How to update distributed cache under high traffic and multiple applications? - caching

I have N services that use M redis as the remote distributed cache. Suppose now multiple services want to retrieve the same key, and the following pseudo codes are how the work is done:
redisClient = getRedisClientByConsistentHash(key)
value = redisClient.get(key)
if value not exist
value = getValueFromSomewhereElse(key) // line4
redisClient set key value ex 1 nx // line5
return value
So the problem is:
In "line4", if 2 applications retrieve different values, one is newer and the other is old(should be deprecated), it's possible that the call to store the old value will happen before the call to store the new value, thus the new value won't be stored in redis. If we introduce some distributed lock mechanism, the problem still remains.

If the Key Storage internally makes use of timestamp of key in a way such that if KeyA is required to be updated from ValueA to ValueB then this updation is possible only if ValueB is inserted at a time which is greater than last updated timestamp of KeyA. Then its guaranteed that only new values will be inserted in a particular Key Storage. OldValues cannot overwrite NewValues (Timestamp Based Protocol). (Don't know whether redis follows Timestamp Based Protocol).
Both of your 2 applications (say, A, B) tried to fetch key from their respective primary redisClient and did not find the key and hence they went to fetch the key from SomewhereElse and found the key, but A has old and B has new. In such case there are few questions:
1. What if A's or B's primary `redisClient` itself gave you a value which is old?
2. How you come to know the value which is fetched is old or new?
Solutions:
1. Use a value which has majority (i.e the value received from atleast [ceil(M+1)/2] redisClients). Ofcourse this involves querying atleast [ceil(M+1)/2] rediClients which seems expensive. (Paxos Theorem)
2. Depending upon application logic, most of the time you don't require latest values. That is, if the application requirement is to just check the presence of a value then it does not matter whether the value is old or new.

Related

Redis : Get all keys by providing one of the value in the values list

In redis I'm planning to store key as a unique string and value will be a list.
I have a use case where I need to do 2 things.
First, I need to get all the values associated with a key by providing the key as input.
Second, I want to get all the keys associated with a value by providing one of the value in the values list.
Second part is where I need the advice, how we can achive this ?
I cannot get all the keys or key value pair and loop through because I will have millions of entries in Redis.
As mentioned in the comment above the retrieving of all keys with associated value at will probably sometimes create a performance issue as this will be a run through large entries.As also suggested in the official documentation about retrieving data from the memory caches you can try and use the following Redis command to get the value and see if that is what can solve your purpose.
GET
MGET

Redis intersection - analog of Where

I have following struct
user_id: [
{item_id:delivered_at},
{item_id:delivered_at},
{item_id:delivered_at}
]
What I need to do: I have array of item_id's for user_id as argument and I need to check, if they were delivered or not.
I see two approaches here:
I store just key:string, in this case key will be user_id:item_id and value delivered_at. So when I have array of item_id's, then I can query consistently all item_id's (and one network request) to return delivered_at for each item_id if it exists.
Second approach is to store for each user_id a zset, key will be user_id, and zset will be score: delivered_at and value:item_id.
Why I don't like the first approach - I cannot easily get all items for provided user, which would be very handful and next task will be exactly this.
What would be perfect-if I could intersect incomming set of item_id's with those in zset.
As far as I understood - I can intersect sets, but only 2 sets in redis, so in my case I need to create new temp set, and after that intersect it with one in zset.
There is an alternative way for 2nd approach- I can just get all items for provided user from zset and after that intersect sets in application, however I don't like this way because there can be thousands of deliveries for user, and it isn't great idea to transfer couple of MB of data for checking 2 or 3 deliveries.
Is there any option to intersect INCOMING set with already present in Redis?
Is there a better approach to storing data for this specific case? I've read some articles, including secondary indexes in redis blog.

