🚀 Maximize Data Performance with Liquid Clustering:

Optimization! 💡💾
Unlock the Power of Hilbert Curves & Incremental

Ever wished your data could be stored and accessed faster with less
overhead? Welcome to Liquid Clustering, a powerful technique that uses
Hilbert curves and Block-Wise Assignment (BWA) to handle large

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datasets, boost query performance, and store data intelligently. Let’s break it
down step-by-step!

🔍 How Does Liquid Clustering Store Data?

🤔 What is Liquid Clustering? Liquid Clustering is a flexible, incremental
clustering mechanism for Delta Lake that automatically organizes your data
for faster queries. Unlike traditional partitioning methods, it adapts to your
workload and evolves with your data!

Liquid Clustering uses Hilbert curves to reorganize data across multiple

dimensions (like region, date, product) into a single-dimensional space.
This allows for efficient storage and retrieval of related data points. But how
does it actually store data on disk?

Here’s where the Block-Wise Assignment (BWA) comes in. 🚀

📦 What is Block-Wise Assignment (BWA)?
Block-Wise Assignment (BWA) is a mechanism that helps Liquid Clustering
assign blocks of data to different segments (or ZCubes). Here’s how it
works:

● Smart Segmentation: BWA assigns data to blocks in a way that

optimizes for clustered columns (like date, product, etc.). These

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blocks represent batches of data that are close in multi-dimensional
space and stored physically close on disk.
● Optimized Storage: This block-based system ensures that related

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data (from multiple dimensions) is stored together, so Spark can skip
irrelevant blocks when scanning data for queries.
💡 Example: In an e-commerce dataset, all sales records for INDIA in
AUGUST 2024 would be stored close together in the same block, allowing
Spark to quickly retrieve them without scanning through unrelated rows like
sales from Europe or previous years.

🔄 Incremental Data Optimization with Liquid Clustering

One of the biggest advantages of Liquid Clustering is its ability to handle
incremental data without having to rewrite the entire table. Here’s how it
works:

1. New Data Gets Assigned to ZCubes: As new data comes in, it’s
assigned to a new ZCube (a unique ID assigned by the clustering
system). This keeps the new data organized and separate from old
data.
2. Incremental Clustering: Liquid Clustering clusters only the new data
as it’s ingested, rather than rewriting the entire table. This means your

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existing data stays intact, and only the latest batch is optimized for
performance.
3. Faster Data Access: Since the data is already organized based on

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Hilbert curves and ZCubes, Spark can efficiently skip files that don’t
match the query conditions, even as new data is ingested.

🎯 How Does Liquid Clustering Help Performance?

● Efficient Data Storage: By clustering data with Hilbert curves and
organizing it into blocks with BWA, Liquid Clustering ensures that
related data is stored together, making it faster to read during queries.
● Smarter Data Skipping: Because Spark uses min/max values for each

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block, it can quickly skip over irrelevant data when you run a query,
saving time and resources.
● Optimized for Incremental Loads: As new data is added, it’s clustered
incrementally, meaning Spark doesn’t have to re-cluster old data. This
improves the efficiency of the system as the dataset grows over time.
💡 Real-Life Example: Financial Data Analysis
Imagine a financial company tracking transactions by region, date, and
transaction type. With Liquid Clustering:

1. Incremental Transactions: As new transactions come in, they are

assigned to new ZCubes and clustered based on key dimensions like
date and transaction_type. This ensures new data is quickly
optimized without disturbing the existing dataset.
2. Fast Queries: When querying for transactions in the US during the last
quarter, Liquid Clustering allows Spark to skip over irrelevant blocks
(e.g., European transactions or older data), drastically improving query
speeds.

🔑 Key Takeaways:
● Hilbert Curves map multi-dimensional data into a single-dimensional
format, making data retrieval faster and more efficient.
● Block-Wise Assignment (BWA) optimizes how data is physically
stored, keeping related blocks of data together to boost query
performance.
● Incremental Optimization allows Liquid Clustering to cluster only new

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data, reducing overhead and improving efficiency with large datasets.

