IceDB is an in-process Parquet merge engine for better data warehousing in S3, using only S3.
No Spark, no JVM, no data warehouse experience required.
IceDB runs stateless, and stores data in easily readable formats to allow any language or framework to parse the log (jsonl) and read the data (parquet), making it far easier to insert, migrate, query, run, and scale than alternatives.
It's queryable by anything that understands parquet, and runs 54x cheaper than managed solutions such as BigQuery, Snowflake, and Athena.
IceDB tracks table schemas as standard SQL types, supports dynamic schema evolution, and divides your data into tables and partitions.
IceDB merges parquet files and manages tombstone cleanup to optimize your data storage for faster queries, very similar to what systems like ClickHouse do under the hood. Except IceDB does it effectively stateless: All state and storage is in S3. This makes it extremely easy to run and scale. When you need to introduce concurrent mutations at the table level, you can introduce coordination through exclusive locks. The IceDB log format also uses the widely understood newline-delimited JSON format, making it trivial to read from any language.
It retains many of the features of modern OLAP systems (such as ClickHouse’s Materialized Views), adds some new ones, and makes it way easier to build scalable data systems with a focus on true multi-tenancy.
IceDB can replace systems like BigQuery, Athena, and Snowflake, but with clever data design can also replace provisioned solutions such as a ClickHouse cluster, Redshift, and more.
Query engines such as DuckDB, ClickHouse, CHDB, Datafusion, Pandas, or custom parquet readers in any language can
easily read IceDB data in hundreds of milliseconds, and even faster when combined with the IceDB S3 Proxy for transparent queries (the client just thinks it's S3) like with
the ClickHouse S3 function s3('https://icedb-s3-proxy/**/*.parquet') or DuckDB's
read_parquet('s3://icedb-s3-proxy/**/*.parquet').
- IceDB
Clone the repo:
git clone https://github.com/danthegoodman1/icedb
docker compose up -d # starts local minio server
pip install git+https://github.com/danthegoodman1/icedb duckdb
Use pip3 if you are on macOS or have a dual installation
import duckdb
from icedb.log import S3Client, IceLogIO
from icedb import IceDBv3, CompressionCodec
from datetime import datetime
from time import time
# create an s3 client to talk to minio
s3c = S3Client(s3prefix="example", s3bucket="testbucket", s3region="us-east-1", s3endpoint="http://localhost:9000",
s3accesskey="user", s3secretkey="password")
example_events = [
{
"ts": 1686176939445,
"event": "page_load",
"user_id": "user_a",
"properties": {
"page_name": "Home"
}
}, {
"ts": 1676126229999,
"event": "page_load",
"user_id": "user_b",
"properties": {
"page_name": "Home"
}
}, {
"ts": 1686176939666,
"event": "page_load",
"user_id": "user_a",
"properties": {
"page_name": "Settings"
}
}, {
"ts": 1686176941445,
"event": "page_load",
"user_id": "user_a",
"properties": {
"page_name": "Home"
}
}
]
def part_func(row: dict) -> str:
"""
Partition by user_id, date
"""
row_time = datetime.utcfromtimestamp(row['ts'] / 1000)
part = f"u={row['user_id']}/d={row_time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')}"
return part
# Initialize the client
ice = IceDBv3(
part_func,
['event', 'ts'], # Sort by event, then timestamp of the event within the data part
"us-east-1",
"user",
"password",
"http://localhost:9000",
s3c,
"dan-mbp",
s3_use_path=True, # needed for local minio
compression_codec=CompressionCodec.ZSTD # Let's force a higher compression level, default is SNAPPY
)
# Insert records
inserted = ice.insert(example_events)
print('inserted', inserted)
# Read the log state
log = IceLogIO("demo-host")
_, file_markers, _, _ = log.read_at_max_time(s3c, round(time() * 1000))
alive_files = list(filter(lambda x: x.tombstone is None, file_markers))
# Setup duckdb for querying local minio
ddb = duckdb.connect(":memory:")
ddb.execute("install httpfs")
ddb.execute("load httpfs")
ddb.execute("SET s3_region='us-east-1'")
ddb.execute("SET s3_access_key_id='user'")
ddb.execute("SET s3_secret_access_key='password'")
ddb.execute("SET s3_endpoint='localhost:9000'")
ddb.execute("SET s3_use_ssl='false'")
