We need to load millions of key/values into Apache Geode and we'd like to know what are some the options available. Our values happen to be in the 256kb range.
There are several options depending on your application requirements/SLAs or whether you need to perform conversion or other transformations, etc.
Out-of-the-box, Apache Geode provides the Cache & Region Snapshot Service. This is useful when you want to migrate data from 1 existing Apache Geode cluster to another, for instance. Not so useful if your data is coming from an external source, like a RDBMS.
Another option is to lazily load the data based on need. This can be accomplished by implementing the CacheLoader interface and registering the CacheLoader with a Region. Obviously, you could create a CacheLoader implementation that intelligently loads a block of data based on some rules/criteria in addition to loading and returning the single value of interests based on the current requests.
A lot of times, users create an external, custom Conversion process or tool to extract, transform and bulk load (ETL) a bunch of data into Apache Geode. This is typical in complex Use Cases or requirements. However, it is highly advisable to use perhaps a framework/tool like...
Spring XD (now Spring Cloud Data Flow on Pivotal's Cloud Foundry (PCF)) is great ETL tool and pipeline for creating stream-based applications. Spring XD / SCDF provides many different options for "sources" and "sinks" (e.g. GemFire Server). In addition to sources & sinks, you can even "tap" the stream to process the data with "Processors". So whether you are doing real-time stream or batch-oriented data operations (e.g. bulk loads), Spring XD is a great option.
I am sure Google might provide other answers on how to perform ETL with a KeyValue store like Apache Geode.
Hope this helps get you going.
Cheers, John