Postgres tsvector_update_trigger sometimes takes minutes - performance

I have configured free text search on a table in my postgres database. Pretty simple stuff, with firstname, lastname and email. This works well and is fast.
I do however sometimes experience looong delays when inserting a new entry into the table, where the insert keeps running for minutes and also generates huge WAL files. (We use the WAL files for replication).
Is there anything I need to be aware of with my free text index? Like Postgres maybe randomly restructuring it for performance reasons? My index is currently around 400 MB big.
Thanks in advance!
Christian

Given the size of the WAL files, I suspect you are right that it is an index update/rebalancing that is causing the issue. However I have to wonder what else is going on.
I would recommend against storing tsvectors in separate columns. A better way is to run an index on to_tsvector()'s output. You can have multiple indexes for multiple languages if you need. So instead of a trigger that takes, say, a field called description and stores the tsvector in desc_tsvector, I would recommend just doing:
CREATE INDEX mytable_description_tsvector_idx ON mytable(to_tsvector(description));
Now, if you need a consistent search interface across a whole table, there are more elegant ways of doing this using "table methods."
In general the functional index approach has fewer issues associated with it than anything else.
Now a second thing you should be aware of are partial indexes. If you need to, you can index only records of interest. For example, if most of my queries only check the last year, I can:
CREATE INDEX mytable_description_tsvector_idx ON mytable(to_tsvector(description))
WHERE created_at > now() - '1 year'::interval;

Related

How to avoid data duplicates in ClickHouse

I already read this but I still have questions. I only have one VM with 16 GB of RAM, 4 cores and a disk of 100 GB, with only ClickHouse and a light web api working on it.
I'm storing leaked credentials in a database:
CREATE TABLE credential (
user String,
domain String,
password String,
first_seen Date,
leaks Array(UInt64)
) ENGINE ReplacingMergeTree
PARTITION BY first_seen
ORDER BY user, domain, password, first_seen
It something happens that some credentials appear more than once (inside a file or between many).
My long-term objective is(was) the following:
- when inserting a credential which is already in the database, I want to keep the smaller first_seen and add the new leak id to the field leaks.
I have tried the ReplacingMergeTree engine, insert twice the same data ($ cat "data.csv" | clickhouse-client --query 'INSERT INTO credential FORMAT CSV') and then performed OPTIMIZE TABLE credential to force the replacing engine to do its asynchronous job, according to the documentation. Nothing happens, data is twice in the database.
So I wonder:
- what did i miss with the ReplacingMergeTree engine ?
- how does OPTIMIZE work and why doesn't it do what I was expecting from it ?
- is there a real solution for avoiding replicated data on a single instance of ClickHouse ?
I have already tried to do it manually. My problem is a have 4.5 billions records into my database, and identifying duplicates inside a 100k entries sample almost takes 5 minutes with the follow query: SELECT DISTINCT user, domain, password, count() as c FROM credential WHERE has(leaks, 0) GROUP BY user, domain, password HAVING c > 1 This query obviously does not work on the 4.5b entries, as I do not have enough RAM.
Any ideas will be tried.
Multiple things are going wrong here:
You partition very granulary... you should partition by something like a month of data, whatsoever. Now clickhous has to scan lots of files.
You dont provide the table engine with a version. The problem here is, that clickhouse is not able to find out wich row should replace the other.
I suggest you use the "version" parameter of the ReplacingMergeTree, as it allows you to provide an incremental version as a number, or if this works better for you, the current DateTime (where the last DateTime always wins)
You should never design your solution to require OPTIMIZE be called to make your data consistent in your result sets, it is not designed for this.
Clickhouse always allows you to write a query where you can provide (eventual) consistency without using OPTIMIZE beforehand.
Reason for avoiding OPTIMIZE, besides being really slow and heavy on your DB, you could end up in race conditions, where other clients of the database (or replicating clickhouse nodes) could invalidate your data between the OPTIMIZE finished and the SELECT is done.
Bottomline, as a solution:
So what you should do here is, add a version column. Then when inserting rows, insert the current timestamp as a version.
Then select for each row only the one that has the highest version in your result so that you do not depend on OPTIMIZE for anything other then garbage collection.

