In this page hierarchy, we explain the concepts, design and the overall architectural underpinnings of Apache Hudi. This content is intended to be the technical documentation of the project and will be kept up-to date with 

Introduction

Apache Hudi (Hudi for short, here on) allows you to store vast amounts of data, on top existing def~hadoop-compatible-storage, while providing two primitives, that enable def~stream-processing on def~data-lakes, in addition to typical  def~batch-processing.

Specifically,

• Update/Delete Records : Hudi provides support for updating/deleting records, using fine grained file/record level indexes, while providing transactional guarantees for the write operation. Queries process  the last such committed snapshot, to produce results.
• Change Streams : Hudi also provides first-class support for obtaining an incremental stream of all the records that were updated/inserted/deleted in a given dataset, from a given point-in-time, and unlocks a new category of incremental queries.

Together these primitives unlock stream/incremental processing capabilities directly on top of def~DFS-abstractions. If you are familiar def~stream-processing, this is very similar to consuming events from a def~kafka-topic and then using a def~state-stores to accumulate intermediate results incrementally.

It has several architectural advantages.

• Increased Efficiency : Ingesting data often needs to deal with updates (resulting from def~database-change-capture), deletions (due to def~data-privacy-regulations) and enforcing def~unique-key-constraints (to ensure def~data-quality of event streams/analytics). However, due to lack of standardized support for such functionality using a system like Hudi, data engineers often resort to big batch jobs that reprocess entire day's events or reload the entire upstream database every run, leading to massive waste of def~computational-resources. Since Hudi supports record level updates, it brings an order of magnitude improvement to these operations, by only reprocessing changes records and rewriting only the part of the def~dataset, that was updated/deleted, as opposed to rewriting entire def~dataset-partitions or even the entire def~dataset.
• Faster ETL/Derived Pipelines : An ubiquitous next step, once the data has been ingested from external sources is to build derived data pipelines using Apache Spark/Apache Hive or any other data processing framework to def~ETL the ingested data for a variety of use-cases like def~data-warehousing, def~machine-learning-feature-extraction, or even just def~analytics. Typically, such processes again rely on def~batch-processing jobs expressed in code or SQL, that process all input data in bulk and recompute all the output results. 
• Access to fresh data : 
• Unified Storage : 

System Overview

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Additionally, 

• Unified, Optimized analytical storage
• GDPR, Data deletions, Compliance.
• Building block for great data lakes!
• Optimized storage/sizing

Concepts

Timeline

Storage/Writing

The implementation specifics of the two storage types are detailed below.

Copy-On-Write

def~Merge-On-Read

Hudi writing is implemented as a Spark library, which makes it easy to integrate into existing data pipelines or ingestion libraries (which we will refer to as `Hudi clients`). Hudi Clients prepare an `RDD[HoodieRecord]` that contains the data to be upserted and Hudi upsert/insert is merely a Spark DAG, that can be broken into two big pieces.

• Indexing : A big part of Hudi's efficiency comes from indexing the mapping from record keys to the file ids, to which they belong to. This index also helps the `HoodieWriteClient` separate upserted records into inserts and updates, so they can be treated differently. `HoodieReadClient` supports operations such as `filterExists` (used for de-duplication of table) and an efficient batch `read(keys)` api, that can read out the records corresponding to the keys using the index much quickly, than a typical scan via a query. The index is also atomically updated each commit, and is also rolled back when commits are rolled back.
• Storage : The storage part of the DAG is responsible for taking an `RDD[HoodieRecord]`, that has been tagged as an insert or update via index lookup, and writing it out efficiently onto storage.

File Layout

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Indexing

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Hudi currently provides two choices for indexes : `BloomIndex` and `HBaseIndex` to map a record key into the file id to which it belongs to. This enables us to speed up upserts significantly, without scanning over every record in the dataset. Hudi Indices can be classified based on their ability to lookup records across partition. A `global` index does not need partition information for finding the file-id for a record key but a `non-global` does.

HBase Index (global)

Here, we just use HBase in a straightforward way to store the mapping above. The challenge with using HBase (or any external key-value store for that matter) is performing rollback of a commit and handling partial index updates.
Since the HBase table is indexed by record key and not commit Time, we would have to scan all the entries which will be prohibitively expensive. Instead, we store the commit time with the value and discard its value if it does not belong to a valid commit.

Bloom Index (non-global)

This index is built by adding bloom filters with a very high false positive tolerance (e.g: 1/10^9), to the parquet file footers. The advantage of this index over HBase is the obvious removal of a big external dependency, and also nicer handling of rollbacks & partial updates since the index is part of the data file itself.

At runtime, checking the Bloom Index for a given set of record keys effectively amounts to checking all the bloom filters within a given partition, against the incoming records, using a Spark join. Much of the engineering effort towards the Bloom index has gone into scaling this join by caching the incoming RDD[HoodieRecord] and dynamically tuning join parallelism, to avoid hitting Spark limitations like 2GB maximum for partition size. As a result, Bloom Index implementation has been able to handle single upserts upto 5TB, in a reliable manner.

DAG with Range Pruning:

Compaction

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File Sizing

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Querying

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Snapshot Queries

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Incremental Queries

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Read Optimized

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