CSV Source

Introduction

The CSV Source is one of ActivePivot's key components. It relies on NIO (Non-blocking I/O) channel, memory buffers and multi-threading to speed-up character decoding and object parsing, providing thus high speed data analysis through fast data loading.

The CSV Source implementation aims at high performance and detailed configuration. It allows fetching data from, and listening for changes in CSV files in a multi-threaded way in record times, while keeping the amount of transient memory to a minimum.

Moreover, CSV work is organized internally in workloads that they execute. Nevertheless, it is also possible for custom code to bypass the CSV Source standard pipelines, to take control of parsing operations, deciding what files are loaded into what channel, and when.

Principle

Multi-threaded CSV parsing isn't as straight-forward as splitting the file and assigning each chunk to a single thread.

This example illustrates the difficulties:

Given the following CSV:

ID, Name, Price, Comment
0,"nameA",1,"This is a comment, is it not"
1,"nameB",2,"Another comment"

If this file is split in half (character wise, since the parser doesn't know about context, line delimiter, and so on, at that point of the algorithm), the first thread will have the bytes that correspond to

0,"nameA",1,"This is a commen

while the second thread gets

t, is it not"
1,"nameB",2,"Another comment"

Now the second thread sees a delimiter, the character , but as it doesn't know the context, it cannot know if it is within a comment or not. It could count the " character and deduce, after parsing the entire block, that it was within a comment, but that technique has its own limits.

ActiveViam's multi-threaded parser can read over a million entries per second. This article explains the solution, as well as its parametrization.

ParserTask

The CSV Source uses a single unified thread pool that runs a single type of task called a ParserTask. A ParserTask performs the following tasks:

  • Fetch bytes from a byte channel that represents the file,
  • Decode the bytes into characters,
  • Split these characters into lines,
  • Parse the lines into records,
  • Publish the records to a source listener.

ParserTasks optimize memory access by having all transient data remain in the CPU's cache for the duration of the computation. Each task works separately without the need for synchronization with the other tasks in the thread pool.

In a typical usage of the CSV source, the first three sub-tasks of a ParserTask are much less expensive than the following two. Thus, as soon as a ParserTask is done with its decoding sub-task, it spawns the next task, and can give that task context regarding delimiters.

A CSV parsing process can therefore be seen as such:

ParserTask

Integration with CSVSource

The process of reading a CSV starts with the creation of a ChannelTask that holds information regarding the file. When started, it creates the first ParserTask.

Around these tasks, ActiveViam has designed a pipeline to help load CSV files into the datastore.

Topics

You have to define ICSVTopics, which hold information about the columns from a CSV file (or several files that have a common structure) and are used to load data.

For CSV files that come from the local file system, we provide two implementations:

  • a single CSV file topic, where a single file is watched for updates, or
  • a directory topic, where a directory is watched for new or updated files that match a given pattern.

Configuring these topics can be easily done through a FileSystemCSVTopicFactory.

Note that there exist CSV topic implementations for files that do not come from the local file system (Cloud source), that we do not discuss further in this article. Even though the way to access the file contents is different, all other aspects of data loading stay the same.

Each ICSVTopic holds its own ICSVParserConfiguration, which states the delimiter used, the columns of the files and their position, and other properties. For more details, see ICSVParserConfiguration.

CSVSource

ICSVTopics are held by the ICSVSource, which can create parser configurations and initialize the workload. An ICSVSource is not a data source, that is, it does not represent a file.

MessageChannels and messages

The IMessageChannels are each linked to a single topic and are used to gather the data, as it is being parsed, into messages. They are also responsible for sending those messages.

Most messages are IStoreMessages, and gather the data as tuples to add to the datastore.

When asked to fetch data for specific IMessageChannels, given as arguments, the ICSVSource polls the corresponding ICSVTopics and generates the corresponding workload.

Note that several channels can correspond to the same topic. For example, if some of the columns of a file correspond to a given store and some to another store, there can be one channel for each store: they all depend on the same files (and the same topic). In that case the channels are automatically grouped into a composite channel, so that the topic polling and file parsing into lines is only done once but then the lines are dispatched to each individual channel for specific parsing into records.

