Apache Accumulo User Manual Version 1.6

Accumulo provides a richer data model than simple key-value stores, but is not a fully relational database. Data is represented as key-value pairs, where the key and value are comprised of the following elements:

All elements of the Key and the Value are represented as byte arrays except for Timestamp, which is a Long. Accumulo sorts keys by element and lexicographically in ascending order. Timestamps are sorted in descending order so that later versions of the same Key appear first in a sequential scan. Tables consist of a set of sorted key-value pairs.

Accumulo is a distributed data storage and retrieval system and as such consists of several architectural components, some of which run on many individual servers. Much of the work Accumulo does involves maintaining certain properties of the data, such as organization, availability, and integrity, across many commodity-class machines.

An instance of Accumulo includes many TabletServers, one Garbage Collector process, one Master server and many Clients.

Accumulo stores data in tables, which are partitioned into tablets. Tablets are partitioned on row boundaries so that all of the columns and values for a particular row are found together within the same tablet. The Master assigns Tablets to one TabletServer at a time. This enables row-level transactions to take place without using distributed locking or some other complicated synchronization mechanism. As clients insert and query data, and as machines are added and removed from the cluster, the Master migrates tablets to ensure they remain available and that the ingest and query load is balanced across the cluster.

When a write arrives at a TabletServer it is written to a Write-Ahead Log and then inserted into a sorted data structure in memory called a MemTable. When the MemTable reaches a certain size the TabletServer writes out the sorted key-value pairs to a file in HDFS called Indexed Sequential Access Method (ISAM) file. This process is called a minor compaction. A new MemTable is then created and the fact of the compaction is recorded in the Write-Ahead Log.

When a request to read data arrives at a TabletServer, the TabletServer does a binary search across the MemTable as well as the in-memory indexes associated with each ISAM file to find the relevant values. If clients are performing a scan, several key-value pairs are returned to the client in order from the MemTable and the set of ISAM files by performing a merge-sort as they are read.

In order to manage the number of files per tablet, periodically the TabletServer performs Major Compactions of files within a tablet, in which some set of ISAM files are combined into one file. The previous files will eventually be removed by the Garbage Collector. This also provides an opportunity to permanently remove deleted key-value pairs by omitting key-value pairs suppressed by a delete entry when the new file is created.

When a table is created it has one tablet. As the table grows its initial tablet eventually splits into two tablets. Its likely that one of these tablets will migrate to another tablet server. As the table continues to grow, its tablets will continue to split and be migrated. The decision to automatically split a tablet is based on the size of a tablets files. The size threshold at which a tablet splits is configurable per table. In addition to automatic splitting, a user can manually add split points to a table to create new tablets. Manually splitting a new table can parallelize reads and writes giving better initial performance without waiting for automatic splitting.

As data is deleted from a table, tablets may shrink. Over time this can lead to small or empty tablets. To deal with this, merging of tablets was introduced in Accumulo 1.4. This is discussed in more detail later.

If a TabletServer fails, the Master detects it and automatically reassigns the tablets assigned from the failed server to other servers. Any key-value pairs that were in memory at the time the TabletServer fails are automatically reapplied from the Write-Ahead Log(WAL) to prevent any loss of data.

Tablet servers write their WALs directly to HDFS so the logs are available to all tablet servers for recovery. To make the recovery process efficient, the updates within a log are grouped by tablet. TabletServers can quickly apply the mutations from the sorted logs that are destined for the tablets they have now been assigned.

TabletServer failures are noted on the Master’s monitor page, accessible via http://master-address:50095/monitor.

The Accumulo shell can be used to create and delete tables, as well as to configure table and instance specific options.

The Shell can also be used to insert updates and scan tables. This is useful for inspecting tables.

The value in brackets “[]” would be the visibility labels. Since none were used, this is empty for this row. You can use the -st option to scan to see the timestamp for the cell, too.

The compact command instructs Accumulo to schedule a compaction of the table during which files are consolidated and deleted entries are removed.

The flush command instructs Accumulo to write all entries currently in memory for a given table to disk.