Mapping through two data sets with Hadoop

Suppose I have two key-value data sets--Data Sets A and B, let's call them. I want to update all the data in Set A with data from Set B where the two match on keys.
Because I'm dealing with such large quantities of data, I'm using Hadoop to MapReduce. My concern is that to do this key matching between A and B, I need to load all of Set A (a lot of data) into the memory of every mapper instance. That seems rather inefficient.
Would there be a recommended way to do this that doesn't require repeating the work of loading in A every time?
Some pseudcode to clarify what I'm currently doing:
Load in Data Set A # This seems like the expensive step to always be doing
Foreach key/value in Data Set B:
If key is in Data Set A:
Update Data Seta A
According to the documentation, the MapReduce framework includes the following steps:
Map
Sort/Partition
Combine (optional)
Reduce
You've described one way to perform your join: loading all of Set A into memory in each Mapper. You're correct that this is inefficient.
Instead, observe that a large join can be partitioned into arbitrarily many smaller joins if both sets are sorted and partitioned by key. MapReduce sorts the output of each Mapper by key in step (2) above. Sorted Map output is then partitioned by key, so that one partition is created per Reducer. For each unique key, the Reducer will receive all values from both Set A and Set B.
To finish your join, the Reducer needs only to output the key and either the updated value from Set B, if it exists; otherwise, output the key and the original value from Set A. To distinguish between values from Set A and Set B, try setting a flag on the output value from the Mapper.
All of the answers posted so far are correct - this should be a Reduce-side join... but there's no need to reinvent the wheel! Have you considered Pig, Hive, or Cascading for this? They all have joins built-in, and are fairly well optimized.
This video tutorial by Cloudera gives a great description of how to do a large-scale Join through MapReduce, starting around the 12 minute mark.
Here are the basic steps he lays out for joining records from file B onto records from file A on key K, with pseudocode. If anything here isn't clear, I'd suggest watching the video as he does a much better job explaining it than I can.
In your Mapper:
K from file A:
tag K to identify as Primary Key
emit <K, value of K>
K from file B:
tag K to identify as Foreign Key
emit <K, record>
Write a Sorter and Grouper which will ignore the PK/FK tagging, so that your records are sent to the same Reducer regardless of whether they are a PK record or a FK record and are grouped together.
Write a Comparator which will compare the PK and FK keys and send the PK first.
The result of this step will be that all records with the same key will be sent to the same Reducer and be in the same set of values to be reduced. The record tagged with PK will be first, followed by all records from B which need to be joined. Now, the Reducer:
value_of_PK = values[0] // First value is the value of your primary key
for value in values[1:]:
value.replace(FK,value_of_PK) // Replace the foreign key with the key's value
emit <key, value>
The result of this will be file B, with all occurrences of K replaced by the value of K in file A. You can also extend this to effect a full inner join, or to write out both files in their entirety for direct database storage, but those are pretty trivial modifications once you get this working.

Windows Azure Paging Large Datasets Solution

I'm using Windows Azure Table Storage to store millions of entities, however I'm trying to figure out the best solution that easily allows for two things:
1) a search on an entity, will retrieve that entity and at least (pageSize) number of entities either side of that entity
2) if there are more entities beyond (pageSize) number of entities either side of that entity, then page next or page previous links are shown, this will continue until either the start or end is reached.
3) the order is reverse chronological order
I've decided that the PartitionKey will be the Title provided by the user as each container is unique in the system. The RowKey is Steve Marx's lexiographical algorithm:
http://blog.smarx.com/posts/using-numbers-as-keys-in-windows-azure
which when converted to javascript instead of c# looks like this:
pad(new Date(100000000 * 86400000).getTime() - new Date().getTime(), 19) + "_" + uuid()
uuid() is a javascript function that returns a guid and pad adds zeros up to 19 chars in length. So records in the system look something like this:
PK RK
TEST 0008638662595845431_ecf134e4-b10d-47e8-91f2-4de9c4d64388
TEST 0008638662595845432_ae7bb505-8594-43bc-80b7-6bd34bb9541b
TEST 0008638662595845433_d527d215-03a5-4e46-8a54-10027b8e23f8
TEST 0008638662595845434_a2ebc3f4-67fe-43e2-becd-eaa41a4132e2
This pattern allows for every new entity inserted to be at the top of the list which satisfies point number 3 above.
With a nice way of adding new records in the system I thought then I would create a mechanism that looks at the first half of the RowKey i.e. 0008638662595845431_ part and does a greater than or less than comparison depending on which direction of the already found item. In other words to get the row immediately before 0008638662595845431 I would do a query like so:
var tableService = azure.createTableService();
var minPossibleDateTimeNumber = pad(new Date(-100000000*86400000).getTime() - new Date().getTime(), 19);
tableService.getTable('testTable', function (error) {
if (error === null) {
var query = azure.TableQuery
.select()
.from('testTable')
.where('PartitionKey eq ?', 'TEST')
.and('RowKey gt ?', minPossibleDateTimeNumber + '_')
.and('RowKey lt ?', '0008638662595845431_')
.and('Deleted eq ?', 'false');
If the results returned are greater than 1000 and azure gives me a continuation token, then I thought I would remember the last items RowKey i.e. the number part 0008638662595845431. So now the next query will have the remembered value as the starting value etc.
I am using Windows Azure Node.Js SDK and language is javascript.
Can anybody see gotcha's or problems with this approach?
I do not see how this can work effectively and efficiently, especially to get the rows for a previous page.
To be efficient, the prefix of your “key” needs to be a serially incrementing or decrementing value, instead of being based on a timestamp. A timestamp generated value would have duplicates as well as holes, making mapping page size to row count at best inefficient and at worst difficult to determine.
Also, this potential algorithm is dependent on a single partition key, destroying table scalability.
The challenge here would be to have a method of generating a serially incremented key. One solution is to use a SQL database and performing an atomic update on a single row, such that an incrementing or decrementing value is produced in sequence. Something like UPDATE … SET X = X + 1 and return X. Maybe using a stored procedure.
So the key could be a zero left padded serially generated number. Split such that say the first N digits of the number is the partition key and remaining M digits are the row key.
For example
PKey RKey
00001 10321
00001 10322
….
00954 98912
Now, since the rows are in sequence it is possible to write a query with the exact key range for the page size.
Caveat. There is a small risk of a failure occurring between generating a serial key and writing to table storage. In which case, there may be holes in the table. However, your paging algorithm should be able to detect and work around such instances quite easily by specify a page size slightly larger than necessary or by retrying with an adjusted range.

