Publish features to an online store

This article describes how to publish features to an online store for real-time serving.

Databricks Feature Store supports these online stores:

Online store provider	Publish with Feature Engineering in Unity Catalog	Publish with Workspace Feature Store	Feature lookup in Legacy MLflow Model Serving	Feature lookup in Model Serving
Amazon DynamoDB	X	X (Feature Store client v0.3.8 and above)	X	X
Amazon Aurora (MySQL-compatible)		X	X
Amazon RDS MySQL		X	X

Note

The DynamoDB online store uses a different schema than the offline store. Specifically, in the online store, primary keys are stored as a combined key in the column _feature_store_internal__primary_keys.

To ensure that Feature Store can access the DynamoDB online store, you must create the table in the online store by using publish_table(). Do not manually create a table inside DynamoDB. publish_table() does that for you automatically.

Publish batch-computed features to an online store

You can create and schedule a Databricks job to regularly publish updated features. This job can also include the code to calculate the updated features, or you can create and run separate jobs to calculate and publish feature updates.

For SQL stores, the following code assumes that an online database named “recommender_system” already exists in the online store and matches the name of the offline store. If there is no table named “customer_features” in the database, this code creates one. It also assumes that features are computed each day and stored as a partitioned column _dt.

The following code assumes that you have created secrets to access this online store.

If you are using DynamoDB, Databricks recommends that you provide write authentication through an instance profile attached to a Databricks cluster. The instance profile can only be used for publishing features; to look up feature values, you must use Databricks secrets.

DynamoDB support is available in all versions of Feature Engineering in Unity Catalog client, and Feature Store client v0.3.8 and above.

import datetime
from databricks.feature_engineering.online_store_spec import AmazonDynamoDBSpec
# or databricks.feature_store.online_store_spec for Workspace Feature Store

# do not pass `write_secret_prefix` if you intend to use the instance profile attached to the cluster.
online_store = AmazonDynamoDBSpec(
  region='<region>',
  read_secret_prefix='<read-scope>/<prefix>',
  write_secret_prefix='<write-scope>/<prefix>'
)

fe.publish_table( # or fs.publish_table for Workspace Feature Store
  name='ml.recommender_system.customer_features',
  online_store=online_store,
  filter_condition=f"_dt = '{str(datetime.date.today())}'",
  mode='merge'
)

import datetime
from databricks.feature_store.online_store_spec import AmazonRdsMySqlSpec

online_store = AmazonRdsMySqlSpec(
  hostname='<hostname>',
  port='<port>',
  read_secret_prefix='<read-scope>/<prefix>',
  write_secret_prefix='<write-scope>/<prefix>'
)

fs.publish_table(
  name='recommender_system.customer_features',
  online_store=online_store,
  filter_condition=f"_dt = '{str(datetime.date.today())}'",
  mode='merge'
)

Publish streaming features to an online store

To continuously stream features to the online store, set streaming=True.

fe.publish_table( # or fs.publish_table for Workspace Feature Store
  name='ml.recommender_system.customer_features',
  online_store=online_store,
  streaming=True
)

Publish selected features to an online store

To publish only selected features to the online store, use the features argument to specify the feature name(s) to publish. Primary keys and timestamp keys are always published. If you do not specify the features argument or if the value is None, all features from the offline feature table are published.

fe.publish_table( # or fs.publish_table for Workspace Feature Store
  name='ml.recommender_system.customer_features',
  online_store=online_store,
  features=["total_purchases_30d"]
)

Publish a feature table to a specific database

In the online store spec, specify the database name (database_name) and the table name (table_name). If you do not specify these parameters, the offline database name and feature table name are used. database_name must already exist in the online store.

online_store = AmazonRdsMySqlSpec(
  hostname='<hostname>',
  port='<port>',
  database_name='<database-name>',
  table_name='<table-name>',
  read_secret_prefix='<read-scope>/<prefix>',
  write_secret_prefix='<write-scope>/<prefix>'
)

Overwrite an existing online feature table or specific rows

Use mode='overwrite' in the publish_table call. The online table is completely overwritten by the data in the offline table.

Note

Amazon DynamoDB does not support overwrite mode.

fs.publish_table(
  name='recommender_system.customer_features',
  online_store=online_store,
  mode='overwrite'
)

To overwrite only certain rows, use the filter_condition argument:

fs.publish_table(
  name='recommender_system.customer_features',
  online_store=online_store,
  filter_condition=f"_dt = '{str(datetime.date.today())}'",
  mode='merge'
)

Delete a published table from an online store

With Feature Store client v0.12.0 and above, you can use drop_online_table to delete a published table from an online store. When you delete a published table with drop_online_table, the table is deleted from your online store provider and the online store metadata is removed from Databricks.

fe.drop_online_table( # or fs.drop_online_table for Workspace Feature Store
  name='recommender_system.customer_features',
  online_store = online_store
)

Note

drop_online_table deletes the published table from the online store. It does not delete the feature table in Databricks.
Before you delete a published table, you should ensure that the table is not used for Model Serving feature lookup and has no other downstream dependencies. The delete is irreversible and might cause dependencies to fail.
To check for any dependencies, consider rotating the keys for the published table you plan to delete for a day before you execute drop_online_table.