Sybase ASE remote row insert locking - insert

Im working on an application which access a Sybase ASE 15.0.2 ,where the current code access a remote database
(CIS) to insert a row using a proxy table definition (the destination table is a DOL - DRL table - The PK
row is defined as identity ,and is always growing). The current code performs a select to check if the row
already exists to avoid duplicate data to be inserted.
Since the remote table also have a PK definition on the table, i do understand that the PK verification will
be done again prior to commiting the row.
Im planning to remove the select check since its being effectively done again by the PK verification,
but im concerned about if when receiving a file with many duplicates, the table may suffer
some unecessary contention when the data is tried to be commited.
Its not clear to me if Sybase ASE tries to hold the last row and writes the data prior to check for the
duplicate. Also, if the table is very big, im concerned also about the time it will spend looking the
whole index to find duplicates.
I've found some documentation for SQL anywhere, but not ASE in the following link
http://dcx.sybase.com/1200/en/dbusage/insert-how-transact.html
The best i could find is the following explanation
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/comp.databases.sybase/tHnOqptD7X8
But it doesn't enlighten in details how the row is locked (and if there is any kind of
optimization to write it ahead or at the same time of PK checking)
, and also if it will waste a full PK look if im positively inserting a row which the PK
positively greater than the last row commited
Thanks
Alex

Unlike SqlAnywhere there is no option for ASE to set wait_for_commit. The primary key constraint is checked during the insert and not at the commit time. The problem as I understand from your post I see is if you have a mass insert from a file that may contain duplicates is to load into a temp table , check for duplicates, remove the duplicates and then insert the unique ones. Mass insert are lot faster though it still checks for primary key violations. However there is no cost associated as there is no rolling back. The insert statement is always all or nothing. Even if one row is duplicate the entire insert statement will fail. Check before insert in more of error free approach as opposed to use of constraint to the verification because it is going to fail and rollback is going to again be costly.

Thanks Mike
The link does have a very quick explanation about the insert from the CIS perspective. Its a variable to keep an eye on given that CIS may become a representative time consumer
if its performing data and syntax checking if it will be done again when CIS forwards the insert statement to the target server. I was afraid that CIS could have some influence beyond the network traffic/time over the locking/PK checking
Raju
I do agree that avoiding the PK duplication by checking if the row already exists by running a select and doing in a batch, but im currently looking for a stop gap solution, and that may be to perform the insert command in batches of about 50 rows and leave the
duplicate key check for the PK.
Hopefully the PK check will be done over a join of the 50 newly inserted rows, and thus
avoid to traverse the index for each single row...
Ill try to test this and comment back
Alex

Related

Unique Constraint Violated on empty table

I recently received a case which my client came across the ORA-00001: unique constraint violated error. This happened when a program tried to truncate two tables and then insert data into them.
From the error-log file, the truncate step was completed,
delete from INTERNET_GROUP
delete from INTERNET_ITEM
BUT right after this, the insertion to the Internet_group table triggered the ORA-00001 error. I am wondering if there is any database settings related to this error? I never used Oracle and am wondering if Oracle puts a lock on a row with SELECT statement, in which case the row is locked and not deleted somehow? Any help is appreciated.
Please know that there is a difference between truncate and delete. You say you truncated the table, but you mention "delete from" . That is entirely different.
If you're sure you want to empty the tables, try replacing with
truncate table internet_group reuse storage;
Mind you that a commit is not necessary with the truncate statement as this is considered a DDL (data definition language) statement and not a DML (Data modification language) statement like updates and deletes.
Also, there is no row locking on selects. But changes are only applied and visible for other sessions in the database when commit-ed.
I guess that is wat happened; you deleted the records but did not execute a commit (yet) and subsequently inserted new records.
edit:
I now realize you're probably inserting multiple records....
The other option might be, that the data itself causes a violation. Can you please provide the constraints on the table? There must be a primary key or unique constraint. You might want to hold that against your dataset.

