This is a problem I have been thinking about for a long time but I haven't written any code yet because I first want to solve some general problems I am struggling with. This is the main one.
Background
A single page web application makes requests for data to some remote API (which is under our control). It then stores this data in a local cache and serves pages from there. Ideally, the app remains fully functional when offline, including the ability to create new objects.
Constraints
Assume a server side database of products containing +- 50000 products (50Mb)
Assume no db type, we interact with it via REST/GraphQL interface
Assume a single product record is < 1kB
Assume a max payload for a resultset of 256kB
Assume max 5MB storage on the client
Assume search result sets ranging between 0 ... 5000 items per search
Challenge
The challenge is to define a stateless but (network) efficient way fetch pages from a result set so that it is deterministic which results we will get.
Example
In traditional paging, when getting the next 100 results for some query using this url:
https://example.com/products?category=shoes&firstResult=100&pageSize=100
the search result may look like this:
{
"totalResults": 2458,
"firstResult": 100,
"pageSize": 100,
"results": [
{"some": "item"},
{"some": "other item"},
// 98 more ...
]
}
The problem with this is that there is no way, based on this information, to get exactly the objects that are on a certain page. Because by the time we request the next page, the result set may have changed (due to changes in the DB), influencing which items are part of the result set. Even a small change can have a big impact: one item removed from the DB, that happened to be on page 0 of the result set, will change what results we will get when requesting all subsequent pages.
Goal
I am looking for a mechanism to make the definition of the result set independent of future database changes, so if someone was looking for shoes and got a result set of 2458 items, he could actually fetch all pages of that result set reliably even if it got influenced by later changes in the DB (I plan to not really delete items, but set a removed flag on them, for this purpose)
Ideas so far
I have seen a solution where the result set included a "pages" property, which was an array with the first and last id of the items in that page. Assuming your IDs keep going up in number and you don't really delete items from the DB ever, the number of items between two IDs is constant. Meaning the app could get all items between those two IDs and always get the exact same items back. The problem with this solution is that it only works if the list is sorted in ID order... I need custom sorting options.
The only way I have come up with for now is to just send a list of all IDs in the result set... That way pages can be fetched by doing a SELECT * FROM products WHERE id IN (3,4,6,9,...)... but this feels rather inelegant...
Any way I am hoping it is not too broad or theoretical. I have a web-based DB, just no good idea on how to do paging with it. I am looking for answers that help me in a direction to learn, not full solutions.
Versioning DB is the answer for resultsets consistency.
Each record has primary id, modification counter (version number) and timestamp of modification/creation. Instead of modification of record r you add new record with same id, version number+1 and sysdate for modification.
In fetch response you add DB request_time (do not use client timestamp due to possibly difference in time between client/server). First page is served normally, but you return sysdate as request_time. Other pages are served differently: you add condition like modification_time <= request_time for each versioned table.
You can cache the result set of IDs on the server side when a query arrives for the first time and return a unique ID to the frontend. This unique ID corresponds to the result set for that query. So now the frontend can request something like next_page with the unique ID that it got the first time it made the query. You should still go ahead with your approach of changing DELETE operation to a removed operation because it would make sure that none of the entries from the result set it deleted. You can discard the result set of the query from the cache when the frontend reaches the end of the result set or you can set a time limit on the lifetime of the cache entry.
Related
I have a MySQL table of records with several fields.
These records are shown and updated live in the browser. They are displayed in an order choosen by the user, with optional filters also choosen by the user.
Sometimes a change is made to one of the records, and it may affect the order for a given user.
In order to position the message correctly in the list, I need to find where its new offset falls after the change to the record. Basically, I need to get the "id" for the record that now comes before it in the MySQL results, so that I can use Javascript on the client side to reposition the record on the screen.
In raw SQL, I'd do something like this:
SET #rank=0;
SELECT rank
FROM
(SELECT #rank:=#rank+1 AS rank,
subQuery.id AS innerQuery,
FROM ...{rest of custom query here}... as subQuery)
AS outerQuery WHERE outerQuery.innerQuery={ID TO FIND};
Then I can just subtract 1 from the resulting rank, and find the ID of the question that comes before the record in question.
Is this kind of query possible with Laravel's query builder? Or is there a better strategy than what I've come up with here to accomplish the same task?
