Can OLAP be done in BigTable?

Question

In the past I used to build WebAnalytics using OLAP cubes running on MySQL. Now an OLAP cube the way I used it is simply a large table (ok, it was stored a bit smarter than that) where each row is basically a measurement or and aggregated set of measurements. Each measurement has a bunch of dimensions (i.e. which pagename, useragent, ip, etc.) and a bunch of values (i.e. how many pageviews, how many visitors, etc.).

The queries that you run on a table like this are usually of the form (meta-SQL):

SELECT SUM(hits), SUM(bytes),
FROM MyCube
WHERE date='20090914' and pagename='Homepage' and browser!='googlebot'
GROUP BY hour

So you get the totals for each hour of the selected day with the mentioned filters. One snag was that these cubes usually meant a full table scan (various reasons) and this meant a practical limitation on the size (in MiB) you could make these things.

I'm currently learning the ins and outs of Hadoop and the likes.

Running the above query as a mapreduce on a BigTable looks easy enough: Simply make 'hour' the key, filter in the map and reduce by summing the values.

Can you run a query like I showed above (or at least with the same output) on a BigTable kind of system in 'real time' (i.e. via a user interface and the user get's their answer ASAP) instead of batch mode?

If not; what is the appropriate technology to do something like this in the realm of BigTable/Hadoop/HBase/Hive and the likes?

Answer 1

It's even kind of been done (kind of).

LastFm's aggregation/summary engine: http://github.com/zohmg/zohmg

A google search turned up a google code project "mroll" but it doesn't have anything except contact info (no code, nothing). Still, might want to reach out to that guy and see what's up. http://code.google.com/p/mroll/