The Shell can be used to add, remove, and grant privileges to users.

There are multiple ways to run Java code that uses Accumulo. Below is a list of the different ways to execute client code.

In order to run client code written to run against Accumulo, you will need to include the jars that Accumulo depends on in your classpath. Accumulo client code depends on Hadoop and Zookeeper. For Hadoop add the hadoop client jar, all of the jars in the Hadoop lib directory, and the conf directory to the classpath. For Zookeeper 3.3 you only need to add the Zookeeper jar, and not what is in the Zookeeper lib directory. You can run the following command on a configured Accumulo system to see what its using for its classpath.

Another option for running your code is to put a jar file in $ACCUMULO_HOME/lib/ext. After doing this you can use the accumulo script to execute your code. For example if you create a jar containing the class com.foo.Client and placed that in lib/ext, then you could use the command $ACCUMULO_HOME/bin/accumulo com.foo.Client to execute your code.

If you are writing map reduce job that access Accumulo, then you can use the bin/tool.sh script to run those jobs. See the map reduce example.

All clients must first identify the Accumulo instance to which they will be communicating. Code to do this is as follows:

The PasswordToken is the most common implementation of an AuthenticationToken. This general interface allows authentication as an Accumulo user to come from a variety of sources or means. The CredentialProviderToken leverages the Hadoop CredentialProviders (new in Hadoop 2.6).

For example, the CredentialProviderToken can be used in conjunction with a Java KeyStore to alleviate passwords stored in cleartext. When stored in HDFS, a single KeyStore can be used across an entire instance. Be aware that KeyStores stored on the local filesystem must be made available to all nodes in the Accumulo cluster.

Data are written to Accumulo by creating Mutation objects that represent all the changes to the columns of a single row. The changes are made atomically in the TabletServer. Clients then add Mutations to a BatchWriter which submits them to the appropriate TabletServers.

Mutations can be created thus:

Accumulo is optimized to quickly retrieve the value associated with a given key, and to efficiently return ranges of consecutive keys and their associated values.

The proxy API allows the interaction with Accumulo with languages other than Java. A proxy server is provided in the codebase and a client can further be generated.

Mock Accumulo supplies mock implementations for much of the client API. It presently does not enforce users, logins, permissions, etc. It does support Iterators and Combiners. Note that MockAccumulo holds all data in memory, and will not retain any data or settings between runs.

While normal interaction with the Accumulo client looks like this:

To interact with the MockAccumulo, just replace the ZooKeeperInstance with MockInstance:

In fact, you can use the --fake option to the Accumulo shell and interact with MockAccumulo:

When testing Map Reduce jobs, you can also set the Mock Accumulo on the AccumuloInputFormat and AccumuloOutputFormat classes:

While the Mock Accumulo provides a lightweight implementation of the client API for unit testing, it is often necessary to write more realistic end-to-end integration tests that take advantage of the entire ecosystem. The Mini Accumulo Cluster makes this possible by configuring and starting Zookeeper, initializing Accumulo, and starting the Master as well as some Tablet Servers. It runs against the local filesystem instead of having to start up HDFS.

To start it up, you will need to supply an empty directory and a root password as arguments:

Once we have our mini cluster running, we will want to interact with the Accumulo client API:

Upon completion of our development code, we will want to shutdown our MiniAccumuloCluster:

Accumulo supports storing sets of column families separately on disk to allow clients to efficiently scan over columns that are frequently used together and to avoid scanning over column families that are not requested. After a locality group is set, Scanner and BatchScanner operations will automatically take advantage of them whenever the fetchColumnFamilies() method is used.

By default, tables place all column families into the same “default” locality group. Additional locality groups can be configured at any time via the shell or programmatically as follows:

Accumulo supports constraints applied on mutations at insert time. This can be used to disallow certain inserts according to a user defined policy. Any mutation that fails to meet the requirements of the constraint is rejected and sent back to the client.

