Quick Start

This section describes how to run YCSB on Accumulo.

1. Start Accumulo

See the Accumulo Documentation for details on installing and running Accumulo.

Before running the YCSB test you must create the Accumulo table. Again see the Accumulo Documentation for details. The default table name is ycsb.

2. Set Up YCSB

Git clone YCSB and compile:

git clone http://github.com/brianfrankcooper/YCSB.git
cd YCSB
mvn -pl site.ycsb:accumulo1.6-binding -am clean package

3. Create the Accumulo table

By default, YCSB uses a table with the name "usertable". Users must create this table before loading data into Accumulo. For maximum Accumulo performance, the Accumulo table must be pre-split. A simple Ruby script, based on the HBase README, can generate adequate split-point. 10's of Tablets per TabletServer is a good starting point. Unless otherwise specified, the following commands should run on any version of Accumulo.

$ echo 'num_splits = 20; puts (1..num_splits).map {|i| "user#{1000+i*(9999-1000)/num_splits}"}' | ruby > /tmp/splits.txt
$ accumulo shell -u <user> -p <password> -e "createtable usertable"
$ accumulo shell -u <user> -p <password> -e "addsplits -t usertable -sf /tmp/splits.txt"
$ accumulo shell -u <user> -p <password> -e "config -t usertable -s table.cache.block.enable=true"

Additionally, there are some other configuration properties which can increase performance. These can be set on the Accumulo table via the shell after it is created. Setting the table durability to flush relaxes the constraints on data durability during hard power-outages (avoids calls to fsync). Accumulo defaults table compression to gzip which is not particularly fast; snappy is a faster and similarly-efficient option. The mutation queue property controls how many writes that Accumulo will buffer in memory before performing a flush; this property should be set relative to the amount of JVM heap the TabletServers are given.

Please note that the table.durability and tserver.total.mutation.queue.max properties only exists for >=Accumulo-1.7. There are no concise replacements for these properties in earlier versions.

accumulo> config -s table.durability=flush
accumulo> config -s tserver.total.mutation.queue.max=256M
accumulo> config -t usertable -s table.file.compress.type=snappy

On repeated data loads, the following commands may be helpful to re-set the state of the table quickly.

accumulo> createtable tmp --copy-splits usertable --copy-config usertable
accumulo> deletetable --force usertable
accumulo> renametable tmp usertable
accumulo> compact --wait -t accumulo.metadata

4. Load Data and Run Tests

Load the data:

./bin/ycsb load accumulo1.6 -s -P workloads/workloada \
     -p accumulo.zooKeepers=localhost \
     -p accumulo.columnFamily=ycsb \
     -p accumulo.instanceName=ycsb \
     -p accumulo.username=user \
     -p accumulo.password=supersecret \
     > outputLoad.txt

Run the workload test:

./bin/ycsb run accumulo1.6 -s -P workloads/workloada  \
     -p accumulo.zooKeepers=localhost \
     -p accumulo.columnFamily=ycsb \
     -p accumulo.instanceName=ycsb \
     -p accumulo.username=user \
     -p accumulo.password=supersecret \
     > outputLoad.txt

Accumulo Configuration Parameters

• accumulo.zooKeepers

  • The Accumulo cluster's zookeeper servers.
  • Should contain a comma separated list of of hostname or hostname:port values.
  • No default value.

• accumulo.columnFamily

  • The name of the column family to use to store the data within the table.
  • No default value.

• accumulo.instanceName

  • Name of the Accumulo instance.
  • No default value.

• accumulo.username

  • The username to use when connecting to Accumulo.
  • No default value.

• accumulo.password

  • The password for the user connecting to Accumulo.
  • No default value.