● Data Skipping ensures Spark reads only the relevant blocks,

skipping over unnecessary data.

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Liquid Clustering is the future of data organization—smarter, faster, and built
for performance!
Key Differences: Liquid Clustering (BWA) vs. Z-ordering
1. Dynamic & Flexible vs. Static Clustering:
○ Z-ordering: In Z-ordering, the clustering happens at the time of
writing or rewriting data. It organizes data based on multiple
columns (like date, region, etc.) by storing related values
together. However, Z-ordering is a static operation. Every time
new data is ingested, a full rewrite of the existing data may be
required to maintain optimal performance.
○ Liquid Clustering (BWA): In contrast, Block-Wise Assignment
(BWA) used in Liquid Clustering is incremental and adaptive.
Instead of rewriting the entire dataset, Liquid Clustering only
optimizes and clusters newly ingested data into ZCubes. This
makes it more efficient because it clusters the data as it comes in,
without reordering or affecting previously ingested data.

2. Handling Multi-Dimensional Data:

○ Z-ordering: Z-ordering clusters data by mapping multiple
dimensions (e.g., region, date) into 1D space using a Z-curve.
While this reduces the range of data that needs to be scanned, it
doesn't always ensure that nearby data points are physically
adjacent due to gaps in the Z-order mapping.
○ BWA & Hilbert Curves: Liquid Clustering uses Hilbert curves
(instead of Z-curves) to map multi-dimensional data more
efficiently into a 1D space, ensuring that nearby points in
multi-dimensional space are physically close in storage. This
results in better data locality and less data skipping, improving
query performance.

3. Incremental Clustering:
○ Z-ordering: Requires a full re-clustering (rewrite) of all the data
every time you optimize the table, which can be
resource-intensive and time-consuming for large datasets.
○ Liquid Clustering (BWA): Clusters data incrementally, meaning
only the new data is clustered and assigned to ZCubes, without
rewriting the entire table. This significantly reduces the overhead
of managing large datasets.
 4. Storage Efficiency:
○ Z-ordering: While effective for clustering, Z-ordering is less
efficient when handling high volumes of constantly incoming
data because it doesn't handle incremental optimization as
efficiently as Liquid Clustering.
○ Liquid Clustering (BWA): With the block-based approach, data
is stored in optimized batches that are physically close, ensuring
that related data is grouped and ready for fast access. This
method scales well as the dataset grows and helps Spark skip
irrelevant blocks much more efficiently, especially for queries
over large, frequently updated datasets.

Why Liquid Clustering (BWA) is Better for Incremental Data

💡 In Summary:
● Z-ordering is great for static datasets where full clustering is needed.
However, if your dataset is constantly growing and you're frequently
ingesting new data, Liquid Clustering with BWA is more effective.
● BWA ensures that incremental data is quickly clustered and stored
close to related data without needing a full table rewrite. This allows for
faster queries on both old and new data without the overhead of
continuously reorganizing the entire dataset.

🛠️ How to Use: It's as simple as:

→CREATE TABLE my_table USING delta CLUSTER BY (date, category,
price)

And when you need to optimize:

→OPTIMIZE my_table

Liquid Clustering takes care of the rest!

🌟 Why It's a Game-Changer: Whether you're a data scientist running
complex analyses, a business analyst generating reports, or a developer
building data-intensive applications, Liquid Clustering can significantly boost
your performance without the headaches of traditional partitioning.

🚀📚
Ready to make your big data feel like a small, well-organized library? Give
Liquid Clustering a try and watch your queries fly!

data clustering before? Let's discuss in the comments! 👇

What are your thoughts on this new feature? Have you faced challenges with

#BigData #LiquidClustering #DataOptimization #DataEngineering #DeltaLake

#HilbertCurves #SparkOptimization