Apache Kylin™ Overview

Apache Kylin™ is an open source Distributed Analytics Engine designed to provide SQL interface and multi-dimensional analysis (OLAP) on Hadoop 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. Identify a Star Schema on Hadoop.
  2. Build Cube from the identified tables.
  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 for 10+ billions of rows of data

- ANSI SQL Interface on Hadoop:

Kylin offers ANSI SQL on Hadoop 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 and Excel. Integration with Microstrategy is coming soon

- 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 Cube/Project 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