Oracle database help optimizing LIKE searches - oracle

I am on Oracle 11g and we have these 3 core tables:
Customer - CUSTOMERID|DOB
CustomerName - CUSTOMERNAMEID|CustomerID|FNAME|LNAME
Address - ADDRESSID|CUSTOMERID|STREET|CITY|STATE|POSTALCODE
I have about 60 million rows on each of the tables and the data is a mix of US and Canadian population.
I have a front-end application that calls a web service and they do a last name and partial zip search. So my query basically has
where CUSTOMERNAME.LNAME = ? and ADDRESS.POSTALCODE LIKE '?%'
They typically provide the first 3 digits of the zip.
The address table has an index on all street/city/state/zip and another one on state and zip.
I did try adding an index exclusively for the zip and forced oracle to use that index on my query but that didn't make any difference.
For returning about 100 rows (I have pagination to only return 100 at a time) it takes about 30 seconds which isn't ideal. What can I do to make this better?

The problem is that the filters you are applying are not very selective and they apply to different tables. This is bad for an old-fashioned btree index. If the content is very static you could try bitmap indexes. More precisely a function based bitmap join index on the first three letter of the last name and a bitmap join index on the postal code column. This assumes that very few people with the whose last name starts with certain letters live in an are with a certain postal code.
CREATE BITMAP INDEX ix_customer_custname ON customer(SUBSTR(cn.lname,1,3))
FROM customer c, customername cn
WHERE c.customerid = cn.customerid;
CREATE BITMAP INDEX ix_customer_postalcode ON customer(SUBSTR(a.postalcode,1,3))
FROM customer c, address a
WHERE c.customerid = a.customerid;
If you are successful you should see the two bitmap indexes becoming AND connected. The execution time should drop to a couple of seconds. It will not be as fast as a btree index.
Remarks:
You may have to play around a bit whether it is more efficient to make one or two indexes and whether the function are helpful useful.
If you decide to do it function based you should include the exact same function calls in the where clause of your query. Otherwise the index will not be used.
DML operations will be considerably slower. This is only useful for tables with static data. Note that DML operations will block whole row "ranges". Concurrent DML operations will run into problems.
Response time will probably still be seconds not instanteously like a BTREE index.
AFAIK this will work only on the enterprise edition. The syntax is untested because I do not have an enterprise db available at the moment.
If this is still not fast enough you can create a materialized view with customerid, last name and postal code and but a btree index on it. But that is kind of expensive, too.

