Live update with Apache Jena - insert

I have a requirement wherein I need to make realtime updates to my ontological data (in Jena) (Around 30 inserts/updates per minute)
I wanted to know if Jena is good for excessive updates.
Also, if not, Is there any other semantic web based technology which supports excessive updates?
Also, if I want to insert lot of resources in my model, is there any way to automatically (sequentially) generate URIs for the new resources?

I can't for certain - it may well work for you. It'll depend on the amount of data in an update, the storage system used and the capabilities of the machine.
There is no server side automatic generation of resources names. The Jena library contains a URN UUID generator (for type V1 UUIDs) and Java provides type V4. This can help you generate unique names in the application.

Related

Should event driven architecture be targeted for all data & analytics platforms?

For example,
You have an IT estate where a mix of batch and real-time data sources exists from multiple systems, e.g. ERP, Project management, asset, website, monitoring etc.
The aim is to integrate the datasources into a cloud environment (agnostic).
There is a need for reporting and analytics on combinations of all data sources.
Inevitably, some source systems are not capable of streaming, hence batch loading is required.
Potential use-cases for performing functionality/changes/updates based on the ingested data.
Given a steer for creating a future-proofed platform, architecturally, how would you look to design it?
It's a very open-end question, but there are some good principles you can adopt to help direct you in the right direction:
Avoid point-to-point integration, and get everything going through a few common points - ideally one. Using an API Gateway can be a good place to start, the big players (Azure, AWS, GCP) all have their own options, plus there's lots of decent independent ones like Tyk or Kong.
Batches and event-streams are totally different, but even then you can still potentially route them all through the gateway so that you get the centralised observability (reporting, analytics, alerting, etc).
Use standards-based API specifications where possible. A good REST based API, based off a proper resource model is a non-trivial undertaking, not sure if it fits with what you are doing if you are dealing with lots of disparate legacy integration. If you are going to adopt REST, use OpenAPI to specify the API's. Using this standard not only makes it easier for consumers, but also helps you with better tooling as many design, build and test tools support OpenAPI. There's also AsyncAPI for event/async API's
Do some architecture. Moving sh*t to cloud doesn't remove the sh*t - it just moves it to the cloud. Don't recreate old problems in a new place.
Work out the logical components in your new solution: what does each of them do (what's it's reason to exist)? Don't forget ancillary components like API catalogues, etc.
Think about layering the integration (usually depending on how they will be consumed and what role they need to play, e.g. system interface, orchestration, experience APIs, etc).
Want to handle data in a consistent way regardless of source (your 'agnostic' comment)? You'll need to think through how data is ingested and processed. This might lead you into more data / ETL centric considerations rather than integration ones.
Co-design. Is the integration mainly data coming in or going out? Is the integration with 3rd parties or strictly internal?
If you are designing for external / 3rd party consumers then a co-design process is advised, since you're essentially designing the API for them.
If the API's are for internal use, consider designing them for external use so that when/if you decide to do that later it's not so hard.
Taker a step back:
Continually ask yourselves "what problem are we trying to solve?". Usually, a technology initiate is successful if there's a well understood reason for doing it, which has solid buy-in from the business (non-IT).
Who wants the reporting, and why - what problem are they trying to solve?
As you mentioned its an IT estate aka enterprise level solution mix of batch and real time so first you have to identify what is end goal of this migration. You can think of refactoring applications. If you are trying to make it event driven then assess the refactoring efforts and cost. Separation of responsibility is the key factor for refactoring and migration.
If you are thinking about future proofing your solution then consider Cloud for storing and processing your data. Not necessary it will be cheap but mix of Cloud and on-prem could be a way. There are services available by cloud providers to move your data in minimal cost. Cloud native solutions are there for performing analysis on your data. Database migration service in AWS or Azure can move data and then capture on-going changes. So you can keep using on-prem db & apps and perform analysis for reporting on cloud. It will ease out load on your transactional DB. Most data sync from on-prem to cloud is near real time.

Difference between normal JDBC and JDBCIO connector in apache Beam?

