GeoTiff raster data to Delta Lake / Parquet format? - gis

Our organisation has been using Databricks recently for ETL and development of datasets. However I have found the libraries/capabilities for raster datasets very limiting. There are a few raster/Spark libraries around, but they are not very mature. For example GeoTrellis, RasterFrames and Apache Sedona.
I have therefore been exploring alternative ways to efficiently work with raster data on the Databricks platform, which leverages Spark / Delta tables / Parquet files.
One idea I had was to dump the raster data to simple x, y, value columns and load them as tables. Providing my other datasets are of the same resolution (I will pre-process them so that they are), I should then be able to do simple SQL queries for masking/addition/subtraction and more complex user-defined functions.
Step one, I thought would be to dump my raster to points as a CSV, and then I can load to a Delta table. But after 12 hours running on my Databricks cluster (128GB memory, 16 cores), a 3GB raster had still not finished (I was using the gdal2xyz function below).
Does anyone have a quicker way to dump a raster to CSV? Or even better, directly to parquet format.
python gdal2xyz.py -band 1 -skipnodata "AR_FLRF_UD_Q1500_RD_02.tif" "AR_FLRF_UD_Q1500_RD_02.csv"
Maybe I can tile the raster, dump each CSV to file using parallel processing, and then bind the CSV files together but it seems a bit laborious.

GDAL has a parquet driver since version 3.5. So, with at least that version, you should be able to write raster data to parquet with "terra" like this
library(terra)
x <- rast(ncol=10, nrow=10, val=1:100)
writeRaster(x, "file.pqt", driver="Parquet")
You can check the version that "terra" uses with terra::gdal(). The current CRAN release for windows is not there yet (but almost)
gdal()
#[1] "3.4.3"

You can use Sedona to easily load GeoTiffs to DataFrame and save the dataframe as Parquet format. See here: https://sedona.apache.org/latest-snapshot/api/sql/Raster-loader/

Related

Big ( 1GB) JSON data handling in Tableau

I am working with a large twitter dataset in the form of a JSON file. When I try to import that into Tableau, there is an error and the upload fails on the account of data upload limit of 128 MB.
Due to which I need to shrink the dataset to bring it to 128MB thereby reducing the effectiveness of the analysis.
What is the best way to upload and handle large JSON data in tableau?
Do I need to use an external tool for it?
Can we use AWS products to handle the same? Please advise!
From what I can find in unofficial documents online, Tableau does indeed have a 128 MB limit on JSON file size. You have several options.
Split the JSON files into multiple files and union them in your data source (https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/examples_json.html#Union)
Use a tool to convert the JSON to csv or Excel (Google for JSON to csv converter)
Load the JSON into a database, such as MySql and use the MySql as the data source
You may want to consider posting in the Ideas section of the Tableau Community pages and add a suggestion for allowing larger JSON files. This will bring it to the attention of the broader Tableau community and product management.

Merits of JSON vs CSV file format while writing to HDFS for downstream applications

We are in the process of extracting source data (xls) and injecting to HDFS. Is it better to write these files as CSV or JSON format? We are contemplating choosing one of them, but before making the call, we are wondering what are the merits & demerits of using either one of them.
Factors we are trying to figure out are:
Performance (Data Volume is 2-5 GB)
Loading vs Reading Data
How much easier it is to extract Metadata (Structure) info from either of these files.
Injected data will be consumed by other applications which support both JSON & CSV.

Ingesting MySQL data to GeoMesa analytics

I am new to GeoMesa. I mean I just typed geomesa command. So, after following the command line tools tutorial on GeoMesa website. I found some information on ingesting data to geomesa through a .csv file.
So, for my research:
I have a MySQL database storing all the information sent from an Android Application.
And I want to perform some geo spatial analytics on it.
Right now I am converting my MySQL table to .csv file and then ingest it into geomesa as adviced on GeoMesa website.
But my questions are:
Is there any other better option because data is in GB and its a streaming data, hence I have to make .csv file regularly?
Is there any API through which I can connect my MySQL database to geomesa?
Is there any way to ingest using .sql dump file because that would be more easier then .csv file?
Since you are dealing with streaming data, I'd point to two GeoMesa integrations:
First, you might want to check out NiFi for managing data flows. If that fits into your architecture, then you can use GeoMesa with NiFi.
Second, Storm is quite popular for working with streaming data. GeoMesa has a brief tutorial for Storm here.
Third, to ingest sql dumps directly, one option would be to extend the GeoMesa converter library to support them. So far, we haven't had that as a feature request from a customer or a contribution to the project. It'd definitely be a sensible and welcome extension!
I'd also point out the GeoMesa gitter channel. It can be useful for quicker responses.