Constraints can be enabled by setting a table property as follows:

Currently there are no general-purpose constraints provided with the Accumulo distribution. New constraints can be created by writing a Java class that implements the following interface:

To deploy a new constraint, create a jar file containing the class implementing the new constraint and place it in the lib directory of the Accumulo installation. New constraint jars can be added to Accumulo and enabled without restarting but any change to an existing constraint class requires Accumulo to be restarted.

An example of constraints can be found in accumulo/docs/examples/README.constraints with corresponding code under accumulo/examples/simple/src/main/java/accumulo/examples/simple/constraints .

As mutations are applied to an Accumulo table, several files are created per tablet. If bloom filters are enabled, Accumulo will create and load a small data structure into memory to determine whether a file contains a given key before opening the file. This can speed up lookups considerably.

To enable bloom filters, enter the following command in the Shell:

An extensive example of using Bloom Filters can be found at accumulo/docs/examples/README.bloom .

Iterators provide a modular mechanism for adding functionality to be executed by TabletServers when scanning or compacting data. This allows users to efficiently summarize, filter, and aggregate data. In fact, the built-in features of cell-level security and column fetching are implemented using Iterators. Some useful Iterators are provided with Accumulo and can be found in the org.apache.accumulo.core.iterators.user package. In each case, any custom Iterators must be included in Accumulo’s classpath, typically by including a jar in $ACCUMULO_HOME/lib or $ACCUMULO_HOME/lib/ext, although the VFS classloader allows for classpath manipulation using a variety of schemes including URLs and HDFS URIs.

In order to increase throughput of commonly accessed entries, Accumulo employs a block cache. This block cache buffers data in memory so that it doesn’t have to be read off of disk. The RFile format that Accumulo prefers is a mix of index blocks and data blocks, where the index blocks are used to find the appropriate data blocks. Typical queries to Accumulo result in a binary search over several index blocks followed by a linear scan of one or more data blocks.

The block cache can be configured on a per-table basis, and all tablets hosted on a tablet server share a single resource pool. To configure the size of the tablet server’s block cache, set the following properties:

To enable the block cache for your table, set the following properties:

The block cache can have a significant effect on alleviating hot spots, as well as reducing query latency. It is enabled by default for the metadata tables.

As data is written to Accumulo it is buffered in memory. The data buffered in memory is eventually written to HDFS on a per tablet basis. Files can also be added to tablets directly by bulk import. In the background tablet servers run major compactions to merge multiple files into one. The tablet server has to decide which tablets to compact and which files within a tablet to compact. This decision is made using the compaction ratio, which is configurable on a per table basis. To configure this ratio modify the following property:

Increasing this ratio will result in more files per tablet and less compaction work. More files per tablet means more higher query latency. So adjusting this ratio is a trade off between ingest and query performance. The ratio defaults to 3.

The way the ratio works is that a set of files is compacted into one file if the sum of the sizes of the files in the set is larger than the ratio multiplied by the size of the largest file in the set. If this is not true for the set of all files in a tablet, the largest file is removed from consideration, and the remaining files are considered for compaction. This is repeated until a compaction is triggered or there are no files left to consider.

The number of background threads tablet servers use to run major compactions is configurable. To configure this modify the following property:

Also, the number of threads tablet servers use for minor compactions is configurable. To configure this modify the following property:

The numbers of minor and major compactions running and queued is visible on the Accumulo monitor page. This allows you to see if compactions are backing up and adjustments to the above settings are needed. When adjusting the number of threads available for compactions, consider the number of cores and other tasks running on the nodes such as maps and reduces.

If major compactions are not keeping up, then the number of files per tablet will grow to a point such that query performance starts to suffer. One way to handle this situation is to increase the compaction ratio. For example, if the compaction ratio were set to 1, then every new file added to a tablet by minor compaction would immediately queue the tablet for major compaction. So if a tablet has a 200M file and minor compaction writes a 1M file, then the major compaction will attempt to merge the 200M and 1M file. If the tablet server has lots of tablets trying to do this sort of thing, then major compactions will back up and the number of files per tablet will start to grow, assuming data is being continuously written. Increasing the compaction ratio will alleviate backups by lowering the amount of major compaction work that needs to be done.

