitioners to quickly test systems by picking a subset of the queries which stresses each of the categories. At the same time, results show how Hive and Spark compare and what performance can be expected of each in PaaS.