EDIT: There are a lot of records. So if possible I'd like to avoid loading all the records into memory to find the offset of the record. They are originally loaded on the screen in an "infinite scroll" type method, since it would be too much to load all of them at once.
We have a database with 2,00,000 vendor in 100 plus category, if someone visit the website we want to allow them to select a category and show them 25 Vendor per page, first we kept order by VendorId but it always use to get first 25, but we removed it, but now in paging it sometime repeat the vendor, is there a way to get random 25 vendor and also keep the paging.
Regards
you can randomize your result but everytime you dot he query, it will create new random list so unless you randomize and save the randomized state in your Code and page over it, it cant be done straightforward way.
refer, SQL Query results pagination with random Order by in SQL Server 2008
I believe this requirement is impossible to implement if a new random order is needed every time, there needs to be good performance and every item should have equal chance to get selected. I believe you should redesign the way your application works.
One possible workaround is to have a couple of columns in a table and fill them with random numbers. When a user requests the list assign the random column to him (stick it in the URL for example). Then do an order by that column and display the results. Randomly switch 4-5 columns to create the appearance of randomness. Update the random numbers in the columns once a day.
I have a product search engine using Coldfusion8 and MySQL 5.0.88
The product search has two display modes: Multiple View and Single View.
Multiple displays basic record info, Single requires additional data to be polled from the database.
Right now a user does a search and I'm polling the database for
(a) total records and
(b) records FROM to TO.
The user always goes to Single view from his current resultset, so my idea was to store the current resultset for each user and not have to query the database again to get (waste a) overall number of records and (waste b) a the single record I already queried before AND then getting the detail information I still need for the Single view.
However, I'm getting nowhere with this.
I cannot cache the current resultset-query, because it's unique to each user(session).
The queries are running inside a CFINVOKED method inside a CFC I'm calling through AJAX, so the whole query runs and afterwards the CFC and CFINVOKE method are discarded, so I can't use query of query or variables.cfc_storage.
So my idea was to store the current resultset in the Session scope, which will be updated with every new search, the user runs (either pagination or completely new search). The maximum results stored will be the number of results displayed.
I can store the query allright, using:
<cfset Session.resultset = query_name>
This stores the whole query with results, like so:
query
CACHED: false
EXECUTIONTIME: 2031
SQL: SELECT a.*, p.ek, p.vk, p.x, p.y
FROM arts a
LEFT JOIN p ON
...
LEFT JOIN f ON
...
WHERE a.aktiv = "ja"
AND
... 20 conditions ...
SQLPARAMETERS: [array]
1) ... 20+ parameters
RESULTSET:
[Record # 1]
a: true
style: 402
price: 2.3
currency: CHF
...
[Record # 2]
a: true
style: 402abc
...
This would be overwritten every time a user does a new search. However, if a user wants to see the details of one of these items, I don't need to query (total number of records & get one record) if I can access the record I need from my temp storage. This way I would save two database trips worth 2031 execution time each to get data which I already pulled before.
The tradeoff would be every user having a resultset of up to 48 results (max number of items per page) in Session.scope.
My questions:
1. Is this feasable or should I requery the database?
2. If I have a struture/array/object like a the above, how do I pick the record I need out of it by style number = how do I access the resultset? I can't just loop over the stored query (tried this for a while now...).
Thanks for help!
KISS rule. Just re-query the database unless you find the performance is really an issue. With the correct index, it should scales pretty well. When the it is an issue, you can simply add query cache there.
QoQ would introduce overhead (on the CF side, memory & computation), and might return stale data (where the query in session is older than the one on DB). I only use QoQ when the same query is used on the same view, but not throughout a Session time span.
Feasible? Yes, depending on how many users and how much data this stores in memory, it's probably much better than going to the DB again.
It seems like the best way to get the single record you want is a query of query. In CF you can create another query that uses an existing query as it's data source. It would look like this:
<cfquery name="subQuery" dbtype="query">
SELECT *
FROM Session.resultset
WHERE style = #SelectedStyleVariable#
</cfquery>
note that if you are using CFBuilder, it will probably scream Error at you for not having a datasource, this is a bug in CFBuilder, you are not required to have a datasource if your DBType is "query"
Depending on how many records, what I would do is have the detail data stored in application scope as a structure where the ID is the key. Something like:
APPLICATION.products[product_id].product_name
.product_price
.product_attribute
Then you would really only need to query for the ID of the item on demand.
