DataStage Configuration file

The Datastage configuration file is a master control file (a textfile which sits on the server side) for jobs which describes the parallel system resources and architecture. The configuration file provides hardware configuration for supporting such architectures as SMP (Single machine with multiple CPU , shared memory and disk), Grid , Cluster or MPP (multiple CPU, mulitple nodes and dedicated memory per node). DataStage understands the architecture of the system through this file. This is one of the biggest strengths of Datastage. For cases in which you have changed your processing configurations, or changed servers or platform, you will never have to worry about it affecting your jobs since all the jobs depend on this configuration file for execution. Datastage jobs determine which node to run the process on, where to store the temporary data, where to store the dataset data, based on the entries provide in the configuration file. There is a default configuration file available whenever the server is installed. The configuration files have extension ".apt". The main outcome from having the configuration file is to separate software and hardware configuration from job design. It allows changing hardware and software resources without changing a job design. Datastage jobs can point to different configuration files by using job parameters, which means that a job can utilize different hardware architectures without being recompiled. The configuration file contains the different processing nodes and also specifies the disk space provided for each processing node which are logical processing nodes that are specified in the configuration file. So if you have more than one CPU this does not mean the nodes in your configuration file correspond to these CPUs. It is possible to have more than one logical node on a single physical node. However you should be wise in configuring the number of logical nodes on a single physical node. Increasing nodes, increases the degree of parallelism but it does not necessarily mean better performance because it results in more number of processes. If your underlying system should have the capability to handle these loads then you will be having a very inefficient configuration on your hands.

1. APT_CONFIG_FILE is the file using which DataStage determines the configuration file (one can have many configuration files for a project) to be used. In fact, this is what is generally used in production. However, if this environment variable is not defined then how DataStage determines which file to use ?? 1. If the APT_CONFIG_FILE environment variable is not defined then DataStage look for default configuration file (config.apt) in following path: 1. Current working directory.

2. INSTALL_DIR/etc, where INSTALL_DIR ($APT_ORCHHOME) is the top level directory of DataStage installation. 2. Define Node in configuration file A Node is a logical processing unit. Each node in a configuration file is distinguished by a virtual name and defines a number and speed of CPUs, memory availability, page and swap space, network connectivity details, etc. 3. What are the different options a logical node can have in the configuration file? 1. fastname The fastname is the physical node name that stages use to open connections for high volume data transfers. The attribute of this option is often the network name. Typically, you can get this name by using Unix command uname -n. 2. pools Name of the pools to which the node is assigned to. Based on the characteristics of the processing nodes you can group nodes into set of pools. 1. A pool can be associated with many nodes and a node can be part of many pools. 2. A node belongs to the default pool unless you explicitly specify apools list for it, and omit the default pool name () from the list. 3. A parallel job or specific stage in the parallel job can be constrained to run on a pool (set of processing nodes). 1. In case job as well as stage within the job are constrained to run on specific processing nodes then stage will run on the node which is common to stage as well as job. 3. resource resource resource_type location [{pools disk_pool_name}] | resource resource_type value . resource_type can be canonicalhostname (Which takes quoted ethernet name of a node in cluster that is unconnected to Conductor node by the hight speed network.) or disk (To read/write persistent data to this directory.) or scratchdisk (Quoted absolute path name of a directory on a file system where intermediate data will be temporarily stored. It is local to the processing node.) or RDBMS Specific resourses (e.g. DB2, INFORMIX, ORACLE, etc.) 4. How datastage decides on which processing node a stage should be run? 1. If a job or stage is not constrained to run on specific nodes then parallel engine executes a parallel stage on all nodes defined in the default node pool. (Default Behavior) 2. If the node is constrained then the constrained processing nodes are chosen while executing the parallel stage.

1. When configuring an MPP, you specify the physical nodes in your system on which the parallel engine will run your parallel jobs. This is called Conductor Node. For other nodes, you do not need to specify the physical node. Also, You need to copy the (.apt) configuration file only to the nodes from which you start parallel engine applications. It

is possible that conductor node is not connected with the high-speed network switches. However, the other nodes are connected to each other using a very high-speed network switches. How do you configure your system so that you will be able to achieve optimized parallelism ?? 1. Make sure that none of the stages are specified to be run on the conductor node. 2. Use conductor node just to start the execution of parallel job. 3. Make sure that conductor node is not the part of the default pool.

