Consistency checkers between an Oracle DB and Solr - oracle

We have an API that saves information to Oracle DB and then inserts the same data in Solr. Both aren't transactional, this is why we can have inconsistencies. Does anyone know a tool to check and resolve these inconsistencies between Oracle and Solr?

There's no automated way to do it.
The way I do it is to have a program that dumps out the Oracle table in question, one line per row, and then another that dumps the Solr core in question, one line per record, and then runs diff on them.
This isn't going to be something that is going to have a one-size-fits-all approach. Chances are your core is comprised of some data from a table, but not all the columns from that table, and probably undergoes some transformation along the way. If you're doing a JOIN in your DIH, then that changes everything anyway.

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force Oracle to use indexes over DB-Link queries

I use stored proceduers on DB instance "A" to store data in GTT. To get the original data i have to go over a DB-Link to DB instance "B". That for i put together the whole query and send it to remote DB instance.
This works fine. But sometimes it seems that Oracle is not using the best way or correct indexes for queries. Is there a way to force Oracle to use specific indexes? I tried to use hints, but honestly I dind't understand the difference between all these options.
Thanks for helping me!
There is a huge temptation to optimize a query one way when you want it to work another way. Adding hints is a temporary solution which can backfire on you when the amount or type of data in the table changes or when you upgrade to a newer version with a newer optimizer.
First, determine that there is a problem. Are all queries taking too long? Just some? Only the first one?
The easiest thing to do is to make sure the indexes on that table are up to date. Then look at optimizing the query by using the explain plan feature to see what indexes are being used.
It's also prudent to examine your data to see if the query is selecting different things or different amounts of records if it is time based.

Seeking Opinion:Denormalising Fact and Dim tables to improve performance of SSRS Reports

We seem to have bit of a debate on a discussion point in our team.
We are working on a Data Warehouse in the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 platform. We have followed the Kimball Architecture to build this Data Warehouse.
Issue:
A reporting solution (built on SSRS), which sources data from this Warehouse, has significant performance issues when sourcing data from fact and dim tables. Some of our team members suggest that we extract data from facts and dims into a new set of tables using SSIS packages. This would mean we denormalise these tables into ‘Snapshot’ tables. In this way the we would not need to join these tables to create data sets within the reports. Data could be read out of these tables directly.
I do have my own worries about this; inconsistencies, maintenance of different data structures, duplication of data etc to name a few.
Question:
Would you consider creating snapshot tables (by denormalising facts and dim tables) for reporting tables a right approach?
Would like to hear your thoughts on this.
Cheers
Nithin
I don't think there is anything wrong with snapshot tables. The two most important aspects of a data warehouse are:
The data is correct.
The data is useful.
If your users are unable to extract the totals they require, in a reasonable timescale, they won't use the warehouse.
My own solution includes 3 snapshot tables. Like you, I was worried about inconsistencies. To address this we built an automated checking process. This sub-system executes a series of queries, stored on a network drive, once an hour. Any records returned by the queries are considered a fail. Fails are reported and immediately investigated by my ETL team. This sub-system ensures the snapshots and underlying facts are always aligned and consistent with each other. Drift is prevented.
That said, additional tables equals additional complexity. And that requires more time/effort to manage. Before introducing another layer to your warehouse, you should investigate why these queries are underperforming. If joins are to blame:
Are you using an inappropriate data type, for your P/F keys?
Are the FKeys indexed (some RDBMS do this by default, others do not)?
Have you looked at the execution plans, for the offending queries?
Is the join really to blame, or is it a filter applied to the dim table?
for raw cube performance my advice would be to always try to denormalize your tables and have one fact table and one table for each dimension (star schema).
If you are unsure if it will actually help you could start creating materialized views. These are kind of the best of both worlds, on the long run you should alter your etl.
In my previous job we only had flattened tables which worked quite well. Currenly we have a normalized schema but flatten it in the last step.

Oracle SCHEMA Based XML DB

I am using schema based XML DB Column in one of oracle Table. I am using 30 nodes in XSD(schema) and the table performance is good.
I am thinking to increase the limit of nodes to 300 or more say 1000(Internally oracle treat each schema node as a column so we can have only 1000 nodes in XSD). But am not sure what impact will be on the performance of of such big table.
If any one has anyone has experience or any reference please guide. I am trying understand how oracle XML DB work with Schema registration.
Regards
Hmm..Performance is always subjective, and based on more than the query / data.
This might get you started:
http://www.orafaq.com/node/508
If you need references, oracles homepage is a really good start.
Have a look around, there is lots of information (too much sometimes actually) :-)
oracle xml schema basics