Related

CDC strategy for multiple staging tables

I'm implementing a Data Mart following the Kimball methodology and I have a challenge with applying deltas from multiple source tables against a single target dimension.
Here's an example of the incoming source data:
STG_APPLICATION
APP_ID, APP_NAME, APP_START_DATE, CDC_HASH, ...
1, FOOBAR, 20/10/2018, MD5_XXX
STG_APPLICATION_STATUS
APP_ID, STATUS_CODE, STATUS_DESC, CDC_HASH, ...
1, SUBMITTED, "APP WAS SUBMITTED", MD5_YYY
Each of these tables (there are several others) represent a normalised version of the source data i.e. a single application can have one or more statuses associated with it.
Now then, because we only get a full alpha for these tables we have to do a snapshot merge, i.e. apply a full outer join on the current day set of records against the previous day set of records for each individual table. This is computed by comparing the CDC_HASH (a concat of all source columns). The result of this comparison is stored in a delta table as follows:
STG_APPLICATION_DELTA
APP_ID, APP_NAME, APP_START_DATE, CDC_HASH, CDC_STATUS ...
STG_APPLICATION_STATUS
APP_ID, STATUS_CODE, STATUS_DESC, CDC_HASH, CDC_STATUS...
1, AWARDED, "APP WAS AWARDED", MD5_YYY, NEW
So in this example, the first table, STG_APPLICATION did not generate a delta record as the attributes pertaining to that table did not change between daily loads. However, the associated table, STG_APPLICATION_STATUS, did calculate a delta, i.e. one or more fields have changed since the last load. This is highlighted by the CDC_STATUS which identifies it as a new record to insert.
The problem now of course is how to correctly handle this situation when loading the target dimension? For example:
DIM_APPLICATION
ID, APPLICATION_ID, APP_NAME, APP_START_DATE, APP_STATUS_CODE, FROM_DATE, TO_DATE
1, 1, FOOBAR, 20/10/2018, SUBMITTED, 20/10/2018, 12/04/2019
2, 1, NULL, NULL, NULL, AWARDED, 13/04/2019, 99/99/9999
This shows the first record - based on these two staging tables being joined - and the second record which is meant to reflect an updated version of the record. However, as previously illustrated, my Delta tables are only partially populated, and therefore I am unable to correctly update the dimension as shown here.
Logically, I understand that I need to be able to include all fields that are used by the dimension as part of my delta calculation, so that I have a copy of a full record when updating the dimension, but I'm not sure of the best way to implement this in my staging area. As shown already, I currently only have independent staging tables, each of which calculate their delta separately.
Please can somebody advise on the best way to handle this? I'm scrutinized Kimball's books on this but to no avail. And I've equally found no suitable answer on any online forums. This is a common problem so I'm sure there exists a suitable architectural pattern to resolve this.
You will need to either compare on joined records or lookup the current dimension values.
If the amount of (unchanged) data is not excessive, you could join the full snapshots of STG_APPLICATION and STG_APPLICATION_STATUS together on APP_ID until they resemble the dimension record column-wise and store those in a separate table with their CDC hash to use as previous day. You then take the deltas at this level and send the (complete) changed records as updates to the dimension.
If the amount of records in the daily update makes it impractical to join the full tables, you can take the deltas and full outer join them as you do now. Then you look up the current dimension record for this APP_ID and fill in all empty fields in the delta record. The completed record is then sent as an update to the dimension.
