Cloudera Enterprise 5.7 brings a lot of changes (more than 1500) to HUE (the Web interface for querying and browsing data). The emphasize on performances and security continues from 5.5 as well as the improvement of the SQL user experience.
New Hive Metastore interface
The app is now single page and offers speed and more accessible statistics and data preview. See more of the improvements below or take a look at the following video demo.
New UI
Fresh restart
The front-end has been rewritten to be slicker and more user-friendly. More information is displayed and navigating across tabs is seamless as it no longer entails a page refresh.
Table specific page after
Table specific page before
Speed
Single page app: first, now the initial page loads very quickly and fetches asynchronously the list of tables, table statistics, data sample, partition list. We are not blocking anymore until everything is queried in Hive. Subsequent navigation clicks will trigger only 1 or 2 calls to the server, instead of reloading all the page resources again. As an added bonus, the browser history now works on all the pages.
Caching: The new assist caches all the Hive metadata. The pages listing tables and database also point to the same cache, as well as the editor autocomplete. This means that now the fetching of thousand of Hive tables and databases will only happen once. On the Hive side, these calls have even been optimized for taking seconds instead of previously minutes (HIVE-7575).
Don’t freeze my browser: on top of the caching, Hue is now much smarter and only displays the elements visible on the screen. For example if the user has a list of 5000 tables, only tens of them will actually be rendered (the rendering is the costly part).
(Read more here).
SQL Editor improvements
The most used app in HUE is getting a
- Format queries button
- Delete history button
- Fixed columns and rows headers for a smoother scrolling
- Hive on Spark support
Security
- A timeout now logs out inactive user after
idle_session_timeout seconds - Optional custom security splash screen at log-in with
login_splash_html - TLS certificate chain support for HUE
- SAML
- Password for the key_file was introduced with
key_file_password - Customize your xmlsec1 binary by changing
xmlsec_binary - Customize your SAML username mapping. It also supports syncing groups on login
- Password for the key_file was introduced with
Search suggest
Result in the Grid Widget can be plotted like in the SQL editor. This is ideal for clicking visualizing the rows returned by the search query.
Hue supports Solr Suggesters and makes your data easier to search! Suggester assists the user by proposing an auto-completable list of queries:
(Read more here).
HDFS summary
Right click on a file or directory to access their disk space consumed, quotas and number of directories and files.
Oozie Improvements
- External Workflow Graph: This feature enables us to see the graph for workflows submitted form File-browser as well as the ones submitted from CLI.
- Dryrun Oozie job: The dryrun option tests running a workflow/coordinator/bundle job with given properties and does not create the job.
- Timezone improvements: All the times on the dashboard are now defaulted to browser timezone and submitting a coordinator/bundle no longer need UTC times.
- Emailing automatically on failure: Each kill node now embeds an optional email action. Edit a kill node to insert a custom message if case it gets called.
(Read more here).
Next Up!
Next CDH version (5.8) of Hue will be rebased on Hue 3.10 that was released this May. On top of hundreds of improvements it brings a revamp of the SQL editor and the home page!
If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to comment here, on the hue-user list or via @gethue!