Move data from Oracle to Cassandra and/or MongoDB

At work we are thinking to move from Oracle to a NoSQL database, so I have to make some test on Cassandra and MongoDB. I have to move a lot of tables to the NoSQL database the idea is to have the data synchronized between this two platforms.
So I create a simple procedure that make selects into the Oracle DB and insert into mongo. Some of my colleagues point that maybe there is an easier(and more professional) way to do it.
Anybody had this problem before? how do you solve it?
If your goal is to copy your existing structure from Oracle to a NoSQL database then you should probably reconsider your move in the first place. By doing that you are losing any of the benefits one sees from going to a non-relational data store.
A good first step would be to take a long look at your existing structure and determine how it can be modified to affect positive impact on your application. Additionally, consider a hybrid system at the same time. Cassandra is great for a lot of things, but if you need a relational system and already are using a lot of Oracle functionality, it likely makes sense for most of your database to stay in Oracle, while moving the pieces that require frequent writes and would benefit from a different structure to Mongo or Cassandra.
Once you've made the decisions about your structure, I would suggest writing scripts/programs/add a module to your existing app, to write the data in the new format to the new data store. That will give you the most fine-grained control over every step in the process, which in a large system-wide architectural change, I would want to have.
You can also consider using components of Hadoop ecosystem to perform this kind of (ETL) task .For that you need to model your Cassandra DB as per the requirements.
Steps could be to migrate your oracle table data to HDFS (using SQOOP preferably) and then writing Map-Reduce job to transform this data and insert into Cassandra Data Model .

Best strategy for retrieving large dynamically-specified tables on an ASP.NET page

Looking for a bit of advice on how to optimise one of our projects. We have a ASP.NET/C# system that retrieves data from a SQL2008 data and presents it on a DevExpress ASPxGridView. The data that's retrieved can come from one of a number of databases - all of which are slightly different and are being added and removed regularly. The user is presented with a list of live "companies", and the data is retrieved from the corresponding database.
At the moment, data is being retrieved using a standard SqlDataSource and a dynamically-created SQL SELECT statement. There are a few JOINs in the statement, as well as optional WHERE constraints, again dynamically-created depending on the database and the user's permission level.
All of this works great (honest!), apart from performance. When it comes to some databases, there are several hundreds of thousands of rows, and retrieving and paging through the data is quite slow (the databases are already properly indexed). I've therefore been looking at ways of speeding the system up, and it seems to boil down to two choices: XPO or LINQ.
LINQ seems to be the popular choice, but I'm not sure how easy it will be to implement with a system that is so dynamic in nature - would I need to create "definitions" for each database that LINQ could access? I'm also a bit unsure about creating the LINQ queries dynamically too, although looking at a few examples that part at least seems doable.
XPO, on the other hand, seems to allow me to create a XPO Data Source on the fly. However, I can't find too much information on how to JOIN to other tables.
Can anyone offer any advice on which method - if any - is the best to try and retro-fit into this project? Or is the dynamic SQL model currently used fundamentally different from LINQ and XPO and best left alone?
Before you go and change the whole way that your app talks to the database, have you had a look at the following:
Run your code through a performance profiler (such as Redgate's performance profiler), the results are often surprising.
If you are constructing the SQL string on the fly, are you using .Net best practices such as String.Concat("str1", "str2") instead of "str1" + "str2". Remember, multiple small gains add up to big gains.
Have you thought about having a summary table or database that is periodically updated (say every 15 mins, you might need to run a service to update this data automatically.) so that you are only hitting one database. New connections to databases are quiet expensive.
Have you looked at the query plans for the SQL that you are running. Today, I moved a dynamically created SQL string to a sproc (only 1 param changed) and shaved 5-10 seconds off the running time (it was being called 100-10000 times depending on some conditions).
Just a warning if you do use LINQ. I have seen some developers who have decided to use LINQ write more inefficient code because they did not know what they are doing (pulling 36,000 records when they needed to check for 1 for example). This things are very easily overlooked.
Just something to get you started on and hopefully there is something there that you haven't thought of.
Cheers,
Stu
As far as I understand you are talking about so called server mode when all data manipulations are done on the DB server instead of them to the web server and processing them there. In this mode grid works very fast with data sources that can contain hundreds thousands records. If you want to use this mode, you should either create the corresponding LINQ classes or XPO classes. If you decide to use LINQ based server mode, the LINQServerModeDataSource provides the Selecting event which can be used to set a custom IQueryable and KeyExpression. I would suggest that you use LINQ in your application. I hope, this information will be helpful to you.
I guess there are two points where performance might be tweaked in this case. I'll assume that you're accessing the database directly rather than through some kind of secondary layer.
First, you don't say how you're displaying the data itself. If you're loading thousands of records into a grid, that will take time no matter how fast everything else is. Obviously the trick here is to show a subset of the data and allow the user to page, etc. If you're not doing this then that might be a good place to start.
Second, you say that the tables are properly indexed. If this is the case, and assuming that you're not loading 1,000 records into the page at once and retreiving only subsets at a time, then you should be OK.
But, if you're only doing an ExecuteQuery() against an SQL connection to get a dataset back I don't see how Linq or anything else will help you. I'd say that the problem is obviously on the DB side.
So to solve the problem with the database you need to profile the different SELECT statements you're running against it, examine the query plan and identify the places where things are slowing down. You might want to start by using the SQL Server Profiler, but if you have a good DBA, sometimes just looking at the query plan (which you can get from Management Studio) is usually enough.

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