ddb.execute("SET s3_url_style='path'")
# Query alive files
query = ("select user_id, count(*), (properties::JSON)->>'page_name' as page "
"from read_parquet([{}]) "
"group by user_id, page "
"order by count(*) desc").format(
', '.join(list(map(lambda x: "'s3://" + ice.s3c.s3bucket + "/" + x.path + "'", alive_files)))
)
print(ddb.sql(query))inserted [{"p": "example/_data/u=user_a/d=2023-06-07/c2bc1eef-b2cd-404a-9ec6-097e27d3130f.parquet", "b": 693, "t": 1702822195892}, {"p": "example/_data/u=user_b/d=2023-02-11/2d8cb9b1-450f-455f-84e0-527b8fb35d5f.parquet", "b": 585, "t": 1702822195894}]
┌─────────┬──────────────┬──────────┐
│ user_id │ count_star() │ page │
│ varchar │ int64 │ varchar │
├─────────┼──────────────┼──────────┤
│ user_a │ 2 │ Home │
│ user_a │ 1 │ Settings │
│ user_b │ 1 │ Home │
└─────────┴──────────────┴──────────┘
For more in-depth examples, see the Examples section
Inserts, merges, and tombstone cleanup are powered by Python and DuckDB. IceDB runs stateless with a log in S3, meaning that you only pay for storage and compute during operations, enabling true serverless analytical processing. It does so in an open and easily readable format to allow for any language or framework to parse the icedb log (jsonl) and read the data (parquet).
The IceDB log keeps track of alive data files, as well as the running schema which is updated via insertion. Query engines such as DuckDB, ClickHouse, CHDB, Datafusion, Pandas, or custom parquet readers in any language can easily read IceDB data in hundreds milliseconds, especially when combined with the IceDB S3 Proxy.
See more in ARCHITECTURE.md
See the examples/ directory for many examples like Materialized Views, custom merge queries, schema validation before insert, and more.
- Simple example
- Materialized View example
- Custom merge queries aggregation and replacing
- Verify schema before insert
- API using flask and falcon
- Segment webhook sink
IceDB can easily insert hundreds of thousands of rows per second per instance, and query engines can query upwards of hundreds of millions of rows per second.
Performance depends on a variety of things such as query engine, network/disk, and how efficiently your data is merged at query time.
See perf_tests for examples.
IceDB was made to fill the gap between solutions like ClickHouse and BigQuery, solving a stronger balance between
decoupled storage (data and metadata) and compute, easily self-hosted, open source, easily extensible and flexible,
multi-tentant, and ready for massive scale.
To be transparent, I’ve omitted systems I’ve never used before (such as databricks), and do not have extensive
experience with some
(such as Snowflake).
IceDB offers many novel features out of the box that comparable data warehouses and OLAP DBs don't:
- Native multi-tenancy with prefix control and the IceDB S3 Proxy, including letting end-users write their own SQL queries
- True separation of data storage, metadata storage, and compute with shared storage (S3)
- Zero-copy data sharing by permitting access to S3 prefixes for other users
- Multiple options for query processing (DuckDB, ClickHouse, CHDB, Datafusion, Pandas, custom parquet readers in any language)
- Open data formats for both the log and data storage
- Extreme flexibility in functionality due to being in-process and easily manipulated for features like materialized views, AggregatingMergeTree and ReplacingMergeTree-like functionality
BigQuery offers a great model of only paying for S3-price storage when not querying, and being able to summon massive resources to fulfill queries when requested. The issues with BigQuery (and similar like Athena) is that:
- They are egregiously expensive at $5/TB processed
- Charge on uncompressed data storage (and they reserve compressed billing for their largest customers)
- They are limited to their respective cloud providers
- Closed source, no way to self-host or contribute
- Only one available query engine
- Show query startup time
For example, queries on data that might cost $6 on BigQuery would only be around ~$0.10 running IceDB and dynamically provisioning a CLickHouse cluster on fly.io to respond to queries. That's a cost reduction of 60x without sacrificing performance.
