Praveen Chaganlal

Peter Ho, Praveen Chaganlal, Tianle Zhang et al.

Production analytics products often depend on reusable methodologies: multi-step definitions such as headcount growth, top-skill growth, or differentially-private impression distributions. Although these methodologies define business-critical numbers, they are commonly implemented as imperative glue around OLAP queries, service calls, joins, transformations, and conditional logic. As a result, teams duplicate orchestration code, definitions drift across products, and methodologies are difficult to test or analyze. We present QDAG, a production system at LinkedIn that represents an analytics methodology as a declarative directed acyclic graph of typed steps. Nodes may execute Apache Pinot queries, downstream service calls, in-memory SQLite joins, jq transformations, conditionals, differentially-private aggregations, or calls to other QDAGs. The engine evaluates graphs demand-driven, memoized, pruned, and parallelized in the per-request analytics mid-tier. QDAG is deployed across more than 500 hosts and over 100 production use cases, adding roughly 10 ms median orchestration overhead and under 50 ms at the 99th percentile. Our experience shows that making methodologies declarative improves reuse, testability, and cross-product consistency while preserving interactive latency.

Praveen Chaganlal, Jia Guo, Vivek Vaidyanathan et al.

Real-time OLAP datastores are critical infrastructure for modern enterprises, powering interactive analytics on petabyte-scale datasets with subsecond latency requirements. As these systems become integral to service architectures, maintaining strict SLAs under failures, load spikes, and cluster changes is as important as raw performance. We present a set of resiliency mechanisms developed for Apache Pinot at LinkedIn, applicable to modern OLAP systems broadly. We introduce Query Workload Isolation (QWI), which provides workload-level CPU and memory budgeting across Pinot's broker and server tiers via fine-grained resource accounting and sub-millisecond enforcement, delivering predictable tail latency and fairness with under 1% overhead. We present Impact-Free Rebalancing for SLA-safe data movement during routine operations (e.g., upgrades, scale-out, and recovery), and Maintenance Zone Awareness to place replicas across fault domains and mitigate correlated failures. We also describe Adaptive Server Selection, which routes queries using real-time load and performance signals to avoid slow or failing nodes while preserving balanced utilization. Together, these mechanisms form a holistic resiliency framework deployed in production at LinkedIn, enabling stable query latency and high availability at scale.