14.6. Accumulo Index Configuration

GeoMesa exposes a variety of configuration options that can be used to customize and optimize a given installation. The Accumulo data store supports most of the general options described under Index Configuration.

14.6.1. Attribute Indices

See Attribute Index for an overview of attribute indices. The Accumulo data store extends the normal attribute indices with an additional ‘join’ format that stores less data.

14.6.1.1. Join Indices

Join indices store a reduced subset of data in the index - just the feature ID, the default date and the default geometry. To answer most queries, a join against the record index is required to retrieve the full simple features - hence the name join index. Joining against the record table is slow when returning many results, and should generally be avoided except for small queries.

GeoMesa will avoid joining against the record table if it is possible to answer a query with only the data in the join index. In general, this means that the query is only returning the properties for the default date, default geometry and the attribute being queried. In addition, any CQL filters must only operate on those three attributes as well.

To enable a join index, the keyword join may be used in place of true when specifying an attribute index in the SimpleFeatureType.

14.6.1.2. Full Indices

Full indices store the full simple feature. This takes up the most space on disk, but allows for any query to be answered without joining against the record table. This is the only option for non-Accumulo data stores. To use a full index, the keyword full or true may be used when specifying an attribute index in the SimpleFeatureType.

14.6.2. Feature Expiration

Warning

Any manually configured age-off iterators should be removed before setting feature expiration, as they may not operate correctly due to the configuration name.

The GeoMesa Accumulo data store supports setting a per-feature time-to-live. Expiration can be set in the SimpleFeatureType user data, using the key geomesa.feature.expiry. See Setting Schema Options for details on configuring the user data. Expiration can be set before calling createSchema, or can be added to an existing schema by calling updateSchema, which may cause currently ingested features to be expired.

Expiration can be based on either ingest time or a feature attribute. To set expiration based on ingest time, specify a time-to-live as a duration string, e.g. 24 hours or 180 days. To set expiration based on a feature attribute, specify the attribute along with a time-to-live in parentheses, e.g. dtg(24 hours) or event-time(30 days) (where dtg and event-time are Date-type attributes in the schema).

Warning

Ingest-time expiration requires that logical timestamps are disabled in the schema. See Logical Timestamps, below.

Feature expiration is implemented using an Accumulo filter. See configure-age-off for details on viewing or modifying existing filters.

14.6.2.1. Statistics

As features are aged off, summary data statistics will get out of date, which can degrade query planning. For manageable data sets, it is recommended to re-analyze statistics every so often, via the stats-analyze command. If the data set is too large for this to be feasible, then stats can instead be disabled completely via geomesa.stats.generate.

14.6.2.2. Forcing Deletion of Records

The GeoMesa age-off iterators will not fully delete records until compactions occur. To force a true deletion of data on disk, you must manually compact a table or range. When compacting an entire table you should take care not to overwhelm your system. To facilitate this, you may use the GeoMesa Accumulo command-line compact command.

14.6.3. Logical Timestamps

By default, GeoMesa index tables are created using Accumulo’s logical time. This ensures that updates to a given simple feature will be ordered correctly, however it obscures the actual insert time for the underlying data row. For advanced use cases, standard system time can be used instead of logical time. To disble logical time, add the following user data hint to the simple feature type before calling createSchema:

// append the hints to the end of the string, separated by a semi-colon
String spec = "name:String,dtg:Date,*geom:Point:srid=4326;geomesa.logical.time='false'";
SimpleFeatureType sft = SimpleFeatureTypes.createType("mySft", spec);

14.6.4. Upgrading Existing Indices

GeoMesa often makes updates to indexing formats to improve query and write performance. However, the index format for a given schema is fixed when it is first created. Updating GeoMesa versions will provide bug fixes and new features, but will not update existing data to new index formats.

The exact version of an index used for each schema can be read from the SimpleFeatureType user data, or by simple examining the name of the index tables created by GeoMesa. See below for a description of current index versions.

Using the GeoMesa command line tools, you can add or update an index to a newer version using add-index. For example, you could add the XZ3 index to replace the Z3 index for a feature type with non-point geometries. The command will populate the new index using a distributed job. For large data sets, you can choose to only populate features matching a CQL filter (e.g. the last month), or choose to not populate any data. The update is seamless, and clients can continue to query and ingest while it runs.

See add-index for more details on the command line tools.