I've been doing a lot of reading lately on Cassandra, and specifically how to structure rows to take advantage of indexing/sorting, but there is one thing I am still unclear on; how many "index" items (or filters if you will) should you include in a column family (CF) row?
Specifically: I am building an app and will be using Cassandra to archive log data, which I will use for analytics.
Example types of analytic searches will include (by date range):
total visits to specific site section
total visits by Country
traffic source
I plan to store the whole log object in JSON format, but to avoid having to go through each item to get basic data, or to create multiple CF just to get basic data, I am curious to know if it's a good idea to include these above "filters" as columns (compound column segment)?
Example:
Row Key | timeUUID:data | timeUUID:country | timeUUID:source |
======================================================
timeUUID:section | JSON Object | USA | example.com |
So as you can see from the structure, the row key would be a compound key of timeUUID (say per day) plus the site section I want to get stats for. This lets me query a date range quite easily.
Next, my dilemma, the columns. Compound column name with timeUUID lets me sort & do a time based slice, but does the concept make sense?
Is this type of structure acceptable by the current "best practice", or would it be frowned upon? Would it be advisable to create a separate "index" CF for each metric I want to query on? (even when it's as simple as this?)
I would rather get this right the first time instead of having to restructure the data and refactor my application code later.
I think the idea behind this is OK. It's a pretty common way of doing timeslicing (assuming I've understood your schema anyway - a create table snippet would be great). Some minor tweaks ...
You don't need a timeUUID as your row key. Given that you suggest partitioning by individual days (which are inherently unique) you don't need a UUID aspect. A timestamp is probably fine, or even simpler a varchar in the format YYYYMMDD (or whatever arrangement you prefer).
You will probably also want to swap your row key composition around to section:time. The reason for this is that if you need to specify an IN clause (i.e. to grab multiple days) you can only do it on the last part of the key. This means you can do WHERE section = 'foo' and time IN (....). I imagine that's a more common use case - but the decision is obviously yours.
If your common case is querying the most recent data don't forget to cluster your timeUUID columns in descending order. This keeps the hot columns at the head.
Double storing content is fine (i.e. once for the JSON payload, and denormalised again for data you need to query). Storage is cheap.
I don't think you need indexes, but it depends on the queries you intend to run. If your queries are simple then you may want to store counters by (date:parameter) instead of values and just increment them as data comes in.
Related
I'm new to the CouchDb.
I have to filter records by date (date must be between two values) and to sort the data by the name or by the date etc (it depends on user's selection in the table).
In MySQL it looks like
SELECT * FROM table WHERE date > "2015-01-01" AND date < "2015-08-01" ORDER BY name/date/email ASC/DESC
I can't figure out if I can use one view for all these issues.
Here is my map example:
function(doc) {
emit(
[doc.date, doc.name, doc.email],
{
email:doc.email,
name:doc.name,
date:doc.date,
}
);
}
I try to filter data using startkey and endkey, but I'm not sure how to sort data in this way:
startkey=["2015-01-01"]&endkey=["2015-08-01"]
Can I use one view? Or I have to create some views with keys order depending on my current order field: [doc.date, doc.name, doc.email], [doc.name, doc.date, doc.email] etc?
Thanks for your help!
As Sebastian said you need to use a list function to do this in Couch.
If you think about it, this is what MySQL is doing. Its query optimizer will pick an index into your table, it will scan a range from that index, load what it needs into memory, and execute query logic.
In Couch the view is your B-tree index, and a list function can implement whatever logic you need. It can be used to spit out HTML instead of JSON, but it can also be used to filter/sort the output of your view, and still spit out JSON in the end. It might not scale very well to millions of documents, but MySQL might not either.
So your options are the ones Sebastian highlighted:
view sorts by date, query selects date range and list function loads everything into memory and sorts by email/etc.
views sort by email/etc, list function filters out everything outside the date range.
Which one you choose depends on your data and architecture.
With option 1 you may skip the list function entirely: get all the necessary data from the view in one go (with include_docs), and sort client side. This is how you'll typically use Couch.
If you need this done server side, you'll need your list function to load every matching document into an array, and then sort it and JSON serialize it. This obviously falls into pieces if there are soo many matching documents that they don't even fit into memory or take to long to sort.
Option 2 scans through preordered documents and only sends those matching the dates. Done right this avoids loading everything into memory. OTOH it might scan way too many documents, trashing your disk IO.
If the date range is "very discriminating" (few documents pass the test) option 1 works best; otherwise (most documents pass) option 2 can be better. Remember that in the time it takes to load a useless document from disk (option 2), you can sort tens of documents in memory, as long as they fit in memory (option 1). Also, the more indexes, the more disk space is used and the more writes are slowed down.
you COULD use a list function for that, in two ways:
1.) Couch-View is ordered by dates and you sort by e-amil => but pls. be aware that you'd have to have ALL items in memory to do this sort by e-mail (i.e. you can do this only when your result set is small)
2.) Couch-View is ordered by e-mail and a list function drops all outside the date range (you can only do that when the overall list is small - so this one is most probably bad)
possibly #1 can help you
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'm fairly new to the more complex parts of Core Data.
My application has a core data store with 15K rows. There is a single entity.
I need to display a subset of those rows in a table view filtered on a calculated search criteria, and for each row displayed add a value that I calculate in real time but don't store in the entity.
The calculation needs to use a couple of values supplied by the user.