Oracle 12c - refreshing the data in my tables based on the data from warehouse tables

I need to update the some tables in my application from some other warehouse tables which would be updating weekly or biweekly. I should update my tables based on those. And these are having foreign keys in another tables. So I cannot just truncate the table and reinsert the whole data every time. So I have to take the delta and update accordingly based on few primary key columns which doesn't change. Need some inputs on how to implement this approach.
My approach:
Check the last updated time of those tables, views.
If it is most recent then compare each row based on the primary key in my table and warehouse table.
update each column if it is different.
Do nothing if there is no change in columns.
insert if there is a new record.
My Question:
How do I implement this? Writing a PL/SQL code is it a good and efficient way? as the expected number of records are around 800K.
Please provide any sample code or links.
I would go for Pl/Sql and bulk collect forall method. You can use minus in your cursor in order to reduce data size and calculating difference.
You can check this site for more information about bulk collect, forall and engines: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/issue-archive/2012/12-sep/o52plsql-1709862.html
There are many parts to your question above and I will answer as best I can:
While it is possible to disable referencing foreign keys, truncate the table, repopulate the table with the updated data then reenable the foreign keys, given your requirements described above I don't believe truncating the table each time to be optimal
Yes, in principle PL/SQL is a good way to achieve what you are wanting to
achieve as this is too complex to deal with in native SQL and PL/SQL is an efficient alternative
Conceptually, the approach I would take is something like as follows:
Initial set up:
create a sequence called activity_seq
Add an "activity_id" column of type number to your source tables with a unique constraint
Add a trigger to the source table/s setting activity_id = activity_seq.nextval for each insert / update of a table row
create some kind of master table to hold the "last processed activity id" value
Then bi/weekly:
retrieve the value of "last processed activity id" from the master
table
select all rows in the source table/s having activity_id value > "last processed activity id" value
iterate through the selected source rows and update the target if a match is found based on whatever your match criterion is, or if
no match is found then insert a new row into the target (I assume
there is no delete as you do not mention it)
on completion, update the master table "last processed activity id" to the greatest value of activity_id for the source rows
processed in step 3 above.
(please note that, depending on your environment and the number of rows processed, the above process may need to be split and repeated over a number of transactions)
I hope this proves helpful

Operations on certain tables won't finish

We have a table TRANSMISSIONS(ID, NAME) which behaves funny in the following ways:
The statement to add a foreign key in another table referencing TRANSMISSIONS.ID won't finish
The statement to add a column to TRANSMISSIONS won't finish
The statement to disable/drop a unique constraint won't finish
The statement to disable/drop a trigger won't finish
TRANSMISSION's primary key is ID, there is also a unique constraint on NAME - therefore there are indexes on ID and NAME. We also have a trigger which creates values for column ID using a sequence, so that INSERT statements do not need to provide a value for ID.
Besides TRANSMISSIONS, there are two more tables behaving like this. For other tables, the above-mentioned statements work fine.
The database is used in an application with Hibernate and due to an incorrect JPA configuration we produced high values for ID during a time. Note that we use the trigger only for "manual" INSERT statements and that Hibernate produces ID values itself, also using the sequence.
The first thought was that the problems were due to the high IDs but we have the problems also with tables that never had such high IDs.
Anyways we suspected that the indexes might be fragmented somehow and called ALTER INDEX TRANSMISSIONS_PK SHRINK SPACE COMPACT, which ran through but showed no effect.
Also, we wanted to call ALTER TABLE TRANSMISSIONS SHRINK SPACE COMPACT which didn't work because we needed to call first ALTER TABLE TRANSMISSIONS ENABLE ROW MOVEMENT which never finished.
We have another instance of the database which does not behave in such a funny way. So we think it might be that in the course of running the application the database got somehow into an inconsistent state.
Does someone have any suggestions what might have gone out of control/into an inconsitent state?
More hints:
There are no locks present on any objects in the database (according to information in v$lock and v$locked_object)
We tried all these statements in SQL Developer and also using SQLPlus (command-line tool).

