Integrating Alibaba Cloud DLF Rest Catalog

Alibaba Cloud Data Lake Formation (DLF), as a core component of the cloud-native data lake architecture, helps users quickly build cloud-native data lake solutions. DLF provides unified metadata management on the data lake, enterprise-level permission control, and seamless integration with multiple compute engines, breaking down data silos and enabling business insights.

• Unified Metadata and Storage

  Big data compute engines share a single set of lake metadata and storage, with data flowing seamlessly between lake products.

• Unified Permission Management

  Big data compute engines share a single set of lake table permission configurations, enabling one-time setup with universal effect.

• Storage Optimization

  Provides optimization strategies including small file compaction, expired snapshot cleanup, partition reorganization, and obsolete file cleanup to improve storage efficiency.

• Comprehensive Cloud Ecosystem Support

  Deep integration with Alibaba Cloud products, including streaming and batch compute engines, delivering out-of-the-box functionality and enhanced user experience.

DLF supports Paimon Rest Catalog starting from version 2.5. Doris supports integration with DLF 2.5+ Paimon Rest Catalog starting from version 3.0.3/3.1.0, enabling seamless connection to DLF for accessing and analyzing Paimon table data. This article demonstrates how to connect Apache Doris with DLF 2.5+ and access Paimon table data.

tip

This feature is supported starting from Doris version 3.0.3/3.1.0.

Usage Guide

01 Enable DLF Service

Please refer to the DLF official documentation to enable the DLF service and create the corresponding Catalog, Database, and Table.

02 Access DLF Using EMR Spark SQL

• Connect

  spark-sql --master yarn \
      --conf spark.driver.memory=5g \
      --conf spark.sql.defaultCatalog=paimon \
      --conf spark.sql.catalog.paimon=org.apache.paimon.spark.SparkCatalog \
      --conf spark.sql.catalog.paimon.metastore=rest \
      --conf spark.sql.extensions=org.apache.paimon.spark.extensions.PaimonSparkSessionExtensions \
      --conf spark.sql.catalog.paimon.uri=http://<region>-vpc.dlf.aliyuncs.com \
      --conf spark.sql.catalog.paimon.warehouse=<your-catalog-name> \
      --conf spark.sql.catalog.paimon.token.provider=dlf \
      --conf spark.sql.catalog.paimon.dlf.token-loader=ecs

  Replace the corresponding warehouse and uri addresses.

• Write Data

  USE <your-catalog-name>;
  
  CREATE TABLE users_samples
  (
      user_id INT,             
      age_level STRING,           
      final_gender_code STRING,    
      clk BOOLEAN
  );
  
  INSERT INTO users_samples VALUES
  (1, '25-34', 'M', true),
  (2, '18-24', 'F', false);
  
  INSERT INTO users_samples VALUES
  (3, '25-34', 'M', true),
  (4, '18-24', 'F', false);
  
  INSERT INTO users_samples VALUES
  (5, '25-34', 'M', true),
  (6, '18-24', 'F', false);

  If you encounter the following error, try removing paimon-jindo-x.y.z.jar from /opt/apps/PAIMON/paimon-dlf-2.5/lib/spark3, then restart the Spark service and retry.

  Ambiguous FileIO classes are:
  org.apache.paimon.jindo.JindoLoader
  org.apache.paimon.oss.OSSLoader

03 Connect to DLF Using Doris

• Create Paimon Catalog

  CREATE CATALOG paimon_dlf_test PROPERTIES (
      'type' = 'paimon',
      'paimon.catalog.type' = 'rest',
      'uri' = 'http://<region>-vpc.dlf.aliyuncs.com',
      'warehouse' = '<your-catalog-name>',
      'paimon.rest.token.provider' = 'dlf',
      'paimon.rest.dlf.access-key-id' = '<ak>',
      'paimon.rest.dlf.access-key-secret' = '<sk>'
  );

  • Doris uses the temporary credentials returned by DLF to access OSS object storage, so no additional OSS credentials are required.
  • DLF can only be accessed within the same VPC. Ensure you provide the correct URI address.

• Query Data

  SELECT * FROM users_samples ORDER BY user_id;
  +---------+-----------+-------------------+------+
  | user_id | age_level | final_gender_code | clk  |
  +---------+-----------+-------------------+------+
  |       1 | 25-34     | M                 |    1 |
  |       2 | 18-24     | F                 |    0 |
  |       3 | 25-34     | M                 |    1 |
  |       4 | 18-24     | F                 |    0 |
  |       5 | 25-34     | M                 |    1 |
  |       6 | 18-24     | F                 |    0 |
  +---------+-----------+-------------------+------+

• Query System Tables

  SELECT snapshot_id, commit_time, total_record_count FROM users_samples$snapshots;
  +-------------+-------------------------+--------------------+
  | snapshot_id | commit_time             | total_record_count |
  +-------------+-------------------------+--------------------+
  |           1 | 2025-08-09 05:56:02.906 |                  2 |
  |           2 | 2025-08-13 03:41:32.732 |                  4 |
  |           3 | 2025-08-13 03:41:35.218 |                  6 |
  +-------------+-------------------------+--------------------+

• Incremental Reading

  SELECT * FROM users_samples@incr('startSnapshotId'=1, 'endSnapshotId'=2) ORDER BY user_id;
  +---------+-----------+-------------------+------+
  | user_id | age_level | final_gender_code | clk  |
  +---------+-----------+-------------------+------+
  |       3 | 25-34     | M                 |    1 |
  |       4 | 18-24     | F                 |    0 |
  +---------+-----------+-------------------+------+