While IceDB does require that you manage some logic like merging and tombstone cleaning yourself, the savings, flexibility, and performance far outweigh the small management overhead.
To get the best performance in this model, combine with the IceDB S3 Proxy
We love ClickHouse, in fact it's our go-to query engine for IceDB in the form of BigHouse (dynamically provisioned ClickHouse clusters)
The issue with these solutions are the tight coupling between storage, metadata, and compute. The lack of elasticity in these systems require that have the resources to answer massive queries idle and ready, while also requiring massive resources for inserting when large queries are only occasional (but need to be answered quickly).
IceDB allows for ingestion, merging, tombstone cleaning, and querying all in a serverless model due to compute being effectively stateless, with all state being managed on S3 (plus some coordination if needed).
Ingestion workers can be summoned per-request, merging and tombstone cleaning can be on timers, and querying can provision resources dynamically based on how much data needs to be read.
Beyond the comical management overhead, performance is shown to be inferior to other solutions, and the flexibility of these systems is paid 10-fold over in complexity.
Ah, yes... I probably named IceDB too close. In all fairness, I named IceDB before I knew about Iceberg.
Iceberg has a few problems right now in my eyes:
- Very few ways to write to it (spark, pyiceberg)
- Very complex (look at any example - requires schema definition, cataloging is verbose, it's really a painful DX)
- Very few ways to read it (a few DBs like ClickHouse can read the catalog, but you couldn't casually bring it in to your Go code like you can with icedb)
- Really painful to import existing data, you basically have to write it through Iceberg which is going to be very slow and wasteful
I specifically designed IceDB to be super easy to use in any language:
- The log is just newline-delimited JSON, any language can easily read JSON. Other serialization formats are hard and vary extremely by language (like protobuf)
- With the S3 Proxy no readers have to understand the log, they only need to understand how to read parquet (every language can do this now)
- Very simple DX. Check the examples, it's far easier to use than pyIceberg, and I'd argue it's more flexible too based on the exposed primitives and extensibility
- Strong multitenancy with the S3 proxy (or a custom system), this means you can let your customers run sql queries on their data. The S3 proxy is designed to handle this with virtual buckets and prefix enforcement. You can even extend checks on table permissions before submitting queries :)
- Much easier to import existing datasets by writing to
_datasubdirectory (just rename files) and writing a log file manually to the_logsubdirectory using the log format.
- If you need answers in <100ms, consider ClickHouse or Tinybird (well-designed materialized views in IceDB can provide this performance level as well)
- If you need tight integrations with cloud-provider-specific integrations and can't spare writing a little extra code, consider BigQuery and Athena
- If your network cards are not very fast, consider ClickHouse
- If you can't access an S3 service from within the same region/datacenter, and are not able to host something like minio yourself, consider ClickHouse
- If you need something 100% fully managed, depending on your needs and budget consider managed ClickHouse (Altinity, DoubleCloud, ClickHouse Cloud, Aiven), Tinybird, BigQuery, or Athena
Performance degrades linearly with more files because the log gets larger, and the number of parquet files in S3 to be read (or even just listed) grows. Optimal performance is obtained by inserting as infrequently as possible. For example, you might write records to RedPanda first, and have workers that insert in large batches every 3 seconds. Or maybe you buffer in memory first from your API nodes, and flush that batch to disk every 3 seconds (example)
Merging increases the performance of queries by reducing the number of files that data is spread across. Merging combines files within the same partition. Parquet natively providers efficient indexing to ensure that selective queries remain performant, even if you are only selecting thousands of rows out of millions from a single parquet file.
