Creating real time datawarehouse

Question

I am doing a personal project that consists of creating the full architecture of a data warehouse (DWH). In this case as an ETL and BI analysis tool I decided to use Pentaho; it has a lot of functionality from allowing easy dashboard creation, to full data mining processes and OLAP cubes.

I have read that a data warehouse must be a relational database, and understand this. What I don't understand is how to achieve a near real time, or fully real time DWH. I have read about push and pull strategies but my conclusions are the following:

• The choice of DBMS is not important to create real time DWH. I mean that is possible with MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle or any other. As I am doing it as a personal project I choose MySQL.
• The key factor is the frequency of the jobs scheduling, and this is task of the scheduler. Is this assumption correct? I mean, the key to create a real time DWH is to establish jobs every second for every ETL process?

If I am wrong can you provide me some help to understand this? And then, which is the way to create a real time DWH? Is the any open source scheduler that allows that? And any not open source scheduler which allows that?

I am very confused because some references say that this is impossible, others that is possible.

Answer 1

Definition

Very interesting question. First of all, it should be defined how "real-time" realtime should be. Realtime really has a very low latency for incoming data but requires good architecture in the sending systems, maybe a event bus or messaging queue and good infrastructure on the receiving end. This usually involves some kind of listener and pushing from the deliviering systems.

Near-realtime would be the next "lower" level. If we say near-realtime would be about 5 minutes delay max, your approach could work as well. So for example here you could pull every minute or so the data. But keep in mind that you need some kind of high-performance check if new data is available and which to get. If this check and the pull would take longer than a minute it would become harder to keep up with the data. Really depends on the volume.

Realtime

As I said before, realtime analytics require at best a messaging queue or a service bus some jobs of yours could connect to and "listen" for new data. If a new data package is pushed into the pipeline, the size of it will probably be very small and it can be processed very fast.

If there is no infrastructure for listeners, you need to go near-realtime.

Near-realtime

This is the part where you have to develop more. You have to make sure to get realtively small data packages which will usually be some kind of delta. This could be done with triggers if you have access to the database. Otherwise you have to pull every once in a while whereas your "once" will probably be very frequent.

This could be done on Linux for example with a simple conjob or on Windows with event planning. Just keep in mind that your loading and processing time shouldn't exceed the time window you have got until the next job is being started.

Database

In the end, when you defined what you want to achieve and have a general idea how to implement delta loading or listeners, you are right - you could take a relational database. If you are interested in performance and are modelling this part as Star Schema, you also could look into Column Based Engines or Column Based Databases like Apache Cassandra.

Scheduling

Also for job scheduling you could start with Linux or Windows standard planning tools. If you code in Java you could use later something like quartz. But this would only be the case for near-realtime. Realtime requires a different architecture as I explained above.