And to improve the "on demand" query, you have at least two "in code" options:
1. A query of query, where you query the entire collection of items once, and then query from that for the data you need.
2. Verity or SOLR to index everything and then you'd only have to query for everything when refreshing your search collection. That would be tons faster than doing all the joins for every single query.
Suppose I have a large (300-500k) collection of text documents stored in the relational database. Each document can belong to one or more (up to six) categories. I need users to be able to randomly select documents in a specific category so that a single entity is never repeated, much like how StumbleUpon works.
I don't really see a way I could implement this using slow NOT IN queries with large amount of users and documents, so I figured I might need to implement some custom data structure for this purpose. Perhaps there is already a paper describing some algorithm that might be adapted to my needs?
Currently I'm considering the following approach:
Read all the entries from the database
Create a linked list based index for each category from the IDs of documents belonging to the this category. Shuffle it
Create a Bloom Filter containing all of the entries viewed by a particular user
Traverse the index using the iterator, randomly select items using Bloom Filter to pick not viewed items.
If you track via a table what entries that the user has seen... try this. And I'm going to use mysql because that's the quickest example I can think of but the gist should be clear.
On a link being 'used'...
insert into viewed (userid, url_id) values ("jj", 123)
On looking for a link...
select p.url_id
from pages p left join viewed v on v.url_id = p.url_id
where v.url_id is null
order by rand()
limit 1
This causes the database to go ahead and do a 1 for 1 join, and your limiting your query to return only one entry that the user has not seen yet.
Just a suggestion.
Edit: It is possible to make this one operation but there's no guarantee that the url will be passed successfully to the user.
It depend on how users get it's random entries.
Option 1:
A user is paging some entities and stop after couple of them. for example the user see the current random entity and then moving to the next one, read it and continue it couple of times and that's it.
in the next time this user (or another) get an entity from this category the entities that already viewed is clear and you can return an already viewed entity.
in that option I would recommend save a (hash) set of already viewed entities id and every time user ask for a random entity- randomally choose it from the DB and check if not already in the set.
because the set is so small and your data is so big, the chance that you get an already viewed id is so small, that it will take O(1) most of the time.
Option 2:
A user is paging in the entities and the viewed entities are saving between all users and every time user visit your page.
in that case you probably use all the entities in each category and saving all the viewed entites + check whether a entity is viewed will take some time.
In that option I would get all the ids for this topic- shuffle them and store it in a linked list. when you want to get a random not viewed entity- just get the head of the list and delete it (O(1)).
I assume that for any given <user, category> pair, the number of documents viewed is pretty small relative to the total number of documents available in that category.
So can you just store indexed triples <user, category, document> indicating which documents have been viewed, and then just take an optimistic approach with respect to randomly selected documents? In the vast majority of cases, the randomly selected document will be unread by the user. And you can check quickly because the triples are indexed.
I would opt for a pseudorandom approach:
1.) Determine number of elements in category to be viewed (SELECT COUNT(*) WHERE ...)
2.) Pick a random number in range 1 ... count.
3.) Select a single document (SELECT * FROM ... WHERE [same as when counting] ORDER BY [generate stable order]. Depending on the SQL dialect in use, there are different clauses that can be used to retrieve only the part of the result set you want (MySQL LIMIT clause, SQLServer TOP clause etc.)
If the number of documents is large the chance serving the same user the same document twice is neglibly small. Using the scheme described above you don't have to store any state information at all.
You may want to consider a nosql solution like Apache Cassandra. These seem to be ideally suited to your needs. There are many ways to design the algorithm you need in an environment where you can easily add new columns to a table (column family) on the fly, with excellent support for a very sparsely populated table.
edit: one of many possible solutions below:
create a CF(column family ie table) for each category (creating these on-the-fly is quite easy).
Add a row to each category CF for each document belonging to the category.
Whenever a user hits a document, you add a column with named and set it to true to the row. Obviously this table will be huge with millions of columns and probably quite sparsely populated, but no problem, reading this is still constant time.
Now finding a new document for a user in a category is simply a matter of selecting any result from select * where == null.
You should get constant time writes and reads, amazing scalability, etc if you can accept Cassandra's "eventually consistent" model (ie, it is not mission critical that a user never get a duplicate document)
I've solved similar in the past by indexing the relational database into a document oriented form using Apache Lucene. This was before the recent rise of NoSQL servers and is basically the same thing, but it's still a valid alternative approach.