insert data from one table to two tables group by for Oracle

I have a situation where I need a large amount of data (9+ billion per day) data being collected in a loading table that has fields like
-TABLE loader
first_seen,request,type,response,hits
1232036346,mydomain.com,A,203.11.12.1,200
1332036546,ogm.com,A,103.13.12.1,600
1432039646,mydomain.com,A,203.11.12.1,30
that need to split into two tables (de-duplicated)
-TABLE final
request,type,response,hitcount,id
mydomain.com,A,203.11.12.1,230,1
ogm.com,A,103.13.12.1,600,2
and
-TABLE timestamps
id,times_seen
1,1232036346
2,1432036546
1,1432039646
I can create the schemas and do the select like
select request,type,response,sum(hitcount) from loader group by request,type,response;
get data into the final table. for best performance I want to see if I can use "insert all" to move data from the loader to these two tables and perhaps use triggers in the database to try to achieve this. Any ideas and recommendations on the best ways to solve this?
"9+ billion per day"
That's more than just a large number of rows: that's a huge number, and it will require special engineering to handle it.
For starters, you don't just need INSERT statements. The requirement to maintain the count for existing (request,type,response) tuples points to UPDATE too. The need to generate and return a synthetic key is problematic in this scenario. It rules out MERGE, the easiest way of implementing upserts (because the MERGE syntax doesn't support the RETURNING clause).
Beyond that, attempting to handle nine billion rows in a single transaction is a bad idea. How long will it take to process? What happens if it fails halfway through? You need to define a more granular unit of work.
Although, that raises some business issues. What do the users only want to see the whole picture, after the Close-Of-Day? Or would they derive benefit from seeing Intra-day results? If yes, how to distinguish Intra-day from Close-Of-Day results? If no, how to hide partially processed results whilst the rest is still in flight? Also, how soon after Close-Of-Day do they want to see those totals?
Then there are the architectural considerations. These figure mean processing over one hundred thousand (one lakh) rows every second. That requires serious crunch and expensive licensing extras. Obviously Enterprise Edition for parallel processing but also Partitioning and perhaps RAC options.
By now you should have an inkling why nobody answered your question straight-away. This is a consultancy gig not a StackOverflow question.
But let's sketch a solution.
We must have continuous processing of incoming raw data. So we stream records for loading into FINAL and TIMESTAMP tables alongside the LOADER table, which becomes an audit of the raw data (or else perhaps we get rid of the LOADER table altogether).
We need to batch the incoming records to leverage set-based operations. Depending on the synthetic key implementation we should aim for pure SQL, otherwise Bulk PL/SQL.
Keeping the thing going is vital so we need to pay attention to Bulk Error Handling.
Ideally the target tables can be partitioned, so we can load into offline tables and use Partition Exchange to bring the cleaned data online.
For the synthetic key I would be tempted to use a hash key based on the (request,type,response) tuple rather than a sequence, as that would give us the option to load TIMESTAMP and FINAL independently. (Collisions are extremely unlikely.)
Just to be clear, this is a bagatelle not a serious architecture. You need to experiment and benchmark various approaches against realistic volumes of data on Production-equivalent hardware.

Is there a way to make selecting query faster?

I want to select multiple rows from multiple tables, one of them having billions of rows. It sometimes take 20 seconds and there are over thousands of users using it so it is pretty bad.
I looked into COLUMNSTORE and tried it in my local machine and the performance is x50 faster than usual! (note that I was clearing the cache to see the difference)
However, the downside is I can't update, insert and delete rows, which is being constantly done for that table with the billion rows.
Is there a way to optimize it? (Besides the (NOLOCK) dirty read, which security is not an issue btw)
There are already indexes in that table, but doesn't help.
Is there a way to perform BATCH EXECUTION (I see it does row execution)? Or any optimization advice?
Using Microsoft SQL Server 2012
When you get to the scale of billions of rows, you often need to take different approaches for handling the data. Separating the content into multiple databases and storing on different machines might be more effective, however the design is considerably more complex.
An alternative is to consider using a combination of partitioned tables with a column-based index. That way at least, you can stage the updated data for the partition and then swap the updated one for the existing one to perform updates. See: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg492088.aspx#Update
An alternative is to consider using three tables: one that is static -- and is perhaps using column-based storage -- the other one dynamic, holding only recent updates and inserts, and the third holding just a list of deleted rows identified by the primary key. You then have to use a view to reconcile the content for queries.