What would be the best algorithm to find an ID that is not used from a table that has the capacity to hold a million rows

To elaborate ..
a) A table (BIGTABLE) has a capacity to hold a million rows with a primary Key as the ID. (random and unique)
b) What algorithm can be used to arrive at an ID that has not been used so far. This number will be used to insert another row into table BIGTABLE.
Updated the question with more details..
C) This table already has about 100 K rows and the primary key is not an set as identity.
d) Currently, a random number is generated as the primary key and a row inserted into this table, if the insert fails another random number is generated. the problem is sometimes it goes into a loop and the random numbers generated are pretty random, but unfortunately, They already exist in the table. so if we re try the random number generation number after some time it works.
e) The sybase rand() function is used to generate the random number.
Hope this addition to the question helps clarify some points.
The question is of course: why do you want a random ID?
One case where I encountered a similar requirement, was for client IDs of a webapp: the client identifies himself with his client ID (stored in a cookie), so it has to be hard to brute force guess another client's ID (because that would allow hijacking his data).
The solution I went with, was to combine a sequential int32 with a random int32 to obtain an int64 that I used as the client ID. In PostgreSQL:
CREATE FUNCTION lift(integer, integer) returns bigint AS $$
SELECT ($1::bigint << 31) + $2
$$ LANGUAGE SQL;
CREATE FUNCTION random_pos_int() RETURNS integer AS $$
select floor((lift(1,0) - 1)*random())::integer
$$ LANGUAGE sql;
ALTER TABLE client ALTER COLUMN id SET DEFAULT
lift((nextval('client_id_seq'::regclass))::integer, random_pos_int());
The generated IDs are 'half' random, while the other 'half' guarantees you cannot obtain the same ID twice:
select lift(1, random_pos_int()); => 3108167398
select lift(2, random_pos_int()); => 4673906795
select lift(3, random_pos_int()); => 7414644984
...
Why is the unique ID Random? Why not use IDENTITY?
How was the ID chosen for the existing rows.
The simplest thing to do is probably (Select Max(ID) from BIGTABLE) and then make sure your new "Random" ID is larger than that...
EDIT: Based on the added information I'd suggest that you're screwed.
If it's an option: Copy the table, then redefine it and use an Identity Column.
If, as another answer speculated, you do need a truly random Identifier: make your PK two fields. An Identity Field and then a random number.
If you simply can't change the tables structure checking to see if the id exists before trying the insert is probably your only recourse.
There isn't really a good algorithm for this. You can use this basic construct to find an unused id:
int id;
do {
id = generateRandomId();
} while (doesIdAlreadyExist(id));
doSomethingWithNewId(id);
Your best bet is to make your key space big enough that the probability of collisions is extremely low, then don't worry about it. As mentioned, GUIDs will do this for you. Or, you can use a pure random number as long as it has enough bits.
This page has the formula for calculating the collision probability.
A bit outside of the box.
Why not pre-generate your random numbers ahead of time? That way, when you insert a new row into bigtable, the check has already been made. That would make inserts into bigtable a constant time operation.
You will have to perform the checks eventually, but that could be offloaded to a second process that doesn’t involve the sensitive process of inserting into bigtable.
Or go generate a few billion random numbers, and delete the duplicates, then you won't have to worry for quite some time.
Make the key field UNIQUE and IDENTITY and you wont have to worry about it.
If this is something you'll need to do often you will probably want to maintain a live (non-db) data structure to help you quickly answer this question. A 10-way tree would be good. When the app starts it populates the tree by reading the keys from the db, and then keeps it in sync with the various inserts and deletes made in the db. So long as your app is the only one updating the db the tree can be consulted very quickly when verifying that the next large random key is not already in use.
Pick a random number, check if it already exists, if so then keep trying until you hit one that doesn't.
Edit: Or
better yet, skip the check and just try to insert the row with different IDs until it works.
