Why is redshift inefficient event for the simplest select queries? - performance

I have a few views in my Redshift database. There are a couple of users who perform simple select statements on these views. When a single select query is run, it executes quickly (typically a few seconds) but when multiple select queries(same simple select statement) are run at the same time, all the queries get queued on the Redshift side and take forever to retrieve the results. Not sure why the same query taking a few seconds get queued when triggered in parallel with other select queries.
I am curious to know how can this be resolved or if there is any workaround I need to consider.

There are a number of reasons why this could be happening. First off how many queries in parallel are we talking about? 10, 100, 1000?
The WLM configuration determines the parallelism that a cluster is set up to perform. If the WLM has a queue with only one slot then only one query can run at a time.
Just because a query is simple doesn't mean it is easy. If the tables are configured correctly or if a lot of data is being read (or spilled) a lot of system resources could be needed to perform the query. When many such queries come along these resources get overloaded and things slow down. You may need to evaluate your cluster / table configurations to address any issues.
I could keep guessing possibilities but the better approach would be to provide a query example, WLM configuration and some cluster performance metrics (console) to help narrow things down.

Related

Impala query with LIMIT 0

Being production support team member, I investigate issues with various Impala queries and while researching on an issue , I see a team submits an Impala query with LIMIT 0 which obviously do not return any rows and then again without LIMIT 0 which gives them result. I guess they submit these queries from IBM Datastage. Before I question them why they do so.. wanted to check what could be a reason for someone to run with LIMIT 0. Is it just to check syntax or connection with Impala? I see a similar question discussed here in context of SQL but thought to ask anyway in Impala perspective. Thanks Neel
I think you are partially correct.
Pls note, limit will process all the data and then apply limit clause.
LIMIT 0 is mostly used to -
to check if syntax of SQL is correct. But impala do fetch all the records before applying limit. so SQL is completely validated. Some system may use this to check out the sql they generated automatically before actually applying it in server.
limit fetching lots of rows from a huge table or a data set every time you run a SQL.
sometime you want to create an empty table using structure of some other tables but do not want to copy store format, configurations etc.
dont want to burden the hue/any interface that is interacting with impala. All data will be processed but will not be returned.
performance test - this will somewhat give you an idea of run time of SQL. i used the word somewhat because its not actual time to complete but estimated time to complete a SQL.

Oracle not uses best dbplan

i'm struggeling with Performance in oracle. Situation is: Subsystem B has a dblink to master DB A. on System B a query completes after 15 seconds over dblink, db plan uses appropriate indexes.
If same query should fill a table in a stored procedure now, Oracle uses another plan with full scans. whatever i try (hints), i can't get rid of these full scans. that's horrible.
What can i do?
The Oracle Query Optimizer tries 2000 different possibilities and chooses the best one in normal situations. But if you think it choose wrong plan, You may suspect the following cases:
1- Your histograms which belongs to querying tables are deprecated.
2- Your indexes can not be used because of your faulty query.
3- You can use index hints to force the indexes to be used.
4- You can use SQL Advisor or run TKProf for performance analysis and decide what's wrong or what caused bad performance. Check network, Disk I/O values etc.
If you share your query we can give you more information.
Look like we are not taking same queries in two different conditions.
First case is Simple select over dblink & Second case is "insert as select over dblink".
can you please share two queries & execution plans here as You may have them handy. If its not possible to past queries due to security limitations, please past execution plans.
-Abhi
after many tries, I could create a new DB Plan with Enterprise Manager. now it's running perfect.

Apache Drill has bad performance against SQL Server

I tried using apache-drill to run a simple join-aggregate query and the speed wasn't really good. my test query was:
SELECT p.Product_Category, SUM(f.sales)
FROM facts f
JOIN Product p on f.pkey = p.pkey
GROUP BY p.Product_Category
Where facts has about 422,000 rows and product has 600 rows. the grouping comes back with 4 rows.
First I tested this query on SqlServer and got a result back in about 150ms.
With drill I first tried to connect directly to SqlServer and run the query, but that was slow (about 5 sec).
Then I tried saving the tables into json files and reading from them, but that was even slower, so I tried parquet files.
I got the result back in the first run in about 3 sec. next run was about 900ms and then it stabled at about 500ms.
From reading around, this makes no sense and drill should be faster!
I tried "REFRESH TABLE METADATA", but the speed didn't change.
I was running this on windows, through the drill command line.
Any idea if I need some extra configuration or something?
Thanks!
Drill is very fast, but it's designed for large distributed queries while joining across several different data sources... and you're not using it that way.
SQL Server is one of the fastest relational databases. Data is stored efficiently, cached in memory, and the query runs in a single process so the scan and join is very quick. Apache Drill has much more work to do in comparison. It has to interpret your query into a distributed plan, send it to all the drillbit processes, which then lookup the data sources, access the data using the connectors, run the query, return the results to the first node for aggregation, and then you receive the final output.
Depending on the data source, Drill might have to read all the data and filter it separately which adds even more time. JSON files are slow because they are verbose text files that are parsed line by line. Parquet is much faster because it's a binary compressed column-oriented storage format designed for efficient scanning, especially when you're only accessing certain columns.
If you have a small dataset stored on a single machine then any relational database will be faster than Drill.
The fact that Drill gets you results in 500ms with Parquet is actually impressive considering how much more work it has to do to give you the flexibility it provides. If you only have a few million rows, stick with SQL server. If you have billions of rows, then use the SQL Server columnstore feature to store data in columnar format with great compression and performance.
Use Apache Drill when you:
Have 10s of billions of rows or more
Have data spread across many machines
Have unstructured data like JSON stored in files without a standard schema
Want to split the query across many machines to run in faster in parallel
Want to access data from different databases and file systems
Want to join data across these different data sources
One thing people need to understand about how Drill works is how Drill translates an SQL query to an executable plan to fetch and process data from, theoretically, any source of data. I deliberately didn't say data source so people won't think of databases or any software-based data management system.
Drill uses storage plugins to read records from whatever data the storage plugin supports.
After Drill gets these rows, it starts performing what is needed to execute the query, whats needed may be filtering, sorting, joining, projecting (selecting specific columns)...etc
So drill doesn't by default use any of the source's capabilities of processing the queried data. In fact, the source may not support any capability of such !
If you wish to leverage any of the source's data processing features, you'll have to modify the storage plugin you're using to access this source.
One query I regularly remember when I think about Drill's performance, is this one
Select a.CUST_ID, (Select count(*) From SALES.CUSTOMERS where CUST_ID < a.CUST_ID) rowNum from SALES.CUSTOMERS a Order by CUST_ID
Only because of the > comparison operator, Drill has to load the whole table (i.e actually a parquet file), SORT IT, then perform the join.
This query took around 18 minutes to run on my machine which is a not so powerful machine but still, the effort Drill needs to perform to process this query must not be ignored.
Drill's purpose is not to be fast, it's purpose is to handle vast amounts of data and run SQL queries against structured and semi-structured data. And probably other things that I can't think about at the moment but you may find more information for other answers.

