How do I get a dataframe or database write from TFX BulkInferrer?

问题

The bounty expires in 6 days. Answers to this question are eligible for a +50 reputation bounty. Sarah Messer is looking for a canonical answer:

TFX BulkInferrer seems designed to work with database-scale prediction, but that's not the output format. What is the recommended approach when making millions of predictions at once?

I'm very new to TFX, but have an apparently-working ML Pipeline which is to be used via BulkInferrer. That seems to produce output exclusively in Protobuf format, but since I'm running bulk inference I want to pipe the results to a database instead. (DB output seems like it should be the default for bulk inference, since both Bulk Inference & DB access take advantage of parallelization... but Protobuf is a per-record, serialized format.)

I assume I could use something like Parquet-Avro-Protobuf to do the conversion (though that's in Java and the rest of the pipeline's in Python), or I could write something myself to consume all the protobuf messages one-by-one, convert them into JSON, deserialize the JSON into a list of dicts, and load the dict into a Pandas DataFrame, or store it as a bunch of key-value pairs which I treat like a single-use DB... but that sounds like a lot of work and pain involving parallelization and optimization for a very common use case. The top-level Protobuf message definition is Tensorflow's PredictionLog.

This must be a common use case, because TensorFlowModelAnalytics functions like this one consume Pandas DataFrames. I'd rather be able to write directly to a DB (preferably Google BigQuery), or a Parquet file (since Parquet / Spark seems to parallelize better than Pandas), and again, those seem like they should be common use cases, but I haven't found any examples. Maybe I'm using the wrong search terms?

I also looked at the PredictExtractor, since "extracting predictions" sounds close to what I want... but the official documentation appears silent on how that class is supposed to be used. I thought TFTransformOutput sounded like a promising verb, but instead it's a noun.

I'm clearly missing something fundamental here. Is there a reason no one wants to store BulkInferrer results in a database? Is there a configuration option that allows me to write the results to a DB? Maybe I want to add a ParquetIO or BigQueryIO instance to the TFX pipeline? (TFX docs say it uses Beam "under the hood" but that doesn't say much about how I should use them together.) But the syntax in those documents looks sufficiently different from my TFX code that I'm not sure if they're compatible?

Help?

来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65525944/how-do-i-get-a-dataframe-or-database-write-from-tfx-bulkinferrer