Another option to deal with the files per tablet growing too large is to adjust the following property:

When a tablet reaches this number of files and needs to flush its in-memory data to disk, it will choose to do a merging minor compaction. A merging minor compaction will merge the tablet’s smallest file with the data in memory at minor compaction time. Therefore the number of files will not grow beyond this limit. This will make minor compactions take longer, which will cause ingest performance to decrease. This can cause ingest to slow down until major compactions have enough time to catch up. When adjusting this property, also consider adjusting the compaction ratio. Ideally, merging minor compactions never need to occur and major compactions will keep up. It is possible to configure the file max and compaction ratio such that only merging minor compactions occur and major compactions never occur. This should be avoided because doing only merging minor compactions causes O(N²) work to be done. The amount of work done by major compactions is O(N*log_R(N)) where R is the compaction ratio.

Compactions can be initiated manually for a table. To initiate a minor compaction, use the flush command in the shell. To initiate a major compaction, use the compact command in the shell. The compact command will compact all tablets in a table to one file. Even tablets with one file are compacted. This is useful for the case where a major compaction filter is configured for a table. In 1.4 the ability to compact a range of a table was added. To use this feature specify start and stop rows for the compact command. This will only compact tablets that overlap the given row range.

Accumulo will balance and distribute tables across servers. Before a table gets large, it will be maintained as a single tablet on a single server. This limits the speed at which data can be added or queried to the speed of a single node. To improve performance when the a table is new, or small, you can add split points and generate new tablets.

In the shell:

This will create a new table with 4 tablets. The table will be split on the letters “g”, “n”, and “t” which will work nicely if the row data start with lower-case alphabetic characters. If your row data includes binary information or numeric information, or if the distribution of the row information is not flat, then you would pick different split points. Now ingest and query can proceed on 4 nodes which can improve performance.

Over time, a table can get very large, so large that it has hundreds of thousands of split points. Once there are enough tablets to spread a table across the entire cluster, additional splits may not improve performance, and may create unnecessary bookkeeping. The distribution of data may change over time. For example, if row data contains date information, and data is continually added and removed to maintain a window of current information, tablets for older rows may be empty.

Accumulo supports tablet merging, which can be used to reduce the number of split points. The following command will merge all rows from “A” to “Z” into a single tablet:

If the result of a merge produces a tablet that is larger than the configured split size, the tablet may be split by the tablet server. Be sure to increase your tablet size prior to any merges if the goal is to have larger tablets:

In order to merge small tablets, you can ask Accumulo to merge sections of a table smaller than a given size.

By default, small tablets will not be merged into tablets that are already larger than the given size. This can leave isolated small tablets. To force small tablets to be merged into larger tablets use the --force option:

Merging away small tablets works on one section at a time. If your table contains many sections of small split points, or you are attempting to change the split size of the entire table, it will be faster to set the split point and merge the entire table:

Consider an indexing scheme that uses date information in each row. For example “20110823-15:20:25.013” might be a row that specifies a date and time. In some cases, we might like to delete rows based on this date, say to remove all the data older than the current year. Accumulo supports a delete range operation which efficiently removes data between two rows. For example:

This will delete all rows starting with “2010” and it will stop at any row starting “2011”. You can delete any data prior to 2011 with:

The shell will not allow you to delete an unbounded range (no start) unless you provide the --force option.

Range deletion is implemented using splits at the given start/end positions, and will affect the number of splits in the table.

A new table can be created that points to an existing table’s data. This is a very quick metadata operation, no data is actually copied. The cloned table and the source table can change independently after the clone operation. One use case for this feature is testing. For example to test a new filtering iterator, clone the table, add the filter to the clone, and force a major compaction. To perform a test on less data, clone a table and then use delete range to efficiently remove a lot of data from the clone. Another use case is generating a snapshot to guard against human error. To create a snapshot, clone a table and then disable write permissions on the clone.

The clone operation will point to the source table’s files. This is why the flush option is present and is enabled by default in the shell. If the flush option is not enabled, then any data the source table currently has in memory will not exist in the clone.

