Wherehows works by sending out ‘crawlers’ to capture metadata from databases, hdfs, directory services, schedulers, and data integration tools. The collected metadata is loaded into an integrated data warehouse. Wherehows provides a web-ui service and a backend service.
Wherehows comes in three operational components:
- A web-ui service
- Backend service
- Database schema for MySQL
The backend service provides the RESTful api but more importantly runs the ETL jobs that go and gather the metadata. The backend service relies heavily on the mysql wherehows database instance for configuration information and as a location for where the metadata will land.
The Web UI provides navigation between the bits of information and the ability to annotate the collected data with comments, ownership and more. The example below is for collecting Hive metadata collected from the Cloudera Hadoop VM
Configuration notes:
MySQL database for the Wherehows metadata database
Ensure that wherehows configuration tables are initialized by running the insert scripts (download 1.9 KB wherehows.dump ). Please note, to change the mysql host property for wherehows database (on <mysqlhost>). The initial SQL:
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--
-- Dumping data for table `wh_etl_job`
--
INSERT INTO `wh_etl_job` VALUES (21,'HIVE_DATASET_METADATA_ETL','DATASET','5 * ** * ?',61,'DB',NULL,1470390365,'comments','','Y');
--
-- Dumping data for table `wh_etl_job_property`
--
INSERT INTO `wh_etl_job_property` VALUES (117,'HIVE_DATASET_METADATA_ETL',61,'DB','hive.metastore.jdbc.url','jdbc:mysql://10.153.252.111:3306/metastore','N','url to connect to hive metastore'),(118,'HIVE_DATASET_METADATA_ETL',61,'DB','hive.metastore.jdbc.driver','com.mysql.jdbc.Driver','N',NULL),(119,'HIVE_DATASET_METADATA_ETL',61,'DB','hive.metastore.password','hive','N',NULL),(120,'HIVE_DATASET_METADATA_ETL',61,'DB','hive.metastore.username','hive','N',NULL),(121,'HIVE_DATASET_METADATA_ETL',61,'DB','hive.schema_json_file','/var/tmp/wherehows/hive_schema.json','N',NULL),(122,'HIVE_DATASET_METADATA_ETL',61,'DB','hive.schema_csv_file','/var/tmp/wherehows/hive_schema.csv','N',NULL),(123,'HIVE_DATASET_METADATA_ETL',61,'DB','hive.field_metadata','/var/tmp/wherehows/hive_field_metadata.csv','N',NULL);
INSERT INTO `wh_property` VALUES ('wherehows.app_folder','/var/tmp/wherehows','N',NULL),('wherehows.db.driver','com.mysql.jdbc.Driver','N',NULL),('wherehows.db.jdbc.url','jdbc:mysql://localhost/wherehows','N',NULL),('wherehows.db.password','wherehows','N',NULL),('wherehows.db.username','wherehows','N',NULL),('wherehows.ui.tree.dataset.file','/var/tmp/wherehows/resource/dataset.json','N',NULL),('wherehows.ui.tree.flow.file','/var/tmp/wherehows/resource/flow.json','N',NULL);