SSIS File Load WAY TOO SLOW in Large Destination Table

this is my first question, I've searched a lot of info from different sites but none of them where conslusive.
Problem:
Daily I'm loading a flat file with an SSIS Package executed in a scheduled job in SQL Server 2005 but it's taking TOO MUCH TIME(like 2 1/2 hours) and the file just has like 300 rows and its a 50 MB file aprox. This is driving me crazy, because is affecting the performance of my server.
This is the Scenario:
-My package is just a Data Flow Task that has a Flat File Source and an OLE DB Destination, thats all!!!
-The Data Access Mode is set to FAST LOAD.
-Just have 3 indexes in the table and are nonclustered.
-My destination table has 366,964,096 records so far and 32 columns
-I haven't set FastParse in any of the Output columns yet.(want to try something else first)
So I've just started to make some tests:
-Rebuild/Reorganize the indexes in the destination table(they where way too fragmented), but this didn't help me much
-Created another table with the same structure but whitout all the indexes and executed the Job with the SSIS package loading to this new table and IT JUST TOOK LIKE 1 MINUTE !!!
So I'm confused, is there something I'm Missing???
-Is the SSIS package writing all the large table in a Buffer and the writing it on Disk? Or why the BIG difference in time ?
-Is the index affecting the insertion time?
-Should I load the file to this new table as a temporary table and then do a BULK INSERT to the destination table with the records ordered? 'Cause I though that the Data FLow Task was much faster than BULK INSERT, but at this point I don't know now.
Greetings in advance.
One thing I might look at is if the large table has any triggers which are causing it to be slower on insert. Also if the clustered index is on a field that will require a good bit of rearranging of the data during the load, that could cause an issues as well.
In SSIS packages, using a merge join (which requires sorting) can cause slownesss, but from your description it doesn't appear you did that. I mention it only in case you were doing that and didn't mention it.
If it works fine without the indexes, perhaps you should look into those. What are the data types? How many are there? Maybe you could post their definitions?
You could also take a look at the fill factor of your indexes - especially the clustered index. Having a high fill factor could cause excessive IO on your inserts.
Well I Rebuild the indexes with another fill factor (80%) like Sam told me, and the time droped down significantly. It took 30 minutes instead of almost 3hours!!!
I will keep with the tests to fine tune the DB. Also I didnt have to create a clustered index,I guess with the clustered the time will drop a lot more.
Thanks to all, wish that this helps to someone in the same situation.

Should I store reference data in my application memory, or in the database?

I am faced with the choice where to store some reference data (essentially drop down values) for my application. This data will not change (or if it does, I am fine with needing to restart the application), and will be frequently accessed as part of an AJAX autocomplete widget (so there may be several queries against this data by one user filling out one field).
Suppose each record looks something like this:
category
effective_date
expiration_date
field_A
field_B
field_C
field_D
The autocomplete query will need to check the input string against 4 fields in each record and discrete parameters against the category and effective/expiration dates, so if this were a SQL query, it would have a where clause that looks something like:
... WHERE category = ?
AND effective_date < ?
AND expiration_date > ?
AND (colA LIKE ? OR colB LIKE ? OR colC LIKE ?)
I feel like this might be a rather inefficient query, but I suppose I don't know enough about how databases optimize their indexes, etc. I do know that a lot of really smart people work really hard to make database engines really fast at this exact type of thing.
The alternative I see is to store it in my application memory. I could have a list of these records for each category, and then iterate over each record in the category to see if the filter criteria is met. This is definitely O(n), since I need to examine every record in the category.
Has anyone faced a similar choice? Do you have any insight to offer?
EDIT: Thanks for the insight, folks. Sending the entire data set down to the client is not really an option, since the data set is so large (several MB).
Definitely cache it in memory if it's not changing during the lifetime of the application. You're right, you don't want to be going back to the database for each call, because it's completely unnecessary.
There's can be debate about exactly how much to cache on the server (I tend to cache as little as possible until I really need to), but for information that will not change and will be accessed repeatedly, you should almost always cache that in the Application object.
Given the number of directions you're coming at this data (filtering on 6 or more columns), I'm not sure how much more you'll be able to optimize the information in memory. The first thing I would try is to store it in a list in the Application object, and query it using LINQ-to-objects. Or, if there is one field that is used significantly more than the others, or try using a Dictionary instead of a list. If the performance continues to be a problem, try using storing it in a DataSet and setting indexes on it (but of course you loose some code-simplicity and maintainability this way).
I do not think there is a one size fits all answer to your question. Depending on the data size and usage patterns the answer will vary. More than that the answer may change over time.
This is why in my development I built some intermediate layer which allows me to change how the caching is done by changing configuration (with no code changes). Every while we analyze various stats (cache hit ratio, etc.) and decide if we want to change cache behavior.
BTW there is also a third layer - you can push your static data to the browser and cache it there too
Can you just hard-wire it into the program (as long as you stick to DRY)? Changing it only requires a rebuild.

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