Efficiently Aggregate Many CSVs in Spark

Pardon my simple question but I'm relatively new to Spark/Hadoop.
I'm trying to load a bunch of small CSV files into Apache Spark. They're currently stored in S3, but I can download them locally if that simplifies things. My goal is to do this as efficiently as possible. It seems like it would be a shame to have some single-threaded master downloading and parsing a bunch of CSV files while my dozens of Spark workers sit idly. I'm hoping there's an idiomatic way to distribute this work.
The CSV files are arranged in a directory structure that looks like:
2014/01-01/fileabcd.csv
2014/01-01/filedefg.csv
...
I have two years of data, with directories for each day, and a few hundred CSVs inside of each. All of those CSVs should have an identical schema, but it's of course possible that one CSV is awry and I'd hate for the whole job to crash if there are a couple problematic files. Those files can be skipped as long as I'm notified in a log somewhere that that happened.
It seems that every Spark project I have in mind is in this same form and I don't know how to solve it. (e.g. trying to read in a bunch of tab-delimited weather data, or reading in a bunch of log files to look at those.)
What I've Tried
I've tried both SparkR and the Scala libraries. I don't really care which language I need to use; I'm more interested in the correct idioms/tools to use.
Pure Scala
My original thought was to enumerate and parallelize the list of all year/mm-dd combinations so that I could have my Spark workers all processing each day independently (download and parse all CSV files, then stack them on top of eachother (unionAll()) to reduce them). Unfortunately, downloading and parsing the CSV files using the spark-csv library can only be done in the "parent"/master job, and not from each child as Spark doesn't allow job nesting. So that won't work as long as I want to use the Spark libraries to do the importing/parsing.
Mixed-Language
You can, of course, use the language's native CSV parsing to read in each file then "upload" them to Spark. In R, this is a combination of some package to get the file out of S3 followed by a read.csv, and finishing off with a createDataFrame() to get the data into Spark. Unfortunately, this is really slow and also seems backwards to the way I want Spark to work. If all my data is piping through R before it can get into Spark, why bother with Spark?
Hive/Sqoop/Phoenix/Pig/Flume/Flume Ng/s3distcp
I've started looking into these tailored tools and quickly got overwhelmed. My understanding is that many/all of these tools could be used to get my CSV files from S3 into HDFS.
Of course it would be faster to read my CSV files in from HDFS than S3, so that solves some portion of the problem. But I still have tens of thousands of CSVs that I need to parse and am unaware of a distributed way to do that in Spark.
So right now (Spark 1.4) SparkR has support for json or parquet file structures. Csv files can be parsed, but then the spark context needs to be started with an extra jar (which needs to be downloaded and placed in the appropriate folder, never done this myself but my collegues have).
sc <- sparkR.init(sparkPackages="com.databricks:spark-csv_2.11:1.0.3")
sqlContext <- sparkRSQL.init(sc)
There is more information in the docs. I expect that a newer spark release would have more support for this.
If you don't do this you'll need to either resort to a different file structure or use python to convert all your files from .csv into .parquet. Here is a snippet from a recent python talk that does this.
data = sc.textFile(s3_paths, 1200).cache()
def caster(x):
return Row(colname1 = x[0], colname2 = x[1])
df_rdd = data\
.map(lambda x: x.split(','))\
.map(caster)
ddf = sqlContext.inferSchema(df_rdd).cache()
ddf.write.save('s3n://<bucket>/<filename>.parquet')
Also, how big is your dataset? You may not even need spark for analysis. Note that also as of right now;
SparkR has only DataFrame support.
no distributed machine learning yet.
for visualisation you will need to convert a distributed dataframe back into a normal one if you want to use libraries like ggplot2.
if your dataset is no larger than a few gigabytes, then the extra bother of learning spark might not be worthwhile yet
it's modest now, but you can expect more from the future
I've run into this problem before (but w/ reading a large qty of Parquet files) and my recommendation would be to avoid dataframes and to use RDDs.
The general idiom used was:
Read in a list of the files w/ each file being a line (In the driver). The expected output here is a list of strings
Parallelize the list of strings and map over them with a customer csv reader. with the return being a list of case classes.
You can also use flatMap if at the end of the day you want a data structure like List[weather_data] that could be rewritten to parquet or a database.

Conversion of GRIB and NetCDF to my database

I have downloaded "High Resolution Initial Conditions" climate forecast data for one day, it was in extension .tar.gz so I extracted it in my local directory and I get the files like in the attached image. I think, that the files without extension are GRIB data (because first word in them is "GRIB"). So I want to get data from the big files (GRIB and NetCDF formats containing climate data like temerature & pressure in grid) to my database, but they are binary. Can you recommend me some easy way for getting data from these files? I can't get any information about handling their datasets on their website.
Converting these files to .csv would be nice, but I can't find a program to convert the GRIB files.
Using python and some available modules it is simple...
The Enthought Python Distribution includes several packages, including netCDF4, to deal with NetCDF files!
I've never worked with GRIB files, but google tells that another python package exists, pygrib2.
Or you can use PyNio, a Python package that allows to read and write netCDF3 and netCDF4 classic format, and to read GRIB1 and GRIB2 files.
I don't know the ammount of data you have, but usually it is crazy to convert it to *.csv! Python is easy to learn, and suitable to work with this kind of data (with matplotlib package you can even plot it). Or, if you really need it in a *.csv, you can select with python a smaller domain, for example, or the needed variables...
For conversion into text, look into http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/wesley/wgrib.html or http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/wesley/wgrib2/
Both are C programs from one of the big names in GRIB.
I'm currently dealing with a similar issue.
In my case I'm trying to rely on the GrADS software, which can "easily" transform GRIB data into other formats.
If your dataset is not huge, then you can export it to csv using this tutorial.
My dataset is 80gb in GRIB binary files, so I'm very restricted in what software I can use to handle it (no R unless I find a computer with more than 80gb of RAM).