A hypothetical example:
Entity: contains fields "id", "first", and "second"
User inputs: 10 and 20
Search / Filter Criteria: only display records where the entity field "id" is a prime number between the two supplied numbers. (I need to build some sort of complex predicate method here I assume?)
Display: all fields of all records that meet the criteria, along with a derived field (not in the the core data entity) that is the sum of the "id" field and a random number, so each row in the tableview would contain 4 fields:
"id", "first", "second", -calculated value-
From my reading / Googling it seems that a transient property might be the way to go, but I can't work out how to do this given that the search criteria and the resultant property need to calculate based on user input.
Could anyone give me any pointers that will help me implement this code? I'm pretty lost right now, and the examples I can find in books etc. don't match my particular needs well enough for me to adapt them as far as I can tell.
Thanks
Darren.
The first thing you need to do is to stop thinking in terms of fields, rows and columns as none of those structures are actually part of Core Data. In this case, it is important because Core Data supports arbitrarily complex fetches but the sqlite store does not. So, if you use a sqlite store your fetches are restricted those supported by SQLite.
In this case, predicates aimed at SQLite can't perform complex operations such as calculating whether an attribute value is prime.
The best solution for your first case would be to add a boolean attribute of isPrime and then modify the setter for your id attribute to calculate whether the set id value is prime or not and then set the isPrime accordingly. That will be store in the SQLite store and can be fetched against e.g. isPrime==YES &&((first<=%#) && (second>=%#))
The second case would simply use a transient property for which you would supply a custom getter to calculate its value when the managed object was in memory.
One often overlooked option is to not use an sqlite store but to use an XML store instead. If the amount of data is relatively small e.g. a few thousand text attributes with a total memory footprint of a few dozen meg, then an XML store will be super fast and can handle more complex operations.
SQLite is sort of the stunted stepchild in Core Data. It's is useful for large data sets and low memory but with memory becoming ever more plentiful, its loosing its edge. I find myself using it less these days. You should consider whether you need sqlite in this particular case.
Let's assume I have a keyspace with a column family that stores user objects and the key of these objects is the username.
How can I use Hector to get a list of users sorted by username?
I tried to use a RangeSlicesQuery, paging works fine with this query, but the results are not sorted in any way.
I'm an absolute Cassandra beginner, can anyone point me to a simple example that shows how to sort a column family by key? Please ask if you need more details on my efforts.
Edit:
The result was not sorted because I used the default RandomPartitioner instead of the OrderPreseveringPartitioner in cassandra.yaml.
Probably it's better not to rely on the sorting by key but to use a secondary index.
Quoting Cassandra - The Definitive Guide
Column names are stored in sorted order according to the value of compare_with. Rows,
on the other hand, are stored in an order defined by the partitioner (for example,
with RandomPartitioner, they are in random order, etc.)
I guess you are using RandomPartitioner which
... return data in an essentially random order.
You should probably use OrderPreservingPartitioner (OPP) where
Rows are therefore stored
by key order, aligning the physical structure of the data with your sort order.
Be aware of inefficiency of OPP.
(edit on Mar 07, 2014)
Important:
This answer is very old now.
It is a system-wide setting. You can set in cassandra.yaml. See this doc. Again, OPP is highly discouraged. This document is for version 1.1, and you can see it is deprecated. It is likely that it is removed from latest version. If you do want to use OPP, you may want to revisit the architecture the architecture.
Or create a row called "meta:userNames" in same column family and put all user names as a look up hash. Something like that.
Users {
key: "meta:userNames" {david:david, paolo:paolo, victor:victor},
key: "paolo" {password:"*****", locale:"it_it"},
key: "david" {password:"*****", locale:"en_us"},
key: "victor" {password:"*****", locale:"en_uk"}
}
First query the meta:userNames columns (that are sorted) and use them to get the user rows. Don't try to get everything via single db query as in SQL driven databases. Use Cassandra as huge Hash Map which provides rapid random access to its data.
Background
I'm writing an adapter for ESE to .NET and LINQ in a Google Code project called eselinq. One important function I can't seem to figure out is how to get a list of indexes defined for a table. I need to be able to list available indexes so the LINQ part can automatically determine when indexes can be used. This will allow much more efficient plans for user queries if appropriate indexes can be found.
There are two related functions for querying index information:
JetGetTableIndexInfo - get index information by tableID
JetGetIndexInfo - get index information by tableName
These only differ in how the related table is specified (name or tableid). It sounds like these would support the function I want but all the info levels seem to require that I already have a certain index to query information for. The only exception is JET_IdxInfoCount, but that only counts how many indexes are present.
JET_IdxInfo with its JET_INDEXLIST sounds plausible but it only lists the columns on a specific index.
Alternatives
I am aware that I could get the index information another way, like annotations on .NET types corresponding to database tables, or by requiring a index mapping be provided ahead of time. I think there's enough introspection implemented to make everything else work out of the box without the user supplying extra information, except for this one function.
Another option may be to examine the system tables to find related index objects, but this is would mean depending on an undocumented interface.
To satisfy this question, I want a supported method of enumerating the indexes (just the name would be sufficient) on a table.
You are correct about JetGetTableIndexInfo and JetGetIndexInfo and JET_IdxInfo. The twist is that the data is returned in a somewhat complex: a temporary table is returned containing a row for the index and then a row for each column in the table. To just get the index names you will need to skip the column rows (the column count is given by the value of the columnidcColumn column in the first row).
For a .NET example of how to decipher this, look at the ManagedEsent project. In the MetaDataHelpers.cs file there is a method called GetIndexInfoFromIndexlist that extracts all the data from the temporary table.