Inserting data in a column avoiding duplicates

Lets say i have a query which is fetching col1 after joining multiple tables. I want to insert values of that col1 in a table which is on remote db i.e. i would be using dblink to do that.
Now that col1 would be fetched from 4-5 different db's. There is chances that a value1 fetch from db1 would b in db2 as well. How can i avoid duplicates ?
In my remote db, I have created col1 a primary key. so when inserting, an error would be thrown if there is a duplicate key, end result failing rest of the process. Which i don't want to. I was thiking about 2 approaches
Write a PLSQL script, For each value, determine if value already exists or not. If it doesn't then insert.
Write a PLSQL script and insert and catch the duplicate key exception. The exception would be ignore and it will keep inserting (it doesn't sound that good).
Which approach would you prefer? Is there anything else i can do ?
I would use the MERGE statement and WHEN NOT MATCHED THEN INSERT.
The same merger could also update but it doesn't have to, just leave the update part out.
The different databases can have duplicate primary keys but that doesn't mean the records are duplicates. The actual data may be different in each case. Or the records may represent the same real world thing but at different statuses, Don't know, you haven't provided enough explanation.
The point is, you need much more analysis of why duplicate records can exist and probably a more sophisticated approach to handling collisions. Do you need to take all records (in which case you need a synthetic key)? Or do you take only one instance (so how do you decide precedence)? Other scenarios may exist.
In any case, MERGE or PL/SQL loops are likely to be too crude a solution.
First off, I would suggest that your target database drive all of these inserts because inserting/updating across a database link can create some locking issues and further complicate things especially with multiple databases attempting to access and perform DML on the same table. However if that isn't possible the solutions below will work.
I would fix your primary key problem by including a table look-up on the target table for each row.
INSERT INTO customer#dblink.oracle.com cust
(emp_name,
emp_id)
VALUES
(SELECT
cust.employee_name,
cust.employee_id --primary_key
FROM
source_table st
WHERE NOT EXISTS
(SELECT 1
FROM customer#dblink.oracle.com cust
WHERE cust.employee_id = st.emp_id));
Again, I would not recommend DML transactions across database links unless absolutely necessary as you can sometimes have weird locking behavior.
A PL/SQL procedure or anonymous PL/SQL block could be used to create a bulk processing solution as follows:
CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE send_unique_data
AS
TYPE tab_cust IS TABLE OF customer#dblink.oracle.com%ROWTYPE
INDEX BY PLS_INTEGER;
t_records tab_cust;
BEGIN
SELECT
cust.employee_name,
cust.employee_id --primary_key
BULK COLLECT
INTO t_records
FROM source_table;
FORALL i IN t_records.FIRST...t_records.LAST SAVE EXCEPTIONS
INSERT INTO customer#dblink.oracle.com
VALUES t_records(i);
END send_unique_data;
You can also call the system SQL%BULKEXCEPTIONS collection in case you want to do anything with the records that threw exceptions (such as unique_constraint violations). Be warned that this solution will cause the target table to suffers from performance issues if there are lots of duplicate data attempting to be inserted.

Oracle, 2 procedures avoid deadlock

I have two procedures that I want to run on the same table, one uses the birth date and the other updates the name and last name taken from a third table.
The one that uses the birthday to update the age field runs all over the table, and the one that updates the names and last name only updates the rows that appear on the third table based on a key.
So I launched both and got deadlocked! Is there a way to prioritize any of them? I read about the nowait and skip locked for the update but then, how would I return to the ones skipped?
Hope you can help me on this!!
One possibility is to lock all rows you will update at once. Doing all updates in a single update statment will accomplish this. Or
select whatever from T
where ...
for update;
Another solution is to create what I call a "Gatekeeper" table. Both procedures need to lock the Gatekeeper table in exclusive mode before updating the table in question. The second procedure will block until the first commits but won't deadlock. In 11g you can create a table with no space allocated.
A variation is to insert a row in the Gatekeeper. Then lock only that row with select for update. Then you can use the Gatekeeper in other situations.
I would guess that you got locked because the update for all the rows and the update for a small set of rows accessed rows in different orders.
The former used a full scan and reached Raw A first, then went on to other rows, eventually trying to lock Row B. However, the other query was driven from an index or a join and already had Row B locked, and was off to lock Row A when it found it was already locked.
So, the fix: firstly, having an age column that needs to be constantly modified is a really bad idea. Perhaps it was done to allow indexing of age, but with a correctly written query an index on date of birth will let you find the same records just as quickly. You've broken normalisation rules and ended up coding yourself a deadlocking application. Hopefully you are only updating the rows that need to be updated, not all of them regardless -- I mean, that would just be insane.
The best solution is to get rid of that design flaw.
The not so good solution is to deconflict your queries by running them at different times or by using DBMS_Lock so that only one of them can run at any time.

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