Translators

A default TupleTranslator is automatically created within the MessageChannelFactory, and converts parsed lines to tuples that can be inserted into the datastore. You can directly set additional IColumnCalculators as attributes of the factory.

Data can be enriched in the ITranslator using IColumnCalculators. For each tuple written into an IMessage, an IColumnCalculator calculates the value to write in the corresponding added column.

A IColumnCalculator is related to a single topic.

CSVColumnParser

A CSVColumnParser parses the sequence of characters for a given column into the asked type. You can also add formatters, provided they are known to ActivePivot. For instance, a "date" column at position 1 in the source can be parsed like so: new CSVColumnParser("date", "localDate[yyyy-MM-dd], 1)

A custom IParser could be created, using the annotation @QuartetPluginValue.

ConstantCalculator

A ConstantCalculator adds the same predetermined constant value in the given column position, for every tuple.

LineIndexCalculator

A LineIndexCalculator returns the index, within the current CSV file, of the line that is being parsed. This is primarily used to add an ID to each element.

FileNameCalculator

A FileNameCalculator returns the name of the current CSV file as a value for the given column. This is primarily used when the imported files each represent a specific entity.

FilePathCalculator

A FilePathCalculator returns the absolute path to the current CSV file.

FileLastModifiedCalculator

A FileLastModifiedCalculator returns the last modified date of the current CSV file.

EmptyCalculator

An EmptyCalculator adds an empty (null) cell to the tuple. This has two major use cases:

  • When the data is not in the source file but is still expected in the destination of the data.
  • When it's filled by another multi-value column calculator using the IColumnCalculationContext write-back feature. This allows a column calculator to write in sibling columns, to use processing resources only once, while filling several columns.

You can define your own logic in a column calculator by creating a new ColumnCalculator and overriding the compute method.

ICSVParserConfiguration

There are several levels of configuration for the ICSVSource.

Each defined topic, whether it is a SingleFileCSVTopic, a DirectoryCSVTopic, or is created using a FileSystemCSVTopicFactory, comes with its ICSVParserConfiguration.

columnCount

Sets the expected number of fields in one line of data.

acceptOverflowingLines

When set to false, a record that contains more elements than the configured columnCount parameter is automatically rejected.

Default value: false. The parser enforces strict compliance rules, unless otherwise specified.

acceptIncompleteLines

When set to false, a record that contains fewer elements than the configured columnCount parameter is automatically rejected. If set to true, null values are inserted into the missing columns.

Default value: true.

Separator

Sets the CSV separator to use with this particular topic. This character is used to separate fields in the CSV file.

Default value: the comma ','.

processQuotes

Sets the behavior of the parser regarding quotes. When set to true, the parser follows the official CSV specification, meaning:

  • Each field may or may not be enclosed in double quotes. If fields are not enclosed with double quotes, then double quotes may not appear inside the fields.
  • A double-quote appearing inside a field must be escaped by preceding it with another double-quote. The double-quote character MUST NOT be enclosed in a double-quote pair.
  • Fields containing line breaks (CRLF), double quotes, and commas MUST be enclosed in double-quotes.

When set to false, all double-quotes within a field are treated as any regular character, following Microsoft Excel's behavior.

In this mode, fields shouldn't be enclosed in double-quotes. Line breaks shouldn't be used within a field either.

Default value: true.

CsvParserConfigPolicy

Each parser can be given a reading policy. This policy can be used to:

  • Only read a specified amount of lines from a file.
  • Only read one-in-n lines from a file, with n being the reading step.
  • Only read a specified amount of files.

Default value: NoRestrictionCsvParserPolicyConfig. All lines of the CSV file(s) are read.

numberSkippedLines

Sets the amount of lines to skip at the beginning of each file. These are usually header lines.

Skipping columns

If the CSV file contains columns that are not useful for a certain topic, they can be totally skipped by constructing the associated CSVParserConfiguration using constructors that take as arguments either:

  • the list of column names. In this case, the user must specify all column names. The ones that do not correspond to a matching column in the store are skipped.

OR

  • the map of column index to column name. In this case, the user can only specify the columns that are of interest.

Default value: 0

ICSVSourceConfiguration

The CSV Source Configuration is a higher level configuration.

parserThreads

Sets the number of threads that run the parsing in parallel. This is the number of lines in the above schema.