A cloned table copies the configuration of the source table. However the permissions of the source table are not copied to the clone. After a clone is created, only the user that created the clone can read and write to it.

In the following example we see that data inserted after the clone operation is not visible in the clone.

The du command in the shell shows how much space a table is using in HDFS. This command can also show how much overlapping space two cloned tables have in HDFS. In the example below du shows table ci is using 428M. Then ci is cloned to cic and du shows that both tables share 428M. After three entries are inserted into cic and its flushed, du shows the two tables still share 428M but cic has 226 bytes to itself. Finally, table cic is compacted and then du shows that each table uses 428M.

Accumulo supports exporting tables for the purpose of copying tables to another cluster. Exporting and importing tables preserves the tables configuration, splits, and logical time. Tables are exported and then copied via the hadoop distcp command. To export a table, it must be offline and stay offline while discp runs. The reason it needs to stay offline is to prevent files from being deleted. A table can be cloned and the clone taken offline inorder to avoid losing access to the table. See docs/examples/README.export for an example.

Since Accumulo tables are sorted by row ID, each table can be thought of as being indexed by the row ID. Lookups performed by row ID can be executed quickly, by doing a binary search, first across the tablets, and then within a tablet. Clients should choose a row ID carefully in order to support their desired application. A simple rule is to select a unique identifier as the row ID for each entity to be stored and assign all the other attributes to be tracked to be columns under this row ID. For example, if we have the following data in a comma-separated file:

We might choose to store this data using the userid as the rowID, the column name in the column family, and a blank column qualifier:

We could then retrieve any of the columns for a specific userid by specifying the userid as the range of a scanner and fetching specific columns:

Often it is necessary to transform the rowID in order to have rows ordered in a way that is optimal for anticipated access patterns. A good example of this is reversing the order of components of internet domain names in order to group rows of the same parent domain together:

Some data may result in the creation of very large rows - rows with many columns. In this case the table designer may wish to split up these rows for better load balancing while keeping them sorted together for scanning purposes. This can be done by appending a random substring at the end of the row:

It could also be done by adding a string representation of some period of time such as date to the week or month:

Appending dates provides the additional capability of restricting a scan to a given date range.

Since Keys in Accumulo are sorted lexicographically by default, it’s often useful to encode common data types into a byte format in which their sort order corresponds to the sort order in their native form. An example of this is encoding dates and numerical data so that they can be better seeked or searched in ranges.

The lexicoders are a standard and extensible way of encoding Java types. Here’s an example of a lexicoder that encodes a java Date object so that it sorts lexicographically:

If we want to return the most recent date first, we can reverse the sort order with the reverse lexicoder:

In order to support lookups via more than one attribute of an entity, additional indexes can be built. However, because Accumulo tables can support any number of columns without specifying them beforehand, a single additional index will often suffice for supporting lookups of records in the main table. Here, the index has, as the rowID, the Value or Term from the main table, the column families are the same, and the column qualifier of the index table contains the rowID from the main table.

Note: We store rowIDs in the column qualifier rather than the Value so that we can have more than one rowID associated with a particular term within the index. If we stored this in the Value we would only see one of the rows in which the value appears since Accumulo is configured by default to return the one most recent value associated with a key.

Lookups can then be done by scanning the Index Table first for occurrences of the desired values in the columns specified, which returns a list of row ID from the main table. These can then be used to retrieve each matching record, in their entirety, or a subset of their columns, from the Main Table.

To support efficient lookups of multiple rowIDs from the same table, the Accumulo client library provides a BatchScanner. Users specify a set of Ranges to the BatchScanner, which performs the lookups in multiple threads to multiple servers and returns an Iterator over all the rows retrieved. The rows returned are NOT in sorted order, as is the case with the basic Scanner interface.

One advantage of the dynamic schema capabilities of Accumulo is that different fields may be indexed into the same physical table. However, it may be necessary to create different index tables if the terms must be formatted differently in order to maintain proper sort order. For example, real numbers must be formatted differently than their usual notation in order to be sorted correctly. In these cases, usually one index per unique data type will suffice.