This solution requires less storage but seems more fragile, especially if multiple changes are possible within a day. If there are many changes, performance may also suffer. For a handful of changes in millions of records, it should be more efficient.

Oracle compressed/b-tree index how and when to use

I would like to add a compressed index to the Oracle Applications workflow table hr.pqh_ss_transaction_history in order to access specific types of workflows (process_name) and workflows for specific people (selected_person_id).
There are lots of repeating values in process_name although the data is skewed. I would however want to access the TFG_HR_NEW_HIRE_PLACE_JSP_PRC and TFG_HR_TERMINATION_JSP_PRC process types.
"PROCESS_NAME","CNT"
"HR_GENERIC_APPROVAL_PRC",40347
"HR_PERSONAL_INFO_JSP_PRC",39284
"TFG_HR_NEW_HIRE_PLACE_JSP_PRC",18117
"TFG_HREMPSTS_TERMS_CHG_JSP_PRC",14076
"TFG_HR_TERMINATION_JSP_PRC",8764
"HR_ADV_INDIVIDUAL_COMP_PRC",4907
"TFG_HR_SIT_NOAPP",3979
"TFG_YE_TAX_PROV",2663
"HR_TERMINATION_JSP_PRC",1310
"HR_CHANGE_PAY_JSP_PRC",953
"TFG_HR_SIT_EXIT_JSP_PRC",797
"HR_SIT_JSP_PRC",630
"HR_QUALIFICATION_JSP_PRC",282
"HR_CAED_JSP_PRC",250
"TFG_HR_EMP_TERM_JSP_PRC",211
"PER_DOR_JSP_PRC",174
"HR_AWARD_JSP_PRC",101
"TFG_HR_SIT_REP_MOT",32
"TFG_HR_SIT_NEWPOS_NIB_JSP_PRC",30
"TFG_HR_SIT_NEWPOS_INBU_JSP_PRC",28
"HR_NEW_HIRE_PLACE_JSP_PRC",22
"HR_NEWHIRE_JSP_PRC",6
selected_person_id would obviously be more selective. Unfortunately there are 3774 nulls for this column and the highest count after that is 73 for one person. A lot of people would only have 1 row. The total row count is 136963.
My query would be in this format:
select psth.item_key,
psth.creation_date,
psth.last_update_date
from hr.pqh_ss_transaction_history psth
where nvl(psth.selected_person_id, :p_person_id) = :p_person_id
and psth.process_name = 'HR_TERMINATION_JSP_PRC'
order by psth.last_update_date
I am on Oracle 12c release 1.
I assume it would be a good idea to put a non-compressed b-tree index on selected_person_id since the values returned would fall in the less than 5% of the total rows scenario, but how do you handle the nulls in the column which would not go into the index when you select using nvl(psth.selected_person_id, :p_person_id) = :p_person_id? Is there a more efficient way to write the sql and how should you create this index?
For process_name I would like to use a compressed b-tree index. I am assuming that the statement is
CREATE INDEX idxname ON pqh_ss_transaction_history(process_name) COMPRESS
where there would be an implicit second column for rowid. Is it safe for it to use rowid here, since normally it is not advised to use rowid? Is the skewed data an issue (most of the time I would be selecting on the high volume side)? I don't understand how compressed indexes would be efficient. For b-tree indexes you would normally want to return 5% of the data, otherwise a full table scan is actually more efficient. How does the compressed index return so many rowids and then do lookup into the full table using those rowids, faster than a full table scan?
Or since the optimizer will only be able to use one of the two indexes should I rather create an uncompressed function based index with selected_person_id and process_name concatenated?
Perhaps you could create this index:
CREATE INDEX idxname ON pqh_ss_transaction_history
(process_name, NVL(selected_person_id,-1)) COMPRESS 1
Then change your query to:
select psth.item_key,
psth.creation_date,
psth.last_update_date
from hr.pqh_ss_transaction_history psth
where nvl(psth.selected_person_id, -1) in (:p_person_id,-1)
and psth.process_name = 'HR_TERMINATION_JSP_PRC'
order by psth.last_update_date

