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What is KijiMR?

KijiMR allows KijiSchema users to employ MapReduce-based techniques to develop many kinds of applications, including those using machine learning and other complex analytics.

KijiMR is organized around three core MapReduce job types: Bulk Importers, Producers and Gatherers.

  • Bulk Importers make it easy to efficiently load data into Kiji tables from a variety of formats, such as JSON or CSV files stored in HDFS.
  • Producers are entity-centric operations that use an entity’s existing data to generate new information and store it back in the entity’s row. One typical use-case for producers is to generate new recommendations for a user based on the user’s history.
  • Gatherers provide flexible MapReduce computations that scan over Kiji table rows and output key-value pairs. By using different outputs and reducers, gatherers can export data in a variety of formats (such as text or Avro) or into other Kiji tables.

Finally, KijiMR allows any of these jobs to combine the data they operate on with external KeyValueStores. This allows the user to join data sets stored in HDFS and Kiji.

Unlike KijiSchema, where the classes most relevant to application developers were usually concrete, these core job types exist in KijiMR as abstract classes (such as KijiProducer). It is typically up to the application developer to subclass the appropriate class in their application and implement their application’s analysis logic in a few methods (such as KijiProducer’s produce() and getDataRequest()). They can then point the job at the appropriate Kiji table using either the kiji command line tools or programmatically using one of the framework’s JobBuilders (such as KijiProduceJobBuilder) that make launching these jobs easy. Kiji can also record metadata about jobs run using KijiMR to provide a historical view.

The KijiMR Library provides a growing repository of implemented solutions to many common use-cases. These solutions can be used directly or as example code. Both KijiMR and the KijiMR Library are included with distributions of Kiji BentoBox.

In the sections of this guide that follow, the core job types will be explained in greater detail. Motiviation, example code snippets, and (where appropriate) a description of reference implementations in the KijiMR Library will be given for each. This guide also contains an in-depth description of how to use KeyValueStores to expose side-data stored in HDFS and Kiji through a consistent interface to your MapReduce jobs. Finally, this guide contains a description of the command line tools included with KijiMR and facilities that make it easier to test KijiMR application code.

Using KijiMR in Your Project

You will need to include KijiSchema as a dependency in your project. If you’re using Maven, this can be included as follows:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.kiji.mapreduce</groupId>
  <artifactId>kiji-mapreduce</artifactId>
  <version>1.0.0-rc62</version>
  <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

If you want to use bulk importers or other classes in the KijiMR Library, you will need to include:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.kiji.mapreduce.lib</groupId>
  <artifactId>kiji-mapreduce-lib</artifactId>
  <version>1.0.0-rc61</version>
  <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

KijiMR User Guide

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