How to do table operations in Google BigQuery? - google-api

Wanted some advice on how to deal with table operations (rename column) in Google BigQuery.
Currently, I have a wrapper to do this. My tables are partitioned by date. eg: if I have a table name fact, I will have several tables named:
fact_20160301
fact_20160302
fact_20160303... etc
My rename column wrapper generates aliased queries. ie. if I want to change my table schema from
['address', 'name', 'city'] -> ['location', 'firstname', 'town']
I do batch query operation:
select address as location, name as firstname, city as town
and do a WRITE_TRUNCATE on the parent tables.
My main issues lies with the fact that BigQuery only supports 50 concurrent jobs. This means, that when I submit my batch request, I can only do around 30 partitions at a time, since I'd like to reserve 20 spots for ETL jobs that are runnings.
Also, I haven't found of a way where you can do a poll_job on a batch operation to see whether or not all jobs in a batch have completed.
If anyone has some tips or tricks, I'd love to hear them.

I can propose two options
Using View
Views creation is very simple to script out and execute - it is fast and free to compare with cost of scanning whole table with select into approach.
You can create view using Tables: insert API with properly set type property
Using Jobs: insert EXTRACT and then LOAD
Here you can extract table to GCS and then load it back to GBQ with adjusted schema
Above approach will a) eliminate cost cost of querying (scan) tables and b) can help with limitations. But might not depends on the actual volumke of tables and other requirements you might have

The best way to manipulate a schema is through the Google Big Query API.
Use the tables get api to retrieve the existing schema for your table. https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/reference/v2/tables/get
Manipulate your schema file, renaming columns etc.
Again using the api perform an update on the schema, setting it to your newly modified version. This should all occur in one job https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/reference/v2/tables/update

Related

Store summary data at master table, instead of deriving it

I am trying to prepare DB design for APEX application. Requirement is as follows.
In Departments IR page, users are asking below columns
Number of employees in each department (Department may or may not have employees)
Primary Location for Department (Department can have multiple addresses and addresses are stored in other table, along with primary flag)
Alternative Manager's Email Address for Department (alt_manager_id column, this is optional column and refers to employees table)
I can implement these requirements using either inline sub queries or using OUTER JIONs. But, these approaches will have performance impact as the data grows (like 100s of thousands of rows). So, my question is, is it ok to store these data directly at "Departments" table and update "Departments" table when child tables gets updated. Basically, I am trying to store summary data at master table, instead of deriving it as on when needed from child tables. Is this considered bad practice? Is it ok to implement such DB design?
Thank you
"Is this considered bad practice?"
Usually yes. There are several problems with maintaining summary detail information in a master record.
Your inserts into child tables (and deletes if you have them) now also have to take a lock on the master record, to increment the count. This adds complexity to what should be simple transactions.
It also has two performance hits: the additional overhead of maintaining the counts and the potential for sessions to hang in multi-user environments.
Note that you are adding a definite performance hit to your insert activity for a possible saving in the performance of aggregating queries.
The good practice is to just run the counts when you need the summaries. Tune the queries if you need to.
If you think you really are going to be querying the summary data often enough for the workload to be a problem you should consider building materialized views for the summary queries. Then, when you enable query rewrites, Oracle will transparently query the materialized view if it can satisfy the query rather than re-running the aggregations. This is a technique which is used a lot in data warehouses, but there's no reason not to use it in OLTP environments if you really have the data volumes to justify it. Find out more.
Generally, try the simplest thing which could work first. Only look to do something different (like building a materialized view for aggregations) when you know you have a demonstrable problem with performance.

Hive Managed vs External tables maintainability

Which one is better (performance wise and operation on the long run) in maintaining data loaded, managed or external?
And by maintaining, i mean that these tables will have the following operations on daily basis frequently;
Select using partitions most of the time.. but for some of it they are not used.
Delete specific records, not all the partition (for example found a problem in some columns and want to delete and insert it again). - i am not sure if this supported for normal tables, unless transactional is used.
Most important, The need to merge files frequently.. may be twice a day to merge small files to gain less mappers. I know concate is available on managed and insert overwrite on external.. which one is less cost?
It depends on your use case. External table is recommended when they are used across multiple application for example Along with hive pig or other application is also used for processing the data in this kind of scenario external tables are mainly recommended.They are used when you are mainly reading data.
While in case of managed tables hive have complete control over the data. Though you can convert any external table to managed and vice versa
alter table table_name SET TBLPROPERTIES('EXTERNAL'='TRUE');
As in your case you are doing frequent modifications in data so it is better that hive should have total control over the data. In this scenraio it is recommended to use Managed tables.
Apart from that managed table are more secure then external table because external table can be accessed by anyone. While in managed table you can implement hive level security which provided better control but in case of external you will have to implement HDFS level security.
You can refer the below links which can give you few pointers in considerations
External Vs Managed tables comparison

Oracle 11g - Building a Type 2 SCD based on existing historical data in a relational model

