Metanome CLI

The main purpose of this project is to provide a command-line interface for Metanome to allow for easy automation of data profiling tasks, e.g., to conduct experiments or to profile datasets batchwise. Besides that, this project integrates Metanome with

• Metacrate, a storage and analytics tool for data profiles, and
• ProfileDB, a tiny tool to collect and store experimental data.

Furthermore, HDFS is supported as input source.

Installation

Either obtain a Metanome CLI release or build it yourself. Conceretely, the project can be built with Maven:

.../metanome-cli$ mvn package -Pdistro

This command creates a "fatjar" (target/metanome-cli-0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar or similar) that contains Metanome and the Metanome CLI along with all their dependencies (except for Metanome algorithms, though).

Note that this project might depend on unstable snapshot versions of Metanome, Metacrate, and ProfileDB. In case of build errors related to these projects, you might need to clone, build, and install (i.e., mvn install) them yourself. Then, re-run the build with

.../metanome-cli$ mvn package -Pdistro --offline

Usage

Once you have obtained above described fatjar, you can simply put it on the Java classpath along with your algorithm jar files and run them as a normal Java application. As an example, assume you have an algorithm jar file called my-algorithm.jar with the main algorithm class com.example.MyAlgorithm. Then you can execute it via

$ java -cp metanome-cli.jar:my-algorithm.jar de.metanome.cli.App --algorithm com.example.MyAlgorithm <parameters...>

In order to get an overview of the various parameters of the Metanome CLI, you may also execute it without any parameters (including --algorithm).

The amount and severity of logging output can be controlled via the system properties of Tinylog. Most importantly if the algorithm does not behave as expected or you are trying to debug, enable all log messages by appending -Dtinylog.level=trace to the java invocation. If log output is not releveant at all, turn Metanome CLI into quiet mode with -Dtinylog.level=off.

Contributing

In case of problems, feel free to file an issue. Preferably stick to the Google Java Style Guide. Formatter instructions for Eclipse and Intellij are available on Github.