Speeding up a postgres query (which works on 2 tables)

I am doing, in postgresql, something like this:
select A.first,
count(B.second) as count,
array_agg(A.second) as second,
array_agg(A.third) as third,
array_agg(B.kids) as kids
from A join B on A.first=B.second
group by A.first;
And it's taking forever (also because the tables are pretty big). Limiting the output to 10 row and looking with explain analyze told me there's a nested loop which is huge and takes most of the time.
Is there any way in which I can write this query (which I'll then use in CREATE TABLE AS to create a new table) to speed it up, while conserving the same output, which is what I want?
Thanks!
Ensure the column bring used as a foreign key is indexed:
create index b_second on b(second);
Without such an index, every row of a would cause a table scan of b, which would make your query crawl.

Sqlite view vs plain select statement performance

I have a simple table (with about 8 columns and a LOT of rows) in a SQLite database. There is a single program that runs as a service and performs selects, updates and inserts on the table quite often (approximately every 5 minutes). The selects are used only to determine which rows are to be updated, and they are based on a column that holds boolean values (probably translated to integer internally by SQLite).
There is also a web application that performs selects (always with a GROUP BY clause) whenever a web user wishes to view part of the data.
There are two ways to ask for data through the web application: (a) predefined filters (i.e. the where clause has specific conditions on 3 specific columns) an (b) custom filters (i.e. the user chooses the values for the conditions, but the columns participating in the where clause are the same as in (a)). As mentioned, in both cases there is a GROUP BY operation.
I am wondering whether using a view or a custom function might increase the performance. Currently, a "custom" select may take more than 30 seconds to complete - and that's before any data has been sent back to the user.
EDIT:
Using EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN on a "predefined" select statement yields only one row:
0|0|TABLE mytable
Using EXPLAIN on the same query, yields the following:
0|OpenVirtual|1|4|keyinfo(2,-BINARY,BINARY)
1|OpenVirtual|2|3|keyinfo(1,BINARY)
2|MemInt|0|5|
3|MemInt|0|4|
4|Goto|0|27|
5|MemInt|1|5|
6|Return|0|0|
7|IfMemPos|4|9|
8|Return|0|0|
9|AggFinal|0|0|count(0)
10|AggFinal|2|1|sum(1)
11|MemLoad|0|0|
12|MemLoad|1|0|
13|MemLoad|2|0|
14|MakeRecord|3|0|
15|MemLoad|0|0|
16|MemLoad|1|0|
17|Sequence|1|0|
18|Pull|3|0|
19|MakeRecord|4|0|
20|IdxInsert|1|0|
21|Return|0|0|
22|MemNull|1|0|
23|MemNull|3|0|
24|MemNull|0|0|
25|MemNull|2|0|
26|Return|0|0|
27|Gosub|0|22|
28|Goto|0|82|
29|Integer|0|0|
30|OpenRead|0|2|
31|SetNumColumns|0|9|
32|Rewind|0|48|
33|Column|0|8|
34|String8|0|0|123456789
35|Le|356|39|collseq(BINARY)
36|Column|0|3|
37|Integer|180|0|
38|Gt|100|42|collseq(BINARY)
39|Column|0|7|
40|Integer|1|0|
41|Ne|356|47|collseq(BINARY)
42|Column|0|6|
43|Sequence|2|0|
44|Column|0|3|
45|MakeRecord|3|0|
46|IdxInsert|2|0|
47|Next|0|33|
48|Close|0|0|
49|Sort|2|69|
50|Column|2|0|
51|MemStore|7|0|
52|MemLoad|6|0|
53|Eq|512|58|collseq(BINARY)
54|MemMove|6|7|
55|Gosub|0|7|
56|IfMemPos|5|69|
57|Gosub|0|22|
58|AggStep|0|0|count(0)
59|Column|2|2|
60|Integer|30|0|
61|Add|0|0|
62|ToReal|0|0|
63|AggStep|2|1|sum(1)
64|Column|2|0|
65|MemStore|1|1|
66|MemInt|1|4|
67|Next|2|50|
68|Gosub|0|7|
69|OpenPseudo|3|0|
70|SetNumColumns|3|3|
71|Sort|1|80|
72|Integer|1|0|
73|Column|1|3|
74|Insert|3|0|
75|Column|3|0|
76|Column|3|1|
77|Column|3|2|
78|Callback|3|0|
79|Next|1|72|
80|Close|3|0|
81|Halt|0|0|
82|Transaction|0|0|
83|VerifyCookie|0|1|
84|Goto|0|29|
85|Noop|0|0|
The select I used was as the following
SELECT
COUNT(*) as number,
field1,
SUM(CAST(filter2 +30 AS float)) as column2
FROM
mytable
WHERE
(filter1 > '123456789' AND filter2 > 180)
OR filter3=1
GROUP BY
field1
ORDER BY
number DESC, field1;
Whenever you're going to be doing comparisons of a non-primary-key field, it's a good design idea to add an index into to the field(s). Too many, however, can cause INSERTs to crawl, so plan accordingly.
Also, if you have simple fields such as ones that only hold a boolean value, you may want to consider declaring it as an INTEGER instead of whatever you declared it as. Declaring it as any type not specifically defined by SQLite will cause it to default to a NUMERIC type which will take longer to compare values because it will store it internally as a double and will use the floating-point math processor instead of the integer math processor.
IMO, the GROUP BY sorting directive is sometimes a dead giveaway to an unoptimized query; its methodology involves eliminating redundant data which could have been eliminated beforehand if it hadn't been pulled out of the database to begin with.
EDIT:
I saw your query and saw there are some simple things you can do to optimize it:
SUM(CAST(filter2 +30 AS float)) is inefficient; why are you casting it as a float? Why not just SUM it then add 30 * the COUNT?
filter1 > '123456789' - Why the string comparison? Why not just use integer comparison?