Accumulo is ideal for storing entities and their attributes, especially of the attributes are sparse. It is often useful to join several datasets together on common entities within the same table. This can allow for the representation of graphs, including nodes, their attributes, and connections to other nodes.

Rather than storing individual events, Entity-Attribute or Graph tables store aggregate information about the entities involved in the events and the relationships between entities. This is often preferrable when single events aren’t very useful and when a continuously updated summarization is desired.

The physical schema for an entity-attribute or graph table is as follows:

For example, to keep track of employees, managers and products the following entity-attribute table could be used. Note that the weights are not always necessary and are set to 0 when not used.

To allow efficient updating of edge weights, an aggregating iterator can be configured to add the value of all mutations applied with the same key. These types of tables can easily be created from raw events by simply extracting the entities, attributes, and relationships from individual events and inserting the keys into Accumulo each with a count of 1. The aggregating iterator will take care of maintaining the edge weights.

Using a simple index as described above works well when looking for records that match one of a set of given criteria. When looking for records that match more than one criterion simultaneously, such as when looking for documents that contain all of the words ‘the’ and ‘white’ and ‘house’, there are several issues.

First is that the set of all records matching any one of the search terms must be sent to the client, which incurs a lot of network traffic. The second problem is that the client is responsible for performing set intersection on the sets of records returned to eliminate all but the records matching all search terms. The memory of the client may easily be overwhelmed during this operation.

For these reasons Accumulo includes support for a scheme known as sharded indexing, in which these set operations can be performed at the TabletServers and decisions about which records to include in the result set can be made without incurring network traffic.

This is accomplished via partitioning records into bins that each reside on at most one TabletServer, and then creating an index of terms per record within each bin as follows:

Documents or records are mapped into bins by a user-defined ingest application. By storing the BinID as the RowID we ensure that all the information for a particular bin is contained in a single tablet and hosted on a single TabletServer since Accumulo never splits rows across tablets. Storing the Terms as column families serves to enable fast lookups of all the documents within this bin that contain the given term.

Finally, we perform set intersection operations on the TabletServer via a special iterator called the Intersecting Iterator. Since documents are partitioned into many bins, a search of all documents must search every bin. We can use the BatchScanner to scan all bins in parallel. The Intersecting Iterator should be enabled on a BatchScanner within user query code as follows:

This code effectively has the BatchScanner scan all tablets of a table, looking for documents that match all the given terms. Because all tablets are being scanned for every query, each query is more expensive than other Accumulo scans, which typically involve a small number of TabletServers. This reduces the number of concurrent queries supported and is subject to what is known as the ‘straggler’ problem in which every query runs as slow as the slowest server participating.

Of course, fast servers will return their results to the client which can display them to the user immediately while they wait for the rest of the results to arrive. If the results are unordered this is quite effective as the first results to arrive are as good as any others to the user.

New tables consist of a single tablet by default. As mutations are applied, the table grows and splits into multiple tablets which are balanced by the Master across TabletServers. This implies that the aggregate ingest rate will be limited to fewer servers than are available within the cluster until the table has reached the point where there are tablets on every TabletServer.

Pre-splitting a table ensures that there are as many tablets as desired available before ingest begins to take advantage of all the parallelism possible with the cluster hardware. Tables can be split at any time by using the shell:

For the purposes of providing parallelism to ingest it is not necessary to create more tablets than there are physical machines within the cluster as the aggregate ingest rate is a function of the number of physical machines. Note that the aggregate ingest rate is still subject to the number of machines running ingest clients, and the distribution of rowIDs across the table. The aggregation ingest rate will be suboptimal if there are many inserts into a small number of rowIDs.

Accumulo is capable of scaling to very high rates of ingest, which is dependent upon not just the number of TabletServers in operation but also the number of ingest clients. This is because a single client, while capable of batching mutations and sending them to all TabletServers, is ultimately limited by the amount of data that can be processed on a single machine. The aggregate ingest rate will scale linearly with the number of clients up to the point at which either the aggregate I/O of TabletServers or total network bandwidth capacity is reached.