First question: Is this a planned database or a already functional one. If it already has data inside then the answer by bmdhacks is correct. If it is a planned database here is the second question:
Does your primary key really need to be random? If the answer is yes then use a function to create a random id from with a known seed and a counter to know how many Ids have been created. Each Id created will increment the counter.
If you keep the seed secret (i.e., have the seed called and declared private) then no one else should be able to predict the next ID.
If ID is purely random, there is no algorithm to find an unused ID in a similarly random fashion without brute forcing. However, as long as the bit-depth of your random unique id is reasonably large (say 64 bits), you're pretty safe from collisions with only a million rows. If it collides on insert, just try again.
depending on your database you might have the option of either using a sequenser (oracle) or a autoincrement (mysql, ms sql, etc). Or last resort do a select max(id) + 1 as new id - just be carefull of concurrent requests so you don't end up with the same max-id twice - wrap it in a lock with the upcomming insert statement
I've seen this done so many times before via brute force, using random number generators, and it's always a bad idea. Generating a random number outside of the db and attempting to see if it exists will put a lot strain on your app and database. And it could lead to 2 processes picking the same id.
Your best option is to use MySQL's autoincrement ability. Other databases have similar functionality. You are guaranteed a unique id and won't have issues with concurrency.
It is probably a bad idea to scan every value in that table every time looking for a unique value. I think the way to do this would be to have a value in another table, lock on that table, read the value, calculate the value of the next id, write the value of the next id, release the lock. You can then use the id you read with the confidence your current process is the only one holding that unique value. Not sure how well it scales.
Alternatively use a GUID for your ids, since each newly generated GUID is supposed to be unique.
Is it a requirement that the new ID also be random? If so, the best answer is just to loop over (randomize, test for existence) until you find one that doesn't exist.
If the data just happens to be random, but that isn't a strong constraint, you can just use SELECT MAX(idcolumn), increment in a way appropriate to the data, and use that as the primary key for your next record.
You need to do this atomically, so either lock the table or use some other concurrency control appropriate to your DB configuration and schema. Stored procs, table locks, row locks, SELECT...FOR UPDATE, whatever.
Note that in either approach you may need to handle failed transactions. You may theoretically get duplicate key issues in the first (though that's unlikely if your key space is sparsely populated), and you are likely to get deadlocks on some DBs with approaches like SELECT...FOR UPDATE. So be sure to check and restart the transaction on error.
First check if Max(ID) + 1 is not taken and use that.
If Max(ID) + 1 exceeds the maximum then select an ordered chunk at the top and start looping backwards looking for a hole. Repeat the chunks until you run out of numbers (in which case throw a big error).
if the "hole" is found then save the ID in another table and you can use that as the starting point for the next case to save looping.
Skipping the reasoning of the task itself, the only algorithm that
will give you an ID not in the table
that will be used to insert a new line in the table
will result in a table still having random unique IDs
is generating a random number and then checking if it's already used
The best algorithm in that case is to generate a random number and do a select to see if it exists, or just try to add it if your database errs out sanely. Depending on the range of your key, vs, how many records there are, this could be a small amount of time. It also has the ability to spike and isn't consistent at all.
Would it be possible to run some queries on the BigTable and see if there are any ranges that could be exploited? ie. between 100,000 and 234,000 there are no ID's yet, so we could add ID's there?
Why not append your random number creator with the current date in seconds. This way the only way to have an identical ID is if two users are created at the same second and are given the same random number by your generator.

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