I understood that clickhouse is eventually consistent. So once an insert call returns, it doesn't mean that the data will appear in a select query.
does that apply to stand-alone clickhouse (no distribution, no replication)?
I understand the concept of eventual consistency for data replication, but does it apply with distribution but no replication?
using a distributed+replicated clickhouse, what is a recommended way to know that some insert(s) can be safely looked up?
Basically I didn't find much information on this topic, so maybe I am not asking the best questions. Feel free to enlighten me.
No, but single-node setup shouldn't be considered reliable either.
By default yes, you'll insert to node the client is connected to (probably via some load balancer) and Distributed table will asynchronously forward each piece of data to node where it belongs. The insert_distributed_sync=1 setting will make the client wait synchronously.
On insert use ***MergeTree shard tables directly (not Distributed) with insert_quorum=2 setting (if there are 3 replicas) and retry infinitely with exactly same batch if there are some errors (can use different replicas on retry, since there's a deduplication based on batch hash). Then on reads use select_sequential_consistency=1 setting.
Related
I develop for a relatively large online store with a PHP backend, and it uses elasticsearch for some things (like text search, logging... etc).
Now, I'd like to start storing all kinds of information about user activity in ES. For instance, every page view (for instance: user enter product page/category page ,etc).
Is ES optimized for such a heavy load of continuous inserts, or should I consider some alternatives, like for instance having some sort of a buffer layer where I store all of my immediate inserts in memory, and then every minute or so, insert them into ES in bulk?
What is the industry standard? Or am I worrying in vain and ES is optimized for that?
Thanks.
Elasticsearch, when properly sized to handle your load, is definitely a valid alternative for such a use case.
You might decide, however, to store that streaming data into another cluster which is different from your production cluster, so as to not impact the health of the production cluster too much.
There are a lot variables to arrive at the correct decision, and we don't have enough information here, but it's definitely a valid way.
I'm writing an application with Kafka Streams (v0.10.0.1) and would like to enrich the records I'm processing with lookup data. This data (timestamped file) is written into a HDFS directory on daily basis (or 2-3 times a day).
How can I load this in the Kafka Streams application and join to the actual KStream?
What would be the best practice to reread the data from HDFS when a new file arrives there?
Or would it be better switching to Kafka Connect and write the RDBMS table content to a Kafka topic which can be consumed by all the Kafka Streams application instances?
Update:
As suggested Kafka Connect would be the way to go. Because the lookup data is updated in the RDBMS on a daily basis I was thinking about running Kafka Connect as a scheduled one-off job instead of keeping the connection always open. Yes, because of semantics and the overhead of keeping a connection always open and making sure that it won't be interrupted..etc. For me having a scheduled fetch in this case looks safer.
The lookup data is not big and records may be deleted / added / modified. I don't know either how I can always have a full dump into a Kafka topic and truncate the previous records. Enabling log compaction and sending null values for the keys that have been deleted would probably won't work as I don't know what has been deleted in the source system. Additionally AFAIK I don't have a control when the compaction happens.
The recommend approach is indeed to ingest the lookup data into Kafka, too -- for example via Kafka Connect -- as you suggested above yourself.
But in this case how can I schedule the Connect job to run on a daily basis rather than continuously fetch from the source table which is not necessary in my case?
Perhaps you can update your question you do not want to have a continuous Kafka Connect job running? Are you concerned about resource consumption (load on the DB), are you concerned about the semantics of the processing if it's not "daily udpates", or...?
Update:
As suggested Kafka Connect would be the way to go. Because the lookup data is updated in the RDBMS on a daily basis I was thinking about running Kafka Connect as a scheduled one-off job instead of keeping the connection always open. Yes, because of semantics and the overhead of keeping a connection always open and making sure that it won't be interrupted..etc. For me having a scheduled fetch in this case looks safer.
