Apache Kylin™ Overview

Apache Kylin™ is an open source Distributed Analytics Engine designed to provide SQL interface and multi-dimensional analysis (OLAP) on Hadoop/Spark supporting extremely large datasets, original contributed from eBay Inc.

Apache Kylin™ lets you query massive data set at sub-second latency in 3 steps.

  1. 1 Identify a Star/Snowflake Schema on Hadoop.
  2. 2 Build Cube from the identified tables.
  3. 3 Query with ANSI-SQL and get results in sub-second, via ODBC, JDBC or RESTful API.

What is Kylin?

Extremely Fast OLAP Engine at Scale:
Kylin is designed to reduce query latency on Hadoop/Spark for 10+ billions of rows of data
ANSI SQL Interface on Hadoop:
Kylin offers ANSI SQL on Hadoop/Spark and supports most ANSI SQL query functions
Interactive Query Capability:
Users can interact with Hadoop data via Kylin at sub-second latency, better than Hive queries for the same dataset
MOLAP Cube:
User can define a data model and pre-build in Kylin with more than 10+ billions of raw data records
Seamless Integration with BI Tools:
Kylin currently offers integration capability with BI Tools like Tableau, PowerBI/Excel, MSTR, QlikSense, Hue and SuperSet.
Other Highlights:
  • Job Management and Monitoring
  • Compression and Encoding Support
  • Incremental Refresh of Cubes
  • Leverage HBase Coprocessor for query latency
  • Both approximate and precise Query Capabilities for Distinct Count
  • Approximate Top-N Query Capability
  • Easy Web interface to manage, build, monitor and query cubes
  • Security capability to set ACL at Project/Table Level
  • Support LDAP and SAML Integration

Kylin Ecosystem

Kylin Core:

Fundamental framework of Kylin OLAP Engine comprises of Metadata Engine, Query Engine, Job Engine and Storage Engine to run the entire stack. It also includes a REST Server to service client requests

Extensions:

Plugins to support additional functions and features

Integration:

Lifecycle Management Support to integrate with Job Scheduler, ETL, Monitoring and Alerting Systems

User Interface:

Allows third party users to build customized user-interface atop Kylin core

Drivers:

ODBC and JDBC drivers to support different tools and products, such as Tableau