I'm an ETL developer that's currently being tasked with developing a type 2 SCD from existing historical data in a relational database. I'm perfectly capable of creating a type 2 SCD that's responsible for tracking future changes to the data, but I'm completely useless when it comes to the task at hand.
The relational model is in our ODS . Based on that relational model, I'm supposed to build flat records in our DW dimension. There are multiple attributes which need to be monitored for changes, each in specific related tables in the relational model. Historical changes must be kept on a daily basis, and if multiple changes to the same attribute occur on the same day, only the last subsists.
How can I tackle this? I'm lost. Thanks in advance.
P.S. we're talking tables with 20-30 million rows and multiple attributes that may change at any given time and therefore must result in a new record in the SCD.
This will indeed be painful. I'm assuming from your question that the tables containing the attribute values are currently varying independently (or you wouldn't need to ask the question).
If you have a table 'Table1' containing 'Key', 'Attribute1' and 'Effective From','Effective To' columns, then you can 'explode' that table into a virtual table in the form 'Key','Attribute1','Date', projecting out one row for every date where that attribute was current.
(Note that you probably don't want to do this as a ranged join against your date dimension, because this will be a Triangular Join (ie perform really badly), you probably need to explode the rows in an ETL tool/programmatically)
If you perform this process across multiple tables, you will have a set of tables giving you the full day-by-day snapshot of each attribute for every day that you care about. It's then fairly easy to join those tables based on 'FK' and 'Date' to give you the complete daily snapshot across all of the attribute values.
Then, of course, you need to run this though another process to collapse rows with the same Key, contiguous dates and all the same attribute values, ie 'unexplode' the rows, back into 'effective from','effective to' form. Note again, that this is fundamentally a row-by-row operation (or at very least a windowing function), and a set-based approach will perform very badly. Personally I'd just stream it all though some .net/java code to achieve this.
Given data volumes this will take a while, but should be achievable.

Oracle copy data between databases honoring relationships

I have a question regarding the oracle copy command:
Is it possible to copy data between databases (were the structure is the same) and honor relationships in one go without(!) writing procedures?
To be more precise:
Table B refers (by B.FK) to table A (A.PK) by a foreign key (B.FK -> A.PK; no relationship information is stored in the db itself). The keys are generated by a sequence, which is used to create the PK for all tables.
So how to copy table A and B while keeping the relationship intact and use the target DBs sequence to generate new primary keys for the copied data (i cannot use the "original" PK values as they might already be used in the same table for a different dataset)?
I doubt that the copy command is capable to handle this situation but what is the way to achieve the desired behavior?
Thanks
Matthias
Oracle has several different ways of moving data from one database to another, of which the SQL*Plus copy command is the most basic and the least satisfactory. Writing your own replication routine (as #OldProgrammer suggests) isn't much better.
You're using 11g, so move into the 21st century by using the built-in Streams functionality.
There is no way to synchronize sequences across databases. There is a workaround, which is explained by the inestimable Tom Kyte.
I generally prefer db links and then use sql insert statements to copy over data.
In your scenario , first insert data of Table A using DB link and then table. If you try otherway round, you will error.
For info on DB link , you canc heck this link: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28310/ds_concepts002.htm

Compound rowkey in Azure Table storage

I want to move some of my Azure SQL tables to Table storage. As far as I understand, I can save everything in the same table, seperating it using PartitionKey and keeping it unique within each partition using Rowkey.
Now, I have a table with a compound key:
ParentId: (uniqueidentifier)
ReportTime: (datetime)
I also understand RowKeys have to be strings. Will I need to combine these in a single string? Or can I combine multiple keys some other way? Do I need to make a new key perhaps?
Any help is appreciated.
UPDATE
My idea is to put data from several (three for now) database tables and put in the same storage table seperating them with the partition key.
I will query using the ParentId and a WeekNumber (another column). This table has about 1 million rows that's deleted weekly from the db. My two other tables has about 6 million and 3.5 million
This question is pretty broad and there is no right answer.
The specific question - can you use Compound Keys with Azure Table Storage. Yes, you can do that. But this involves manual Serializing / Deserializing of your object's properties. You can achieve that by overriding the TableEntity's ReadEntity and WriteEntity methods. Check this detailed blog post on how can you override these methods to use your own custom serialization/deserialization.
I will further discuss my view on your more broader question.
First of all, why you want to put data from 3 (SQL) tables into one (Azure Table)? Just have 3 Azure tables.
Second thought, as Fabrizio points out is how are you going to query the records. Because Windows Azure Table service has only one index, and that is PartitionKey + RowKey properties (columns). If you are pretty sure you will mostly query data by known PartitionKey and RowKey, then Azure Tables is perfectly suiting you! However you say that your combination for RowKey is ParentId + WeekNumber! That means that a record is uniquely identified by this combination! If it is true, then you are even more ready to go.
Next you say you are going to delete records every week! You should know that DELETE operation acts on a single entity. You can use Entity Group Transactions to DELETE multiple entities at once, but there is a limit of (a) All entities in batch operation must have the same PartitionKey, (b) The maximum number of entities per batch is 100, and (c) The maximum size of batch operation is 4MB. Say you have 1M records like you say. In order to delete them, you have to first retrieve them in groups by 100, then delete in groups by 100. These are, in best possible case 10k operations on retrieval and 10k operations on deletion. Event if it will only cost 0.002 USD, think about time taken to execute 10k operations against a REST API.
Since you have to delete entities on a regular basis, which is fixed to a WeekNumber let's say, I can suggest that you dynamically create your tables and include the week number in its name. Thus you will achieve:
Even better partitioning of information
Easier and more granular information backup / delete
Deleting millions of entities requires just one operation - delete table.
There is not an unique solution for your problem. Yes, you can use ParentID as PartitionKey and ReportTime as Rowkey (or invert the assignment). But the big 2 main questions re: how do you query your data, with what conditions? and how many data do you store? 1000, 1 million items, 1000 millions items? The total storage usage is important. But it's also very important to consider the number of transaction you will generate to the storage.

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