Tombstone cleaning removes dead data and log files from S3, and also removes the tracked tombstones in the active log files. This improves the performance of queries by making the log faster to read, but does not impact how quickly the query engine can read the data once it knows the list of parquet files to read.
The more frequently you insert batches, the more frequently you need to merge. And the more frequently you merge, the more frequently you need to clean tombstones in the log and data files.
Do not make too many partitions, they do very little to improve query performance, but too many partitions will greatly impair query performance.
The best thing you can do to improve query performance is to sort your data in the same way you'd query it, and write it to multiple tables if you need multiple access patterns to your data.
For example, if you ingest events from a webapp like Mixpanel and need to be able to query events by a given user over time, and a single event over time, then you should create two tables:
- A table with a partition format
uid={user_id}and a sort oftimestamp,event_idfor listing a user's events over time (user-view) - A table with a partition format of
d={YYYY-MM-DD}and a sort ofevent_id,timestampfor finding events over time (dashboards and insights)
Reading the log and/or data will fail if there are conflicting schemas across files. IceDB accepts missing and new columns across files, but rejects a column changing data types.
The best way to handle this across multiple ingestion workers that might insert into the same table is to cache (a
hash of) the
schema in memory, and when a schema change for a given table is detected perform a serializable SELECT FOR UPDATE
level isolation lock on some central schema store. You can then determine whether the schema change is allowed (or
already happened), and update the remote schema definition to add the new columns as needed.
If the schema change is not allowed (a column changed data type), you can either attempt to solve it (e.g. change a
BIGINT to a DOUBLE/DECIMAL), drop the offending rows, or quarantine them in a special {table name}_quarantine
table and notify users of the violating rows for manual review.
You could also require users pre-define schemas, and push updates to ingestion workers, or do a similar check sequence when one is detected (omitting the functionality of updating the remote schema from the ingestion worker).
Columns will always show as NULLABLE in the schema, however the only columns that should never be null are the
ones required to determine the partition (unless you have defaults on those columns).
See a simple example here on verifying the schema before inserting.
IceDB will track the running schema natively. One caveat to this functionality is that if you remove a column as a part of a partition rewrite and that column never returns, IceDB will not remove that from the schema.
pip install git+https://github.com/danthegoodman1/icedb
from icedb import IceDBv3
ice = IceDBv3(...)Function that takes in an dict, and returns a str. How the partition is determined from the row dict. This
function is run for every row, and should not modify the original dict.
While not required, by formatting this in Hive format many query engines can read these from the file path and use
them as additional query filters. DuckDB can do this natively with read_parquet([...], hive_partition=1), and with
ClickHouse you can write something
like extract(_path, 'u=([^\s/]+)') AS user_id, extract(_path, 'd=([0-9-]+)') AS date
Example:
from datetime import datetime
from icedb import IceDBv3
def part_func(row: dict) -> str:
"""
We'll partition by user_id, date
Example: u=user_a/d=2023-08-19
"""
row_time = datetime.utcfromtimestamp(row['ts'] / 1000)
part = f"u={row['user_id']}/d={row_time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')}"
return part
ice = IceDBv3(partition_strategy=part_strat, sort_order=['event', 'timestamp'])Additionally, a _partition property can be pre-defined on the row, which will avoid running the part_func and
use this instead (for example if you calculate this on ingest). This property will be deleted from the row before
insert, so if you intend on re-using the row or intend for that to be stored in the row, you should provide an
additional property named something else (e.g. __partition or partition). You can use preserve_partition=True
to prevent IceDB from deleting this property on each row. Generally it's faster to delete it, as the time to delete
for large batches is smaller than the extra data copy time.
Defines the order of top-level keys in the row dict that will be used for sorting inside the parquet file. This should reflect the same order that you filter on for queries, as this directly impacts performance. Generally, you should start with the lowest cardinality column, and increase in cardinality in the list
Example sorting by event, then timestamp:
['event', 'timestamp']This will allow us to efficiently query for events over time as we can pick a specific event, then filter the time range while reducing the amount of irrelevant rows read.