Default value: half of the available processors, but no more than 8 and not less than 2.

bufferSize

Sets the size of a byte buffer, in kilobytes.

Default value: 64kb

synchronousMode

In synchronous mode, the processing of a new file can only start when all the activity related to the previous file has been completed, such as the fetching, parsing, and publishing of the parsed records. The publishing phase might also include any processing implemented on the CSV source listener side. So, if the listener implements any asynchronous processing once it receives the records, the CSV Source processing won't wait before switching to the following file.

By default, the CSV source works in asynchronous mode for normal CSV files and gzip files. This means that multiple files can be processed simultaneously, with concurrent publishing of records, and so on. This mode is the most efficient way of maximizing the multi-threading performance of the source, but make sure that your listener processing(s) are compatible with it. For example, if you do any "incremental" feeding where the order of records submission is important, you may not want to use an asynchronous CSV source mode.

Default value: false

followSymbolicLinks

When creating a FileSystemCSVTopicFactory, which permits the creation of topics associated with their parser configuration, you can set this property to follow symbolic links when registering a folder to watch.

Default value: false

CSVSource Parsing Order

The CSVSource class can be further configured with setFileIdentifierComparator if you need the files from a topic to be parsed in a specific order (for example, if you have one file per day and want to parse the files in historical order). If your topic is a local file system directory topic, the provided comparator must be an IComparator<Path>.

Note that the comparator will effectively allow to parse the files in the appropriate order only if synchronousMode is set to true (otherwise, even if we respect the file order for beginning the parsing workload, as we don't wait for the first file to be finished parsing before parsing the next one, the final order for record publishing cannot be guaranteed).

Monitoring

The CSV Source can first be monitored using the associated JMX Bean. It can be created using:

@Bean
@DependsOn(value = "csvSource")
public JMXEnabler JMXCsvSourceEnabler() {
    return new JMXEnabler(new CSVMonitoring(csvSource()));
}

with csvSource being a Bean itself.

The following is a list of available operations and attributes:

  • getTopics: Retrieves the list of topics defined in the CSV Source, coupled with their actual state (paused or not, see pauseListen(topic) and resumeListen(topic)below).
  • getCommittedState(topic): Returns the committed state of a given topic: all the files submitted for processing and their last modification time.
  • pauseListen(topic): Allows you to pause the listening of events on a given topic, meaning that the WatcherService of the CSV Source doesn't process events that concern the given topic, until the resume method is called. To be able to call this pause method, the topic must extend the ACSVTopic class.
  • resumeListen(topic): Resumes the listening of events on a given topic. Additionally, this method automatically triggers the differentialReload() method on the given topic.
  • differentialReload(topic): Triggers a differential reload of the topic. it computes the current state of the topic, compares it to the committed state, and generates an event that only loads the difference between the two states. This means that after calling resumeListen() on a topic, the CSV Source processes all the changes that happened during the pause period of time.

Warning: This method relies on the Last Modified Time property of the files, which in some file systems can take up to a second to be updated.

  • fullReload(topic): Performs a full reload of the topic: all files linked to this topic are reloaded.
  • simulateDifferentialReload(topic): Simulates a differential reload of the given topic and returns the changes that the differential reload would have triggered.

Customized Monitoring

Before reading this section, please refer to the monitoring documentation.

Several ICsvHealthEvent have been added to the CSV Source to ease monitoring.

  • CSVFileParsingProgress is dispatched to inform the user about the progress of the current parsing. It contains the full name of the file and the parsing informations related to the exact moment of the dispatch. associated tags: csv, parsing, source
  • CSVFileParsingDone is dispatched when a given file parsing is completed. The ChannelTask is closed, meaning that no new ParsingTask can be created. It contains the full name of the file and the parsing informations related to the exact moment of the dispatch. associated tags: csv, parsing, source
  • CSVFileParsingFailure is dispatched in case of a full failure of a CSV file parsing. It contains the full name of the file, the error message, and the parsing informations related to the exact moment of the failure. associated tags: csv, parsing, source
  • CSVLineParsingFailure is dispatched in case of a failure of a one line parsing in a CSV file. It contains the full name of the file, the failing line content and line number, and the error message. associated tags: csv, parsing, source
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