Improve SQL Server 2005 Query Performance

I have a course search engine and when I try to do a search, it takes too long to show search results. You can try to do a search here
http://76.12.87.164/cpd/testperformance.cfm
At that page you can also see the database tables and indexes, if any.
I'm not using Stored Procedures - the queries are inline using Coldfusion.
I think I need to create some indexes but I'm not sure what kind (clustered, non-clustered) and on what columns.
Thanks
You need to create indexes on columns that appear in your WHERE clauses. There are a few exceptions to that rule:
If the column only has one or two unique values (the canonical example of this is "gender" - with only "Male" and "Female" the possible values, there is no point to an index here). Generally, you want an index that will be able to restrict the rows that need to be processed by a significant number (for example, an index that only reduces the search space by 50% is not worth it, but one that reduces it by 99% is).
If you are search for x LIKE '%something' then there is no point for an index. If you think of an index as specifying a particular order for rows, then sorting by x if you're searching for "%something" is useless: you're going to have to scan all rows anyway.
So let's take a look at the case where you're searching for "keyword 'accounting'". According to your result page, the SQL that this generates is:
SELECT
*
FROM (
SELECT TOP 10
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY sq.name) AS Row,
sq.*
FROM (
SELECT
c.*,
p.providername,
p.school,
p.website,
p.type
FROM
cpd_COURSES c, cpd_PROVIDERS p
WHERE
c.providerid = p.providerid AND
c.activatedYN = 'Y' AND
(
c.name like '%accounting%' OR
c.title like '%accounting%' OR
c.keywords like '%accounting%'
)
) sq
) AS temp
WHERE
Row >= 1 AND Row <= 10
In this case, I will assume that cpd_COURSES.providerid is a foreign key to cpd_PROVIDERS.providerid in which case you don't need an index, because it'll already have one.
Additionally, the activatedYN column is a T/F column and (according to my rule above about restricting the possible values by only 50%) a T/F column should not be indexed, either.
Finally, because searching with a x LIKE '%accounting%' query, you don't need an index on name, title or keywords either - because it would never be used.
So the main thing you need to do in this case is make sure that cpd_COURSES.providerid actually is a foreign key for cpd_PROVIDERS.providerid.
SQL Server Specific
Because you're using SQL Server, the Management Studio has a number of tools to help you decide where you need to put indexes. If you use the "Index Tuning Wizard" it is actually usually pretty good at tell you what will give you the good performance improvements. You just cut'n'paste your query into it, and it'll come back with recommendations for indexes to add.
You still need to be a little bit careful with the indexes that you add, because the more indexes you have, the slower INSERTs and UPDATEs will be. So sometimes you'll need to consolidate indexes, or just ignore them altogether if they don't give enough of a performance benefit. Some judgement is required.
Is this the real live database data? 52,000 records is a very small table, relatively speaking, for what SQL 2005 can deal with.
I wonder how much RAM is allocated to the SQL server, or what sort of disk the database is on. An IDE or even SATA hard disk can't give the same performance as a 15K RPM SAS disk, and it would be nice if there was sufficient RAM to cache the bulk of the frequently accessed data.
Having said all that, I feel the " (c.name like '%accounting%' OR c.title like '%accounting%' OR c.keywords like '%accounting%') " clause is problematic.
Could you create a separate Course_Keywords table, with two columns "courseid" and "keyword" (varchar(24) should be sufficient for the longest keyword?), with a composite clustered index on courseid+keyword
Then, to make the UI even more friendly, use AJAX to apply keyword validation & auto-completion when people type words into the keywords input field. This gives you the behind-the-scenes benefit of having an exact keyword to search for, removing the need for pattern-matching with the LIKE operator...
Using CF9? Try using Solr full text search instead of %xxx%?
You'll want to create indexes on the fields you search by. An index is a secondary list of your records presorted by the indexed fields.
Think of an old-fashioned printed yellow pages - if you want to look up a person by their last name, the phonebook is already sorted in that way - Last Name is the clustered index field. If you wanted to find phone numbers for people named Jennifer or the person with the phone number 867-5309, you'd have to search through every entry and it would take a long time. If there were an index in the back with all the phone numbers or first names listed in order along with the page in the phonebook that the person is listed, it would be a lot faster. These would be the unclustered indexes.
I would try changing your IN statements to an EXISTS query to see if you get better performance on the Zip code lookup. My experience is that IN statements work great for small lists but the larger they get, you get better performance out of EXISTS as the query engine will stop searching for a specific value the first instance it runs into.
<CFIF zipcodes is not "">
EXISTS (
SELECT zipcode
FROM cpd_CODES_ZIPCODES
WHERE zipcode = p.zipcode
AND 3963 * (ACOS((SIN(#getzipcodeinfo.latitude#/57.2958) * SIN(latitude/57.2958)) +
(COS(#getzipcodeinfo.latitude#/57.2958) * COS(latitude/57.2958) *
COS(longitude/57.2958 - #getzipcodeinfo.longitude#/57.2958)))) <= #radius#
)
</CFIF>

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