Major Description
Currently, if the user does not specify the number of reduce slots using the parallel keyword, Pig lets Hadoop decide on the default number of reducers. This model worked well with dynamically allocated clusters using HOD and for static clusters where the default number of reduce slots was explicitly set. With Hadoop 0.20, a single static cluster will be shared amongst a number of queues. As a result, a common scenario is to end up with default number of reducers set to one (1).
When users migrate to Hadoop 0.20, they might see a dramatic change in the performance of their queries if they had not used the parallel keyword to specify the number of reducers. In order to mitigate such circumstances, Pig can support one of the following:
1. Specify a default parallelism for the entire script.
This option will allow users to use the same parallelism for all operators that do not have the explicit parallel keyword. This will ensure that the scripts utilize more reducers than the default of one reducer. On the down side, due to data transformations, usually operations that are performed towards the end of the script will need smaller number of reducers compared to the operators that appear at the beginning of the script.
2. Display a warning message for each reduce side operator that does have the use of the explicit parallel keyword. Proceed with the execution.
3. Display an error message indicating the operator that does not have the explicit use of the parallel keyword. Stop the execution.
Other suggestions/thoughts/solutions are welcome.