Kafka Connect is safe, and the JDBC connector has been built for exactly the purpose of feeding DB tables into Kafka in a robust, fault-tolerant, and performant way (there are many production deployments already). So I would suggest to not fallback to "batch update" pattern just because "it looks safer"; personally, I think triggering daily ingestions is operationally less convenient than just keeping it running for continuous (and real-time!) ingestion, and it also leads to several downsides for your actual use case (see next paragraph).
But of course, your mileage may vary -- so if you are set on updating just once a day, go for it. But you lose a) the ability to enrich your incoming records with the very latest DB data at the point in time when the enrichment happens, and, conversely, b) you might actually enrich the incoming records with stale/old data until the next daily update completed, which most probably will lead to incorrect data that you are sending downstream / making available to other applications for consumption. If, for example, a customer updates her shipping address (in the DB) but you only make this information available to your stream processing app (and potentially many other apps) once per day, then an order processing app will ship packages to the wrong address until the next daily ingest will complete.
The lookup data is not big and records may be deleted / added / modified. I don't know either how I can always have a full dump into a Kafka topic and truncate the previous records. Enabling log compaction and sending null values for the keys that have been deleted would probably won't work as I don't know what has been deleted in the source system.
The JDBC connector for Kafka Connect already handles this automatically for you: 1. it ensures that DB inserts/updates/deletes are properly reflected in a Kafka topic, and 2. Kafka's log compaction ensures that the target topic doesn't grow out of bounds. Perhaps you may want to read up on the JDBC connector in the docs to learn which functionality you just get for free: http://docs.confluent.io/current/connect/connect-jdbc/docs/ ?
I am building an application with RethinkDB and I'm about to switch to using changefeeds. But I'm facing an architectural choice and I'd like to get some advice.
My application currently loads all user data from several tables on user login (sending all of it to the frontend), and then processes requests from the frontend, altering the database, and preparing and sending changed items to users. I'd like to switch that over to changefeeds. The way I see it, I have two choices:
Set up a single changefeed for each table. Filter by users logged in to a particular server, and distribute the changes to users manually. These changefeeds are never closed, e.g. they have the lifetime of my servers.
When a user logs in, set up an individual changefeed for that user, for that user's data only (using a getAll with a secondary index). Maintain as many changefeeds as there are currently logged in users. Close them when users log out.
Solution #1 has a big disadvantage: RethinkDB changefeeds do not have a concept of time (or version number), like for example Kafka does. This means that there is no way to a) load initial data, and b) get changes that happened since the initial load. There is a time window where changes can be lost: between initial data load (a) and the moment the changefeed is set up (b). I find this worrying.
Solution #2 seems better, because includeInitial can be used to get initial data, and then get subsequent changes without interruption. I'd have to deal with initial load performance (it's faster to load a single dump of all data than process thousands of updates), but it seems more "correct". But what about scaling? I'm planning to handle up to 1k users per server — is RethinkDB prepared to handle thousands of changefeeds, each being essentially a getAll query? The actual activity in these changefeeds will be very low, it's just the number that I'm worried about.
The RethinkDB manual is a bit terse about changefeed scaling, saying that:
Changefeeds perform well as they scale, although they create extra intracluster messages in proportion to the number of servers with open feed connections on each write.
Solution #2 creates many more feeds, but the number of servers with open feed connections is actually the same for both solutions. And "changefeeds perform well as they scale" isn't quite enough to go on :-)
I'd also be interested to know what are recommended practices for handling server restarts/upgrades and disconnections. The way I see it, if anything happens to RethinkDB, clients have to perform a full data load (using includeInitial) after reconnecting, because there is no way to know what changes have been lost during downtime. Is that what people do?
RethinkDB should be able to handle thousands of changefeeds just fine if it's on reasonable hardware. One thing some people to do lower network load in that case is they put a proxy node on the same machine as their app server, and connect to that, since the proxy node knows enough to deduplicate the changefeed messages coming in over the network, and because it takes a lot of CPU/memory load off of their main cluster.
Currently the only way to recover from a crash is to restart the changefeed using includeInitial. There are plans to add write timestamps in the future, but handling deletes is complicated in that case.