Is there a way to fix Oracle query in shared pool

I have a report engine, performing PreparedStatements on Oracle 11, that is a highly prioritized task.
What I see is that first query invocation usually performs much much longer than the same query afterwards (query has different parameters and return different data).
I suppose this is due to hard parsing done by Oracle, on first query invocation.
I wonder, is there a way of hinting to Oracle, that this query is highly prioritized query which would be performed often, and which performance is critical, so it should remain in shared pool, no matter what?
I know that I can fix execution plan in Oracle 11, but I don't want to fix it, I want Oracle still to be able to change it, as system changes, all I want is to exclude query hard parsing.
Perhaps you should change your "I suppose..." into a "I tested and have determined..." :)
The query performance may be affected by more than just parsing; when it executes it has to fetch blocks from disk into the buffer cache - subsequent executions quite possibly are taking advantage of the blocks being found in memory and so are faster.
EDIT: to answer your immediate question - a workaround may be to have a job run periodically that parses the query but doesn't execute it. You might even be able to use this to determine whether parsing or fetching is the locus of the problem.
You can try pinning to shared pool using dbms_shared_pool.keep
But I would first make sure that you have an aging out problem first
Anton,
if your query is using bind variables it will be re-used. The cursor will be cached and as long as it is re-used, it will remain in the cursor cache. Make sure that it uses bind variables. This increases re-usability and scalability.
If you don't trust the rdbms you can pin it using dbms_shared_pool.keep.
See http://psoug.org/reference/dbms_shared_pool.html
You need to find your cursor in order to do so.
Normally there is an other problem that should be fixed.
Ronald.
http://ronr.blogspot.com

oracle metrics monitoring and reporting in real time

I am stress testing a database table
I am looking for any software that can connect to my database and show me some metrics like no of rows in a table, time for inserts , inserts/time, table fragmentation[logical/physical] etc .
It would be great if the reporting tool can do the following:
1] Report in real time or atleast after some interval so that I do not have to wait for test to finish to get first look at the data
2] Ability to do stuff with the data later, like get 99.99 percentile, avg etc.
Is mostly freely available :)
Does anyone have any suggestion of something I can use with my Oracle table. Any pointers would be great.
I can actually write scripts to logg stuff like select count(*) etc .. but then I will have to spend a lot of time parsing and changing the data reporting rather than the tests.
I think some intelligent thing might already be out there ??
Thanks
Edit:
I am looking at a piece of design for
a new architecture
The tests are
"comparison" tests for different
designs and hence as far as I do it
on same hardware and same schema etc
they are comparable to some
granularity.
I want to monitor index
fragmentation, and response times
etc.
If you think there are other
things that can change please let me
know. I am trying to roll back the
table to particular state[basically
truncate] for each new iteration of
the test
First, Oracle has built-in functionality for telling you the number of rows in a table (either use count(*) or search 'gather statistics oracle' for another option).
But "stress testing a table" sounds to me like you're going down the wrong path. Most of the metrics you're mentioning ("time for inserts , inserts/time, table fragmentation[logical/physical] etc") are highly dependent on many factors:
what OS Oracle's running on
how the OS is tuned (i.e. other services running)
how the specific Oracle instance is configured
what underlying storage architecture Oracle's using (and how tablespaces are configured)
what other queries are being executed in the database at the exact same time as your test
But NONE of them would be related to the table design itself.
Now, if you're wondering if your normalized (or de-normalized) table schema is hurting your application, that's another matter. As is performance being degraded by improper/unneeded/missing indexes, triggers, or a host of other problems.
But if you really want an app that will give you real-time monitoring, check out Quest Software's Spotlight on Oracle. But it's definitely not free.
Just to add to the other comments, I believe what you really want is to stress test the queries you're running and not the table. The table is just a bunch of data blocks on a disk and the query is what will make the difference in performance as far as development is concerned. That will tell you if you need different indexes or need to redesign the query.
On the other hand, if you're looking at it as a DBA or system administrator, you're probably more interested in OS level statistics especially disk latency, memory paging, and CPU utilization.
All this is available in the enterprise manager which is my primary tuning tool for development and DBA. If you don't have that, read up on using sql_trace to profile your queries and your OS specific documentation on how to get those stats.

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