Book Image

Learning Apache Apex

By : Thomas Weise, Ananth Gundabattula, Munagala V. Ramanath, David Yan, Kenneth Knowles
Book Image

Learning Apache Apex

By: Thomas Weise, Ananth Gundabattula, Munagala V. Ramanath, David Yan, Kenneth Knowles

Overview of this book

Apache Apex is a next-generation stream processing framework designed to operate on data at large scale, with minimum latency, maximum reliability, and strict correctness guarantees. Half of the book consists of Apex applications, showing you key aspects of data processing pipelines such as connectors for sources and sinks, and common data transformations. The other half of the book is evenly split into explaining the Apex framework, and tuning, testing, and scaling Apex applications. Much of our economic world depends on growing streams of data, such as social media feeds, financial records, data from mobile devices, sensors and machines (the Internet of Things - IoT). The projects in the book show how to process such streams to gain valuable, timely, and actionable insights. Traditional use cases, such as ETL, that currently consume a significant chunk of data engineering resources are also covered. The final chapter shows you future possibilities emerging in the streaming space, and how Apache Apex can contribute to it.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Performance – other aspects for custom operators


When tuning an application with custom operators, some common Java coding practices can act as hidden performance drains so developers should avoid them as far as possible. We've already mentioned one earlier, in passing—inadvertently including a large number of fields (or fields whose values are large) of an operator in the state by not adding the transient modifier. As the size of the state increases, serializing it for every checkpoint can become a hidden bottleneck. Generally speaking, if a field is cleared for every streaming or application window, it does not need to be part of the state.

A second practice is the per-tuple use of reflection (or the use of Maps and other Java collections) which is an expensive operation; this is often done when the type of the tuple is not known at compile time, so just Object is used. For such cases, Apex provides a utility class called PojoUtils which can be used to create custom getter and setter methods...