If provided, will use a top-level row key as the _row_id for deduplication instead of generating a UUID per-row.
Use this if your rows already have some unique ID generated.
The remove_partitions function can be dynamically invoked to remove a given partition from the data set. This can
be used for features like TTL expiry, or for removing user data if that is tracked via partition (prefer
partition removal for performance, otherwise see
partition rewriting below).
This method takes in a function that evaluates a list of unique partitions, and returns the list of partitions to drop.
Then, a log-only merge occurs where the file markers are given tombstones, and their respective log files have tombstones created. No data parts are involved in this operation, so it is very fast.
This requires the merge lock to run concurrently on a table. The merge lock is required for ensuring that no data is copied into another part while you are potentially dropping it.
This is only run on alive files, parts with tombstones are ignored as they are already marked for deletion.
For every part in a given partition, the files are rewritten after being passed through the given SQL query to filter out unwanted rows. Useful for purging data for a given user, deduplication, and more. New parts are created within the same partition, and old files are marked with a tombstone. It is CRITICAL that new columns are not created (against the known schema, not just the file) as the current schema is copied to the new log file, and changes will be ignored by the log.
Because this is writing the same data, it's important to acquire the merge lock during this operation, so this should be used somewhat sparingly.
The target data will be at _rows, so for example your query might look like:
select *
from _rows
where user_id != 'user_a'
DuckDB uses the httpfs extension. See how to pre-install it into your runtime
here: https://duckdb.org/docs/extensions/overview.html#downloading-extensions-directly-from-s3
and see the extension_directory
setting: https://duckdb.org/docs/sql/configuration.html#:~:text=PHYSICAL_ONLY-,extension_directory,-Set%20the%20directory
with the default of $HOME/.duckdb/
You may see an example of this in the example Dockerfile.
Merging takes a max_file_size. This is the max file size that is considered for merging, as well as a threshold for
when merging will start. This means that the actual final merged file size (by logic) is in theory 2*max_file_size,
however due to parquet compression it hardly ever gets that close.
For example if a max size is 10MB, and during a merge we have a 9MB file, then come across another 9MB file, then the threshold of 10MB is exceeded (18MB total) and those files will be merged. However, with compression that final file might be only 12MB in size.
Concurrent merges won't break anything due to the isolation level employed in the meta store transactions, however there
is a chance that competing merges can result in conflicts, and when one is detected the conflicting merge will exit.
Instead, you can choose to immediately call merge again (or with a short, like 5 seconds) if you successfully merged
files to ensure that lock contention stays low.
However, concurrent merges in opposite directions is highly suggested.
For example in the use case where a partition might look like y=YYYY/m=MM/d=DD then you should merge in DESC
order frequently (say once every 15 seconds). This will keep the hot partitions more optimized so that queries on
current data don't get too slow. These should have smaller file count and size requirements, so they can be fast, and
reduce the lock time of files in the meta store.
You should run a second, slower merge internal in ASC order that fully optimizes older partitions. These merges can be
much large in file size and count, as they are less likely to conflict with active queries. Say this is run every 5 or
10 minutes.
Using the remove_inactive_parts method, you can delete files with some minimum age that are no longer active. This
helps keep S3 storage down.
For example, you might run this every 10 minutes to delete files that were marked inactive at least 2 hours ago.
You can optionally provide a custom merge query to achieve functionality such as aggregate-on-merge or replace-on-merge as found in the variety of ClickHouse engine tables such as the AggregatingMergeTree and ReplacingMergeTree.
This can also be used alongside double-writing (to different partition prefixes) to create materialized views!
WARNING: If you do not retain your merged files, bugs in merges can permanently corrupt data. Only customize merges if you know exactly what you are doing!
This is achieved through the custom_merge_query function. You should not provide any parameters to this query.
All queries use DuckDB.