You would create a Lucene Document for each of your texts with a textId (relational database id) field and multi valued categoryId and userId fields. Populate the categoryId field appropriately. When a user reads a text, add their id to the userId field. A simple query will return the set of documents with a given categoryId and without a given userId - pick one randomly and display it.
Store a users past X selections in a cookie or something.
Return the last selections to the server with the users new criteria
Randomly choose one of the texts satisfying the criteria until it is not a member of the last X selections of the user.
Return this choice of text and update the list of last X selections.
I would experiment to find the best value of X but I have in mind something like an X of say 16?
I read a lot of documents about AppFabric caching but most of them cover simple scenarios.
For example adding city list data or shopping card data to the cache.
But I need adding product catalog data to the cache.
I have 4 tables:
Product (1 million rows), ProductProperty (25 million rows), Property (100 rows), PropertyOption (300 rows)
I display paged search results querying with some filters for Product and ProductProperty tables.
I am creating criteria set over searched result set. For example (4 Items New Product, 34 Items Phone, 26 Items Book etc.)
I query for grouping over Product table with columns of IsNew, CategoryId, PriceType etc.
and also another query for grouping over ProductProperty table with PropertyId and PropertyOptionId columns to get which property have how many items
Therefore to display search results I make one query for search result and 2 for creating criteria list (with counts)
Search result query took 0,7 second and 2 grouping queryies took 1,5 second in total.
When I run load test I reach 7 request per second and %10 dropped by IIS becasue db could not give response.
This is why I want to cache Product and property records.
If I follow items below (in AppFabric);
Create named cache
Create region for product catalog data (a table which have 1 million rows and property table which have 25 million rows)
Tagging item for querying data and grouping.
Can I query with some tags and get 1st or 2nd page of results ?
Can I query with some tags and get counts of some grouping results. (displaying filter options with count)
And do I have to need 3 servers ? Can I provide a solution with only one appfabric server (And of course I know risk.)
Do you know any article or any document explains those scenarios ?
Thanks.
Note:
Some additional test:
I added about 30.000 items to the cache and its size is 900 MB.
When I run getObjectsInRegion method, it tooks about 2 minutes. "IList> dataList = this.DataCache.GetObjectsInRegion(region).ToList();"
The problem is converting to IList. If I use IEnumerable it works very quicly. But How can I get paging or grouping result without converting it to my type ?
Another test:
I tried getting grouping count with 30.000 product item and getting result for grouping took 4 seconds. For example GetObjectByTag("IsNew").Count() and other nearly 50 query like that.
There is, unfortunately, no paging API for AppFabric in V1. Any of the bulk APIs, like GetObjectsByTag, are going to perform the query on the server and stream back all the matching cache entries to the client. From there you can obviously use any LINQ operators you want on the IEnumerable (e.g. Skip/Take/Count), but be aware that you're always pulling the full result set back from the server.
I'm personally hoping that AppFabric V2 will provide support via IQueryable instead of IEnumerable which will give the ability to remote the full request to the server so it could page results there before returning to the client much like LINQ2SQL or ADO.NET EF.
For now, one potential solution, depending on the capabilities of your application, is you can actually calculate some kind of paging as you inject the items into the cache. You can build ordered lists of entity keys representing each page and store those as single entries in the cache which you can pull out in one request and then individually (in parallel) or bulk fetch the items in the list from the cache and join them together with an in-memory LINQ query. If you wanted to trade off CPU for Memory, just cache the actual list of full entities rather than IDs and having to do the join for the entities.
You would obviously have to come up with some kind of keying mechanism to quickly pull these lists of objects from the cache based on the incoming search criteria. Some kind of keying like this might work:
private static string BuildPageListCacheKey(string entityTypeName, int pageSize, int pageNumber, string sortByPropertyName, string sortDirection)
{
return string.Format("PageList<{0}>[pageSize={1};pageNumber={2};sortedBy={3};sortDirection={4}]", entityTypeName, pageSize, pageNumber, sortByPropertyName, sortDirection);
}
You may want to consider doing this kind of thing with a separate process or worker thread that's keeping the cache up to date rather than doing it on demand and forcing the users wait if the cache entry isn't populated yet.
Whether or not this approach ultimately works for you depends on several factors of your application and data. If it doesn't exactly fit your scenarios maybe it will at least help shift your mind into a different way of thinking about solving the problem.