In operational settings where high rates of ingest are paramount, clusters are often configured to dedicate some number of machines solely to running Ingester Clients. The exact ratio of clients to TabletServers necessary for optimum ingestion rates will vary according to the distribution of resources per machine and by data type.

Accumulo supports the ability to import files produced by an external process such as MapReduce into an existing table. In some cases it may be faster to load data this way rather than via ingesting through clients using BatchWriters. This allows a large number of machines to format data the way Accumulo expects. The new files can then simply be introduced to Accumulo via a shell command.

To configure MapReduce to format data in preparation for bulk loading, the job should be set to use a range partitioner instead of the default hash partitioner. The range partitioner uses the split points of the Accumulo table that will receive the data. The split points can be obtained from the shell and used by the MapReduce RangePartitioner. Note that this is only useful if the existing table is already split into multiple tablets.

Run the MapReduce job, using the AccumuloFileOutputFormat to create the files to be introduced to Accumulo. Once this is complete, the files can be added to Accumulo via the shell:

Note that the paths referenced are directories within the same HDFS instance over which Accumulo is running. Accumulo places any files that failed to be added to the second directory specified.

A complete example of using Bulk Ingest can be found at accumulo/docs/examples/README.bulkIngest.

Logical time is important for bulk imported data, for which the client code may be choosing a timestamp. At bulk import time, the user can choose to enable logical time for the set of files being imported. When its enabled, Accumulo uses a specialized system iterator to lazily set times in a bulk imported file. This mechanism guarantees that times set by unsynchronized multi-node applications (such as those running on MapReduce) will maintain some semblance of causal ordering. This mitigates the problem of the time being wrong on the system that created the file for bulk import. These times are not set when the file is imported, but whenever it is read by scans or compactions. At import, a time is obtained and always used by the specialized system iterator to set that time.

The timestamp assigned by Accumulo will be the same for every key in the file. This could cause problems if the file contains multiple keys that are identical except for the timestamp. In this case, the sort order of the keys will be undefined. This could occur if an insert and an update were in the same bulk import file.

It is possible to efficiently write many mutations to Accumulo in parallel via a MapReduce job. In this scenario the MapReduce is written to process data that lives in HDFS and write mutations to Accumulo using the AccumuloOutputFormat. See the MapReduce section under Analytics for details.

An example of using MapReduce can be found under accumulo/docs/examples/README.mapred.

Accumulo tables can be used as the source and destination of MapReduce jobs. To use an Accumulo table with a MapReduce job (specifically with the new Hadoop API as of version 0.20), configure the job parameters to use the AccumuloInputFormat and AccumuloOutputFormat. Accumulo specific parameters can be set via these two format classes to do the following:

Many applications can benefit from the ability to aggregate values across common keys. This can be done via Combiner iterators and is similar to the Reduce step in MapReduce. This provides the ability to define online, incrementally updated analytics without the overhead or latency associated with batch-oriented MapReduce jobs.

All that is needed to aggregate values of a table is to identify the fields over which values will be grouped, insert mutations with those fields as the key, and configure the table with a combining iterator that supports the summarizing operation desired.

The only restriction on an combining iterator is that the combiner developer should not assume that all values for a given key have been seen, since new mutations can be inserted at anytime. This precludes using the total number of values in the aggregation such as when calculating an average, for example.

Statistical models that need to be updated by many machines in parallel could be similarly stored within an Accumulo table. For example, a MapReduce job that is iteratively updating a global statistical model could have each map or reduce worker reference the parts of the model to be read and updated through an embedded Accumulo client.

Using Accumulo this way enables efficient and fast lookups and updates of small pieces of information in a random access pattern, which is complementary to MapReduce’s sequential access model.

When mutations are applied, users can specify a security label for each value. This is done as the Mutation is created by passing a ColumnVisibility object to the put() method:

Security labels consist of a set of user-defined tokens that are required to read the value the label is associated with. The set of tokens required can be specified using syntax that supports logical AND & and OR | combinations of tokens, as well as nesting groups () of tokens together.

