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Serving Hybrid-Cloud SQL Interactive Queries at Twitter

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Software Architecture (ECSA 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13365))

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Abstract

The demand for data analytics has been consistently increasing in the past years at Twitter. In order to fulfill the requirements and provide a highly scalable and available query experience, a large-scale in-house SQL system is heavily relied on. Recently, we evolved the SQL system into a hybrid-cloud SQL federation system, compliant with Twitter’s Partly Cloudy strategy. The hybrid-cloud SQL federation system is capable of processing queries across Twitter’s data centers and the public cloud, interacting with around 10PB of data per day.

In this paper, the design of the hybrid-cloud SQL federation system is presented, which consists of query, cluster, and storage federations. We identify challenges in a modern SQL system and demonstrate how our system addresses them with some important design decisions. We also conduct qualitative examinations and summarize instructive lessons learned from the development and operation of such a SQL system.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    At Twitter, SQL system users cannot create or update datasets except exclusive temporary tables under personal accounts. Due to the requirements for data lineage and governance, only data pipeline system accounts have write access to public datasets. SQL individual users only have read access.

  2. 2.

    From an analysis of a typical Twitter OLAP workload in three months, 19.2% of queries consume more than 1 TB peak memory.

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Acknowledgment

Twitter’s SQL federation system is a complicated project that has evolved for years. We would like to express our gratitude to everyone who has served on Twitter’s Interactive Query team, including former team members Hao Luo, Yaliang Wang, Da Cheng, Fred Dai, and Maosong Fu. We also appreciate Prateek Mukhedkar, Vrushali Channapattan, Daniel Lipkin, Derek Lyon, Srikanth Thiagarajan, Jeremy Zogg, and Sudhir Srinivas for their strategic vision, direction, and support to the team. Finally, we thank Erica Hessel, Alex Angarita Rosales, and the anonymous ECSA reviewers for their informative comments, which considerably improved our paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Twitter, Inc., San Francisco, USA

    Chunxu Tang, Beinan Wang, Huijun Wu, Zhenzhao Wang, Yao Li, Vrushali Channapattan, Zhenxiao Luo, Ruchin Kabra, Mainak Ghosh, Nikhil Kantibhai Navadiya, Prachi Mishra, Prateek Mukhedkar & Anneliese Lu

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  1. Chunxu Tang
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  2. Beinan Wang
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Correspondence to Chunxu Tang .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Università di Bergamo, Dalmine, Italy

    Patrizia Scandurra

  2. University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

    Matthias Galster

  3. Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Raffaela Mirandola

  4. KU Leuven, Kortrijk, Belgium

    Danny Weyns

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Tang, C. et al. (2022). Serving Hybrid-Cloud SQL Interactive Queries at Twitter. In: Scandurra, P., Galster, M., Mirandola, R., Weyns, D. (eds) Software Architecture. ECSA 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13365. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15116-3_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15116-3_1

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