Question 129 - Professional Machine Learning Engineer discussion

The best option for developing and comparing multiple models on a large-scale BigQuery table using TensorFlow and Vertex AI is to use TensorFlow I/O's BigQuery Reader to directly read the data. This option has the following advantages:

It minimizes any bottlenecks during the data ingestion stage, as the BigQuery Reader can stream data from BigQuery to TensorFlow in parallel and in batches, without loading the entire table into memory or disk. The BigQuery Reader can also perform data transformations and filtering using SQL queries, reducing the need for additional preprocessing steps in TensorFlow.

It leverages the scalability and performance of BigQuery, as the BigQuery Reader can handle hundreds of millions of records worth of training data efficiently and reliably. BigQuery is a serverless, fully managed, and highly scalable data warehouse that can run complex queries over petabytes of data in seconds.

It simplifies the integration with Vertex AI, as the BigQuery Reader can be used with both custom and pre-built TensorFlow models on Vertex AI. Vertex AI is a unified platform for machine learning that provides various tools and features for data ingestion, data labeling, data preprocessing, model training, model tuning, model deployment, model monitoring, and model explainability.

The other options are less optimal for the following reasons:

Option A: Using the BigQuery client library to load data into a dataframe, and using tf.data.Dataset.from_tensor_slices() to read it, introduces memory and performance issues. This option requires loading the entire BigQuery table into a Pandas dataframe, which can consume a lot of memory and cause out-of-memory errors. Moreover, using tf.data.Dataset.from_tensor_slices() to read the dataframe can be slow and inefficient, as it creates one slice per row of the dataframe, resulting in a large number of small tensors.

Option B: Exporting data to CSV files in Cloud Storage, and using tf.data.TextLineDataset() to read them, introduces additional steps and complexity. This option requires exporting the BigQuery table to one or more CSV files in Cloud Storage, which can take a long time and consume a lot of storage space. Moreover, using tf.data.TextLineDataset() to read the CSV files can be slow and error-prone, as it requires parsing and decoding each line of text, handling missing values and invalid data, and applying data transformations and validations.

Option C: Converting the data into TFRecords, and using tf.data.TFRecordDataset() to read them, introduces additional steps and complexity. This option requires converting the BigQuery table into one or more TFRecord files, which are binary files that store serialized TensorFlow examples. This can take a long time and consume a lot of storage space. Moreover, using tf.data.TFRecordDataset() to read the TFRecord files requires defining and parsing the schema of the TensorFlow examples, which can be tedious and error-prone.

[TensorFlow I/O documentation]

[BigQuery documentation]

[Vertex AI documentation]