[HIVE-13479] Relax sorting requirement in ACID tables

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 1.2.0
• Component/s: Transactions
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Eugene Koifman
• Created: 11/Apr/16 17:47
• Updated: 28/Jul/21 14:13

Description

Currently ACID tables require data to be sorted according to internal primary key. This is that base + delta files can be efficiently sort/merged to produce the snapshot for current transaction.

This prevents the user to make the table sorted based on any other criteria which can be useful. One example is using dynamic partition insert (which also occurs for update/delete SQL). This may create lots of writers (buckets*partitions) and tax cluster resources.
The usual solution is hive.optimize.sort.dynamic.partition=true which won't be honored for ACID tables.

We could rely on hash table based algorithm to merge delta files and then not require any particular sort on Acid tables. One way to do that is to treat each update event as an Insert (new internal PK) + delete (old PK). Delete events are very small since they just need to contain PKs. So the hash table would just need to contain Delete events and be reasonably memory efficient.

This is a significant amount of work but worth doing.

Issue Links

• is superceded by: HIVE-17089 make acid 2.0 the default