2. Although, parallelization increases the throughput and speed of the process, why maximum parallelization is not necessarily the optimal parallelization ?? 1. Datastage creates one process for every stage for each processing node. Hence, if the hardware resource is not available to support the maximum parallelization, the performance of overall system goes down. For example, suppose we have a SMP system with three CPU and a Parallel job with 4 stage. We have 3 logical node (one corresponding to each physical node (say CPU)). Now DataStage will start 3*4 = 12 processes, which has to be managed by a single operating system. Significant time will be spent in switching context and scheduling the process. 3. Since we can have different logical processing nodes, it is possible that some node will be more suitable for some stage while other nodes will be more suitable for other stages. So, when to decide which node will be suitable for which stage ?? 1. If a stage is performing a memory intensive task then it should be run on a node which has more disk space available for it. E.g. sorting a data is memory intensive task and it should be run on such nodes. 2. If some stage depends on licensed version of software (e.g. SAS Stage, RDBMS related stages, etc.) then you need to associate those stages with the processing node, which is physically mapped to the machine on which the licensed software is installed. (Assumption: The machine on which licensed software is installed is connected through other machines using high speed network.) 3. If a job contains stages, which exchange large amounts of data then they should be assigned to nodes where stages communicate by either shared memory (SMP) or highspeed link (MPP) in most optimized manner. 4. Basically nodes are nothing but set of machines (specially in MPP systems). You start the execution of parallel jobs from the conductor node. Conductor nodes creates a shell of remote machines (depending on the processing nodes) and copies the same environment on them. However, it is possible to create a startup script which will selectively change the environment on a specific node. This script has a default name of startup.apt. However, like main configuration file, we can also have many startup configuration files.

The appropriate configuration file can be picked up using the environment variable APT_STARTUP_SCRIPT. What is use of APT_NO_STARTUP_SCRIPT environment variable? 1. Using APT_NO_STARTUP_SCRIPT environment variable, you can instruct Parallel engine not to run the startup script on the remote shell. 5. What are the generic things one must follow while creating a configuration file so that optimal parallelization can be achieved? 1. Consider avoiding the disk/disks that your input files reside on. 2. Ensure that the different file systems mentioned as the disk and scratchdisk resources hit disjoint sets of spindles even if theyre located on a RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) system. 3. Know what is real and what is NFS: 1. Real disks are directly attached, or are reachable over a SAN (storage-area network -dedicated, just for storage, low-level protocols). 2. Never use NFS file systems for scratchdisk resources, remember scratchdisk are also used for temporary storage of file/data during processing. 3. If you use NFS file system space for disk resources, then you need to know what you are doing. For example, your final result files may need to be written out onto the NFS disk area, but that doesnt mean the intermediate data sets created and used temporarily in a multi-job sequence should use this NFS disk area. Better to setup a final disk pool, and constrain the result sequential file or data set to reside there, but let intermediate storage go to local or SAN resources, not NFS. 4. Know what data points are striped (RAID) and which are not. Where possible, avoid striping across data points that are already striped at the spindle level.

Below is the sample diagram for 1 node and 4 node resource allocation:

Sample configuration files

Configuration file for a simple SMP

A basic configuration file for a single machine, two node server (2-CPU) is shown below. The file defines 2 nodes (node1 and node2) on a single dev server (IP address might be provided as well instead of a hostname) with 3 disk resources (d1 , d2 for the data and Scratch as scratch space). The configuration file is shown below:

node "node1" { fastname "dev" pool "" resource disk "/IIS/Config/d1" { } resource disk "/IIS/Config/d2" { } resource scratchdisk "/IIS/Config/Scratch" { } } node "node2" { fastname "dev" pool "" resource disk "/IIS/Config/d1" { } resource scratchdisk "/IIS/Config/Scratch" { } }

Configuration file for a cluster / MPP / grid

The sample configuration file for a cluster or a grid computing on 4 machines is shown below. The configuration defines 4 nodes (node[1-4]), node pools (n[1-4]) and s[1-4), resource pools bigdata and sort and a temporary space.

node "node1" { fastname "dev1" pool "" "n1" "s1" "sort" resource disk "/IIS/Config1/d1" {} resource disk "/IIS/Config1/d2" {"bigdata"} resource scratchdisk "/IIS/Config1/Scratch" {"sort"} } node "node2" { fastname "dev2" pool "" "n2" "s2" resource disk "/IIS/Config2/d1" {} resource disk "/IIS/Config2/d2" {"bigdata"} resource scratchdisk "/IIS/Config2/Scratch" {} } node "node3" { fastname "dev3" pool "" "n3" "s3" resource disk "/IIS/Config3/d1" {} resource scratchdisk "/IIS/Config3/Scratch" {} } node "node4" { fastname "dev4" pool "n4" "s4" resource disk "/IIS/Config4/d1" {} resource scratchdisk "/IIS/Config4/Scratch" {} }

Resource disk : Here a disk path is defined. The data files of the dataset are stored in the resource disk. Resource scratch disk : Here also a path to folder is defined. This path is used by the parallel job stages for buffering of the data when the parallel job runs.