GemFire XD’s New Open Source Download: Browser-based Schema Management

October 20, 2014 Pas Apicella

featured-GemFireXD-brushNot too long ago, we provided an open source, web based schema management tool for Pivotal SQLFire. Now, we are providing the same for Pivotal GemFire XD, the in-memory, real-time data grid capability within Pivotal’s Big Data Suite.

GemFireXD*Web is an open source, browser based administration and development tool and provides a convenient web based option to connect to a Pivotal GemFire XD cluster without the need for client side installs. You can access the open project GitHub repository project or simply obtain a ready to go WAR file.

This post provides a quick background on GemFire XD*Web, detailing its capabilities, and shows you how easy it is to get up, running, and productive with Pivotal GemFireXD.

PivotalGF*XD_Welcome

The Quick Background on Pivotal GemFireXD

Pivotal GemFire XD is a memory-optimized, distributed data store that is designed for applications that have demanding scalability and availability requirements. With GemFire XD, you can manage data entirely using in-memory tables, persist very large tables to local disk store files, or persist to a Apache Hadoop® Distributed File System (HDFS) for big data deployments. In the initial release, GemFire XD provides a low-latency SQL interface to in-memory table data, while seamlessly integrating data that is persisted in HDFS—one SQL interface to in-memory and big data tables at the same time. A single GemFire XD distributed system can be easily scaled out using commodity hardware to support thousands of concurrent clients, and you can also replicate data between distinct GemFire XD clusters over a WAN interface. GemFire XD also provides easy access to persisted HDFS data using tools in the Pivotal HD ecosystem such as MapReduce or a massively parallelized SQL engine called HAWQ (using the GemFire XD PXF driver that is installed with HAWQ).

About GemFire XD*Web

In many cases, the most convenient way to access a data store is via a web-based tool, with no local installs or configurations to worry about. While command lines are often a favorite and quite fast, sometimes you might also want to browse a user interface, drill into different objects, take a quick peek at data sets, or run a quick SQL query. This is why GemFireXD*Web was created.

GemFireXD*Web Supports the following features

  • Browse / Administer HDFS Stores
  • Browse / Administer HDFS Tables
  • Browse / Administer Schema Objects
  • Auto Login without going through the Login Page
  • Disconnect GemFireXD*Web JDBC Connections from GemFireXD
  • Schema Creation Dialogs
  • New Table Viewer to view everything about a table including sample data
  • Grant table / program unit privileges when AUTHENTICATION is enabled
  • JMX Mbean Monitoring
  • Save Query Results in CSV or JSON format
  • View member start properties
  • SQL Worksheet to load/execute SQL DML/DDL statements
  • View memory Usage for Tables/Indexes
  • View data distribution for Tables across members and SQL queries
  • Stop/Start Gateway senders / Async Event Listeners

GF*XD_Tables

How to Get Started with GemFire XD*Web

To install GemFireXD*Web, download the WAR file, install it into your java runtime container, and access as noted below.

Note: This project has been tested with Apache Tomcat version 7 as well as Pivotal tc Server, and the instructions below are for Pivotal tc Server. Please check your run time container on how to deploy WAR files to get GemFireXD*Web installed if you are not using Pivotal tc Server.

In general, GemFireXD*Web should be deployed on the same network where the Pivotal GemFireXD cluster is running to ensure fast response times. It can run on the same node where the GemFireXD locator node is running, for example. For best performance run it with a heap of at least 1G of memory.

1. Create / Start a tc Server instance as shown below.

> ./tcruntime-instance.sh create gfxdw
> ./tcruntime-ctl.sh gfxdw start

2. Copy gfxdw.war to $TCSERVER_HOME/gfxdw/webapps

3. Access as follows

http://{server-ip-address}:{server-port}/gfxdw/

4. Access the user interface in your browser

GF*XD_Login

Learn More:

To learn more about Pivotal GemFireXD follow this link

  • Read about Pivotal GemFire XD

Product Info |Documentation | Download |Read More Blog Posts

  • Read about Pivotal HD

Product Info |Documentation | Download |Read More Blog Posts

  • Find out more about Pivotal Big Data Suite

Product Info |Documentation | Download |Read More Blog Posts

Editor’s Note: Apache, Apache Hadoop, Hadoop, and the yellow elephant logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries.

About the Author

Pas Apicella

Pas is a Senior Platform Architect at Pivotal Cloud Foundry

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