Apache: Big Data North America 2017

Query optimizers and people have one thing in common: the better they understand their data, the better they can do their jobs. Optimizing queries is hard if you don't have good estimates for the sizes of the intermediate join and aggregate results. Data profiling is a technique that scans data, looking for patterns within the data such as keys, functional dependencies, and correlated columns. These richer statistics can be used in Apache Calcite's query optimizer, and the projects that use it, such as Apache Hive, Phoenix and Drill. We describe how we built a data profiler as a table function in Apache Calcite, review the recent research and algorithms that made it possible, and show how you can use the profiler to improve the quality of your data.