Analytics/Data Lake

The Analytics Data Lake (ADL), or the Data Lake for short, is a large, analytics-oriented repository of data about Wikimedia projects (in industry terms, a data lake).

Data available

Traffic data

Webrequest, pageviews, and unique devices

Edits data

Historical data about revisions, pages, and users (e.g. MediaWiki History)

Content data

Wikitext (latest & historical) and wikidata-entities

Events data

EventLogging, EventBus and event streams data (raw, refined, sanitized)

ORES scores

Machine learning predictions (available as events as of 2020-02-27)

Some of these datasets (such as webrequests) are only available in Hive, while others (such as pageviews) are also available as data cubes (usually in more aggregated capacity).

Access

The main way to access the data in the Data Lake is to run queries using one of the three available SQL engines: Presto, Hive, and Spark.

You can access these engines through several different routes:

• Superset has a graphical SQL editor where you can run Presto queries
• Hue has a graphical SQL editor where you can run Hive queries
• Custom code on one of the analytics clients (the easiest way to do this is to use our Jupyter service)
  • for Python, use the wmfdata-python package
  • for R, use the wmfdata-r package

All three engines also have command-line programs which you can use on one of the analytics clients. This is probably the least convenient way, but if you want to use it, consult the engine's documentation page.

Differences between the SQL engines

For the most part, Presto, Hive, and Spark work the same way, but they have some differences in SQL syntax and processing power.

Syntax differences

• Spark and Hive use STRING as the keyword for string data, while Presto uses VARCHAR.
• In Spark and Hive, you use the SIZE function to get the length of an array, while in Presto you use CARDINALITY.
• In Spark and Hive, double quoted text (like "foo") is interpreted as a string, while in Presto it is interpreted as a column name. It's easiest to use single quoted text (like 'foo') for strings, since all three engines interpret it the same way.
• Spark and Hive have a CONCAT_WS ("concatenate with separator") function, but Presto does not.
• Spark supports both FLOAT and REAL as keywords for the 32-bit floating-point number data type, while Presto supports only REAL.
• Presto has no FIRST and LAST functions
• If you need to use a keyword like DATE as a column name, you use backticks (`date`) in Spark and Hive, but double quotes ("date") in Presto.
• To convert an ISO 8601 timestamp string (e.g. "2021-11-01T01:23:02Z") to an SQL timestamp:
  • Spark: TO_TIMESTAMP(dt)
  • Presto: FROM_ISO8601_TIMESTAMP(dt)
  • Hive: FROM_UNIXTIME(UNIX_TIMESTAMP(dt, "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss'Z'"))

Technical architecture

Data Lake datasets which are available in Hive are stored in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), usually in the Parquet file format. The Hive metastore is a centralized repository for metadata about these data files, and all three SQL query engines we use (Presto, Spark SQL, and Hive) rely on it. Some Data Lake datasets are available in Druid, which is separate from Hive and HDFS, and allows quick exploration and dashboarding of those datasets in Turnilo and Superset.

The Analytics cluster, which consists of Hadoop servers and related components, provides the infrastructure for the Data Lake.