The default query is:
select *
from source_filesThe ? must be included, and is the list of files being merged.
source_files is just an alias for read_parquet(?, hive_partitioning=1), which will be string-replaced if it exists.
Note that the hive_partitioning columns are virtual, and do not appear in the merged parquet file, therefore is it not
needed.
See examples:
Because this is not a "SQL-native merge" like systems such as ClickHouse, we do have to keep in mind how to format
and prepare rows for merging. The ideal way to do this is to understand how the system works, and either pre-format
the rows, use the format_row function, or (if user-defined) use the custom_insert_query discussed below.
For example if we are keeping a running count, we need to prepare each row with an initial cnt = 1, and merges
will use sum(cnt) instead. The best way to think about this is literally concatenating multiple sub-tables of the
same schema.
You can prepare rows by either:
- Modifying them before insert
- Using the
format_rowparam (safe copying by default) - Using the
custom_insert_queryparam (use if user-defined)
The example above cover different ways you can prepare rows for different scenarios.
Another way to "dynamically seed" rows is to use a (DuckDB) query like:
select user_id, event, sum(ifnull(cnt, 1)) as cnt
from (
select null::int as user_id, null::varchar as event, null::bigint as cnt
-- can also be used: select * from values (null, null, null) fake_table(user_id, event, cnt)
union all by name
select *
from read_parquet([{}])
)
where event is not null
group by user_id, event
order by cnt descThis will put NULL where the cnt column doesn't yet exist, and pre-populate with 1.
In ClickHouse this is more elegant by pre-defining the schema (tracked by IceDB!) and the
input_format_parquet_allow_missing_columns setting:
SELECT COUNT(a), COUNT(b)
FROM file('data.parquet', Parquet, 'a UInt32, b UInt32')
SETTINGS input_format_parquet_allow_missing_columns = 1This function is run at insert/schema introspection time, after any format_row function (if exists). The actual
rows are available at _rows. All queries use DuckDB.
The default insert query is:
select *
from _rows
order by {your sort order}If you want to have a materialized view that uses count(), as we've seen in
the example we need to seed rows with an initial value. It's much easier if we
can allow users to define an insert function to prepare the rows than doing so from python:
select *, 1::BIGINT as cnt
from _rows
order by events, time DESCThis insert query, unlike the format_row function, is safe to take as input from users.
Note: it's always best to explicitly declare the type, as DuckDB uses int32 by default here when we probably want
int64.
Another example is flattening JSON before inserting:
select *
EXCLUDE properties -- remove the old properties
, to_json(properties) as properties -- replace the properties with stringified JSON
from _rows
order by event, timeBy default, no data is attempted to be de-duplicated. You can provider deterministic row IDs (or pre-defined) and deduplicate during merge.
For example, if you wanted merges to take any (but only a single) value for a given _row_id, you might use:
select
any_value(user_id),
any_value(properties),
any_value(timestamp),
_row_id
from source_files
group by _row_idNote that this will only deduplicate for a single merged parquet file, to guarantee single rows you much still employ deduplication in your analytical queries.
If you wanted to replace rows with the most recent version, you could write a custom merge query that looks like:
select
argMax(user_id, timestamp),
argMax(properties, timestamp),
max(timestamp),
_row_id
from source_files
group by _row_idLike deduplication, you must handle this in your queries too if you want to guarantee getting the single latest row.
If you are aggregating, you must include a new _row_id. If you are replacing this should come through choosing the
correct row to replace.
Example aggregation merge query:
select
user_id,
sum(clicks) as clicks,
gen_random_uuid()::TEXT as _row_id
from source_files
group by user_idThis data set will reduce the number of rows over time by aggregating them by user_id.
Pro-Tip: Handling Counts
Counting is a bit trickier because you would normally have to pivot from count() when merging a never-before-merged
file to sum() with files that have been merged at least once to account for the new number. The trick to this is
instead adding a counter column with value 1 every time you insert a new row.
Then, when merging, you simply sum(counter) as counter to keep a count of the number of rows that match a condition.
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