Software Requirements

  • Hadoop: 2.7+, 3.1+ (since v2.5)
  • Hive: 0.13 - 1.2.1+
  • HBase: 1.1+, 2.0 (since v2.5)
  • Spark (optional) 2.3.0+
  • Kafka (optional) 1.0.0+ (since v2.5)
  • JDK: 1.8+ (since v2.5)
  • OS: Linux only, CentOS 6.5+ or Ubuntu 16.0.4+

Tests passed on Hortonworks HDP 2.2-2.6 and 3.0, Cloudera CDH 5.7-5.11 and 6.0, AWS EMR 5.7-5.10, Azure HDInsight 3.5-3.6.

We recommend you to try out Kylin or develop it using the integrated sandbox, such as HDP sandbox, and make sure it has at least 10 GB of memory. When configuring a sandbox, we recommend that you use the Bridged Adapter model instead of the NAT model.

Hardware Requirements

The minimum configuration of a server running Kylin is 4 core CPU, 16 GB RAM and 100 GB disk. For high-load scenarios, a 24-core CPU, 64 GB RAM or higher is recommended.

Hadoop Environment

Kylin relies on Hadoop clusters to handle large data sets. You need to prepare a Hadoop cluster with HDFS, YARN, MapReduce, Hive, HBase, Zookeeper and other services for Kylin to run.
Kylin can be launched on any node in a Hadoop cluster. For convenience, you can run Kylin on the master node. For better stability, it is recommended to deploy Kylin on a clean Hadoop client node with Hive, HBase, HDFS and other command lines installed and client configuration (such as core-site.xml, hive-site.xml, hbase-site.xml and others) are also reasonably configured and can be automatically synchronized with other nodes.

Linux accounts running Kylin must have access to the Hadoop cluster, including the permission to create/write HDFS folders, Hive tables, HBase tables, and submit MapReduce tasks.

Kylin Installation

  1. Download a binary package for your Hadoop version from the Apache Kylin Download Site. For example, Kylin 2.5.0 for HBase 1.x can be downloaded from the following command line:
cd /usr/local/
wget http://mirror.bit.edu.cn/apache/kylin/apache-kylin-2.5.0/apache-kylin-2.5.0-bin-hbase1x.tar.gz
  1. Unzip the tarball and configure the environment variable $KYLIN_HOME to the Kylin folder.
tar -zxvf apache-kylin-2.5.0-bin-hbase1x.tar.gz
cd apache-kylin-2.5.0-bin-hbase1x
export KYLIN_HOME=`pwd`

From v2.6.1, Kylin will not ship Spark binary anymore; You need to install Spark seperately, and then point SPARK_HOME system environment variable to it:

export SPARK_HOME=/path/to/spark

or run the script to download it:

$KYLIN_HOME/bin/download-spark.sh

Kylin tarball structure

  • bin: shell scripts to start/stop Kylin service, backup/restore metadata, as well as some utility scripts.
  • conf: XML configuration files. The function of these xml files can be found in configuration page
  • lib: Kylin jar files for external use, like the Hadoop job jar, JDBC driver, HBase coprocessor jar, etc.
  • meta_backups: default backup folder when run “bin/metastore.sh backup”;
  • sample_cube: files to create the sample cube and its tables.
  • spark: the default spark binary that built with Kylin.
  • tomcat the tomcat web server that run Kylin application.
  • tool: the jar file for running utility CLI.

Checking the operating environment

Kylin runs on a Hadoop cluster and has certain requirements for the version, access rights, and CLASSPATH of each component. To avoid various environmental problems, you can run the script, $KYLIN_HOME/bin/check-env.sh to have a test on your environment, if there are any problems with your environment, the script will print a detailed error message. If there is no error message, it means that your environment is suitable for Kylin to run.

Start Kylin

Run the script, $KYLIN_HOME/bin/kylin.sh start , to start Kylin. The interface output is as follows:

Retrieving hadoop conf dir...
KYLIN_HOME is set to /usr/local/apache-kylin-2.5.0-bin-hbase1x
......
A new Kylin instance is started by root. To stop it, run 'kylin.sh stop'
Check the log at /usr/local/apache-kylin-2.5.0-bin-hbase1x/logs/kylin.log
Web UI is at http://<hostname>:7070/kylin

Using Kylin

Once Kylin is launched, you can access it via the browser http://<hostname>:7070/kylin with
specifying <hostname> with IP address or domain name, and the default port is 7070.
The initial username and password are ADMIN/KYLIN.
After the server is started, you can view the runtime log, $KYLIN_HOME/logs/kylin.log.

Stop Kylin

Run the $KYLIN_HOME/bin/kylin.sh stop script to stop Kylin. The console output is as follows:

Retrieving hadoop conf dir...
KYLIN_HOME is set to /usr/local/apache-kylin-2.5.0-bin-hbase1x
Stopping Kylin: 25964
Stopping in progress. Will check after 2 secs again...
Kylin with pid 25964 has been stopped.

You can run ps -ef | grep kylin to see if the Kylin process has stopped.

HDFS folder structure

Kylin will generate files on HDFS. The root folder is “/kylin/”, but will have the second level folder for each Kylin cluster, named with the metadata table name, by default it is “kylin_metadata” (can be customized in conf/kylin.properties).

Usually, there are at least these four kind of directories under /kylin/kylin_metadata: cardinality, coprocessor, kylin-job_id, resources.
1. cardinality: the output folder of the cardinality calculation job when Kylin loads a Hive table. It can be cleaned when there is no job running;
2. coprocessor: the folder that Kylin puts HBase coprocessor jar file. Please do not delete it.
3. kylin-job_id: the cubing job’s output folder. Please keep them; if need a cleanup, follow the storage cleanup guide.
4. resources: the metadata entries that too big to persisted in HBase (e.g, a dictionary or table snapshot); Please do not delete it; if need a cleanup, follow the cleanup resources from metadata
5. jdbc-resources: similar as resources, only appeared when using MySQL as the metadata storage。