I am currently working on an application that continuously queries a database for real time data to be displayed.
In order to have minimal impact on systems which are writing to database, which are essential to the business operation, I am connecting to the Read Only replica in the availability group directly (using the read only replica server name as opposed to Read Only routing via the Always On listener by means of applicationintent=readonly).
Even in doing so we are noticing response time increases on the inserting of data to the primary server.
To my understanding of secondary replicas this should not be the case. I am using NOLOCK hints in the query as well. I am very perplexed by this and do not quite understand what is causing this increase in response times. All I have thought of so far is that SQL is, regardless of the NOLOCK hint, locking the table I am reading from and preventing the synchronous replication to the read only replica, which is in turn locking the primary instances table, which is holding up the insert query.
Is this the case or is there something I am not quite understanding with regard to Always on Read only replicas?
I found this document which I think best describes what could be possible causes of the increases in response times on the primary server.
In general it's a good read for those who are looking into using their AlwaysOn Availability group to distribute the load between their primary and secondary replicas.
for those who don't wish to read the whole document it taught me the following (in my own rough words):
Although very unlikely, it is possible that workloads running on the secondary replica can impact the the time taken to send the acknowledgement that the transaction has committed(the replication to the secondary). When using synchronous commit mode the primary waits for this acknowledgement before committing the transaction it is running (an insert for example). So the increase in time for the acknowledgement of the secondary replica causes the primary replica to take longer on the insert.
It is much better explained in the document though, under the 'Impact on Primary Workload' section. And again, if you want to know more, I really suggest you read it.
I'm trying to create a Ruby script that spawns several concurrent child processes, each of which needs to access the same data store (a queue of some type) and do something with the data. The problem is that each row of data should be processed only once, and a child process has no way of knowing whether another child process might be operating on the same data at the same instant.
I haven't picked a data store yet, but I'm leaning toward PostgreSQL simply because it's what I'm used to. I've seen the following SQL fragment suggested as a way to avoid race conditions, because the UPDATE clause supposedly locks the table row before the SELECT takes place:
UPDATE jobs
SET status = 'processed'
WHERE id = (
SELECT id FROM jobs WHERE status = 'pending' LIMIT 1
) RETURNING id, data_to_process;
But will this really work? It doesn't seem intuitive the Postgres (or any other database) could lock the table row before performing the SELECT, since the SELECT has to be executed to determine which table row needs to be locked for updating. In other words, I'm concerned that this SQL fragment won't really prevent two separate processes from select and operating on the same table row.
Am I being paranoid? And are there better options than traditional RDBMSs to handle concurrency situations like this?
As you said, use a queue. The standard solution for this in PostgreSQL is PgQ. It has all these concurrency problems worked out for you.
Do you really want many concurrent child processes that must operate serially on a single data store? I suggest that you create one writer process who has sole access to the database (whatever you use) and accepts requests from the other processes to do the database operations you want. Then do the appropriate queue management in that thread rather than making your database do it, and you are assured that only one process accesses the database at any time.
The situation you are describing is called "Non-repeatable read". There are two ways to solve this.
The preferred way would be to set the transaction isolation level to at least REPEATABLE READ. This will mean that any row that concurrent updates of the nature you described will fail. if two processes update the same rows in overlapping transactions one of them will be canceled, its changes ignored, and will return an error. That transaction will have to be retried. This is achieved by calling
SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL REPEATABLE READ
At the start of the transaction. I can't seem to find documentation that explains an idiomatic way of doing this for ruby; you may have to emit that sql explicitly.
The other option is to manage the locking of tables explicitly, which can cause a transaction to block (and possibly deadlock) until the table is free. Transactions won't fail in the same way as they do above, but contention will be much higher, and so I won't describe the details.
That's pretty close to the approach I took when I wrote pg_message_queue, which is a simple queue implementation for PostgreSQL. Unlike PgQ, it requires no components outside of PostgreSQL to use.
It will work just fine. MVCC will come to the rescue.