Using the Autobalance Processing transform to optimize your runtime

The Autobalance Processing transform redistributes the data among the workers for better performance. This helps in cases where the data is unbalanced or as it comes from the source doesn’t allow enough parallel processing on it. This is common where the source is gzipped or is JDBC. The redistribution of data has a modest performance cost, so the optimization might not always compensate that effort if the data was already well balanced. Underneath, the transform uses Apache Spark repartition to randomly reassign data among a number of partitions optimal for the cluster capacity. For advanced users, it’s possible to enter a number of partitions manually. In addition, it can be used to optimize the writing of partitioned tables by reorganizing the data based on specified columns. This results in output files that are more consolidated.

1. Open the Resource panel and then choose Autobalance Processing to add a new transform to your job diagram. The node selected at the time of adding the node will be its parent.

2. (Optional) On the Node properties tab, you can enter a name for the node in the job diagram. If a node parent is not already selected, then choose a node from the Node parents list to use as the input source for the transform.

3. (Optional) On the Transform tab, you can enter a number of partitions. In general, it’s recommended that you let the system decide this value, however you can tune the multiplier or enter a specific value if you need to control this. If you are going to save the data partitioned by columns, you can choose the same columns as repartition columns. This way it will minimize the number of files on each partition and avoid having many files per partitions, which would hinder the performance of the tools querying that data.