Each term is comprised of one to many alpha-numeric characters, hyphens, underscores or periods. Optionally, each term may be wrapped in quotation marks which removes the restriction on valid characters. In quoted terms, quotation marks and backslash characters can be used as characters in the term by escaping them with a backslash.

For example, suppose within our organization we want to label our data values with security labels defined in terms of user roles. We might have tokens such as:

These can be specified alone or combined using logical operators:

When both | and & operators are used, parentheses must be used to specify precedence of the operators.

When clients attempt to read data from Accumulo, any security labels present are examined against the set of authorizations passed by the client code when the Scanner or BatchScanner are created. If the authorizations are determined to be insufficient to satisfy the security label, the value is suppressed from the set of results sent back to the client.

Authorizations are specified as a comma-separated list of tokens the user possesses:

Each Accumulo user has a set of associated security labels. To manipulate these in the shell while using the default authorizor, use the setuaths and getauths commands. These may also be modified for the default authorizor using the java security operations API.

When a user creates a scanner a set of Authorizations is passed. If the authorizations passed to the scanner are not a subset of the users authorizations, then an exception will be thrown.

To prevent users from writing data they can not read, add the visibility constraint to a table. Use the -evc option in the createtable shell command to enable this constraint. For existing tables use the following shell command to enable the visibility constraint. Ensure the constraint number does not conflict with any existing constraints.

Any user with the alter table permission can add or remove this constraint. This constraint is not applied to bulk imported data, if this a concern then disable the bulk import permission.

New in 1.5 of Accumulo is a pluggable security mechanism. It can be broken into three actions — authentication, authorization, and permission handling. By default all of these are handled in Zookeeper, which is how things were handled in Accumulo 1.4 and before. It is worth noting at this point, that it is a new feature in 1.5 and may be adjusted in future releases without the standard deprecation cycle.

Authentication simply handles the ability for a user to verify their integrity. A combination of principal and authentication token are used to verify a user is who they say they are. An authentication token should be constructed, either directly through its constructor, but it is advised to use the init(Property) method to populate an authentication token. It is expected that a user knows what the appropriate token to use for their system is. The default token is PasswordToken.

Once a user is authenticated by the Authenticator, the user has access to the other actions within Accumulo. All actions in Accumulo are ACLed, and this ACL check is handled by the Permission Handler. This is what manages all of the permissions, which are divided in system and per table level. From there, if a user is doing an action which requires authorizations, the Authorizor is queried to determine what authorizations the user has.

This setup allows a variety of different mechanisms to be used for handling different aspects of Accumulo’s security. A system like Kerberos can be used for authentication, then a system like LDAP could be used to determine if a user has a specific permission, and then it may default back to the default ZookeeperAuthorizor to determine what Authorizations a user is ultimately allowed to use. This is a pluggable system so custom components can be created depending on your need.

For applications serving many users, it is not expected that an Accumulo user will be created for each application user. In this case an Accumulo user with all authorizations needed by any of the applications users must be created. To service queries, the application should create a scanner with the application user’s authorizations. These authorizations could be obtained from a trusted 3rd party.

Often production systems will integrate with Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) and designate client code within the query layer to negotiate with PKI servers in order to authenticate users and retrieve their authorization tokens (credentials). This requires users to specify only the information necessary to authenticate themselves to the system. Once user identity is established, their credentials can be accessed by the client code and passed to Accumulo outside of the reach of the user.

Since the primary method of interaction with Accumulo is through the Java API, production environments often call for the implementation of a Query layer. This can be done using web services in containers such as Apache Tomcat, but is not a requirement. The Query Services Layer provides a mechanism for providing a platform on which user facing applications can be built. This allows the application designers to isolate potentially complex query logic, and enables a convenient point at which to perform essential security functions.

Several production environments choose to implement authentication at this layer, where users identifiers are used to retrieve their access credentials which are then cached within the query layer and presented to Accumulo through the Authorizations mechanism.

Typically, the query services layer sits between Accumulo and user workstations.