Build a Data Pipeline with Qubole

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September 18, 2013 by Updated May 10th, 2024

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Build a Data Pipeline with Qubole

We get many questions about how Qubole makes data science easy. The one-line answer is – we have developed a number of features to help with all stages in a data pipeline’s lifecycle – import data, analyze, visualize and deploy to production. However, the best way to answer these questions is by letting the product talk. We have created a demo to showcase how Qubole lowers the barrier to leveraging the power of Apache Hive with Hadoop.

Wikimedia, the organization behind Wikipedia publishes the page views of each topic, every hour of the day. From the page views, trending topics i.e. those topics with sudden jumps in page views can be found. We are not the first ones to attempt such an exercise. Data Wrangling has documented a previous attempt here.

We have also deployed a rails app to visualize the results at https://demotrends.qubole.com. The code for the Rails app is available on GitHub.

wikitopics

Requirements to run the demo

  1. Qubole Trial Plan

OR

  1. An Amazon Web Services account
  2. Qubole Free Plan

PageCount Data

On the Wikimedia website, the data is partitioned by year followed by month. There is one directory per year starting from 2007. Each year has one directory per month. For e.g. in the year 2013, there are directories named

  • 2013-01
  • 2013-02
  • 2013-03
  • 2013-04
  • 2013-05
  • 2013-06
  • 2013-07

Each month’s directory has one file for every hour of the day. For e.g.

Let’s take a peek at the page count data feed. Each row ends with a new line ‘\n’. There are 4 columns in each row and the columns are separated by a space.

ColumnDescription
GroupA category is chosen by Wikipedia.
TitleName of the topic
Page ViewsNo. of views of each topic in an hour
Bytes SentNo. of bytes served by the server in an hour

 

A sample of the rows are:

GroupTitlePage ViewsBytes Sent
EnIndia1265155611676
EnAl_Hind1745733
Af2007_Super_14-seisoen1491226
Af2008_Super_14-seisoen1427131
EnUbuntu_(Operating_System)19366003

Resolve Synonyms

The page titles in a row can be synonyms. For e.g. “Bhart”, “Al_Hind” and “India” redirect to the same Article of India on Wikipedia, ie these 3 are synonyms and Wikipedia keeps track of synonyms. Wikipedia calls the synonym page titles “Redirect Titles”.

wikipedia

The page visit count data that we discussed above gives info about page visits for “Bhart”, “Al_Hind” and “India” separately. To get the actual page visit count of “India” we need to aggregate the data for all synonyms/Redirect titles for “India”. Wikipedia publishes the data about page synonyms in form of 2 dimension tables.

Page IdPage Title
12345India
67567Bhart
56765Al_Hind
Redirect fromPage Title
67567India
56765India

Page Table has an entry for each page that exists in the wiki. The redirect table has an entry for only redirect page ids. We need to join these two tables to get a lookup table.

Redirect IdRedirect TitleTrue TitleTrue Id
12345IndiaIndia12345
67567BhartIndia12345
56765Al_HindIndia12345

We can then use this lookup table to find the True Title for any redirect table.

Final Output

The final output exported to the web app looks like

DateTitleMonthly TrendDaily Trend
2013-07-13India3456129908.6

Flowchart

Flowchart

The data pipeline is visualized in the flowchart shown above. There are four distinct parts:

  1. Import and clean up Pagecount
  2. Import and join Pages & Redirect tables to create a lookup table.
  3. Resolve Synonyms and calculate trend ranks for each topic.
  4. Export the results to the web app database.

In the second part of the blog series, we’ll describe the ETL steps required to process the raw data.

In the third part, we’ll describe the analysis and export steps.

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