Being a beginner with the Apache Beam programming model, I would like to know what is the difference between JDBC and jdbcio. I have developed a simple dataflow which involves normal JDBC connection and it is working as expected.
Is it mandatory to use jdbcio over JDBC? If yes, what are the issues we face when we go with a normal JDBC code?
Within a Beam pipeline there are various options for reading and writing out to external sources of data. The most common method is to make use of inbuilt sinks and sources that have been built by the Beam community (Built-in I/O Transforms). These connectors will often have had considerable development effort spent on them and will have been production hardened. For example the BigQueryIO has been used in production for many years, with continuous development throughout that period. The general advice will therefore be to make use of the standard Sinks and Sources whenever possible.
However not all interactions with external data sources should be via Sources and Sinks, there are use cases where a hand built communication from a DoFn to the external source is the correct path. A few examples below (there are more of course!);
There is no Sink / Source to the data source, or there is a source
but it does not yet support all switches / modes etc for your needs.
Of course you can always enhance the existing Sink / Source or if it
does not exist to build a new I/O connector from scratch and if
possible would be great to contribute this back to the community :)
You are enriching elements flowing through your streaming pipeline
with a small subset of data from a large data set. For example, let's
say your processing events coming from a sales order and you would
like to add information for each item. The information for the item's
lives in a large multi TB store but on average you will only access a
small percentage of the data as lookup keys. In this example it makes
sense to enrich each element by making an external call to the data
store within a DoFn. Rather than reading all of the data in as a
Source and doing the join operation within the pipeline.
Extra notes / hints:
When calling external systems, keep in mind that Apache Beam is designed to distribute work across many threads, this can place significant load on your external datasource, you can often reduce this load by making use of the start & end bundle annotations;
Java (SDK 2.9.0)
DoFn.StartBundle
DoFn.FinishBundle
Python (SDK 2.9.0)
start_bundle()
finish_bundle()

ETL of Human Resource data from Taleo

My company needs to migrate data from a Taleo system to a new HR system.
A little research suggests that traditional ETL may not work against the Taleo cloud based system, but I don't know enough about the setup and am trying to learn.
Does anyone have experience migrating HR data from Taleo to another system, and, if so, how did you do it, and was traditional ETL an option?
Thanks
How you access Taleo depends as much on your platform as theirs.
Example: I'm using Windows:
not sure if this is my mistake ~~ vs2010 Add Service Reference fails
Taleo has just released a new version that as has killed a number of companies temporarily.*
Whether your ETL is one time or continous, Taleo provides a .PDF version of their API that works as follows for employee records (I'm only grabbing their employee records). Other records appear to use the same paradigm.
Employee records have two types of fields: fixed and user defined. The fixed fields which I work with in c# are like simple properties of a class and can be accessed with standard .name notation such as taleoItem.ManagerId. The user defined names are in list of "beans" ... for each bean, one looks first at its name ( *foreach (var taleoItem in taleoEmployeeBean.flexValues) ... if (taleoItem.fieldName == "Social Club Member") { ... ). * currently I'm getting zero of the 50+ flexbeans that I normally get and two flexbeans that I've never before seen. as can be expected, until Taleo fixes this breakage, all that I can to is twiddle my thumbs
When Taleo works properly, retrieving data generally works like this.
access a fixed url to get a url for your company;
authenticate via the url retrieved from step 1 to get a session token.
use the session token from step 2 to invoke the various Taleo API methods.
Warning: the Taleo API has documentation errors. Also, the test cases will not necessarily work.
I'm not familiar with Taleo, but according to their website they have features that allow integration via "XML, Web Services, reusable components, and standard APIs". There are many ETL tools on the market that can interface with web services as a source, or you could optionally write your own.
Taleo provides a PDF which described all the calls that can be made. Basically Taleo uses SOAP as web-service for accessing their data.
For a detailed description visit Taleo Integration in Drupal

Core Data's Limits, can Core Data be used as a Serverside Technology?

I've found no clear answer so far, but maybe I've searched the wrong way.
My Question is, can Core Data to be used as a Persitence Storage for a Server Project? Where are Core Data's Limits, how much Data can be handled with Core Data and SQLite? SQLite should handle a lot of Data very well according to their website. I know of a properitary Java Persitence Manager with an Oracle DB as Storage that handles Millions of Entries and 3000 Clients without Problems. For my own Project I wonder if I can use Core Data on the Server Side for User Mangament and intern microblogging, texting with up to 5000 clients. Will it handle such big amounts of Data or do I have to manage something like that myself? Does anyone happend to have experience with huge amounts if Data and Core Data?
Thank you
twickl
I wouldn't advise using Core Data for a server side project. Core Data was designed to handle the data of individual, object-oriented applications therefore it lacks many of the common features of dedicated server software such as easily handling multiple simultaneous accesses.
Really, the only circumstance where I would advise using it is when the server side logic is very complex and the number of users small. For example, if you wanted to write an in house web app and have almost all the logic on the server, then Core Data might serve well.
Apple used to have WebObjects which was a package to manage servers using an object-oriented DB much like Core Data. (Core Data was inspired by a component of WebObjects called Enterprise Objects.) However, IIRC Apple no longer supports WebObjects for external use.
Your better off using one of the many dedicated server packages out there than trying to roll your own.
I have no experience using Core Data in the manner you describe, but my understanding of the architecture leads me to believe that it could be used, depending on how you plan to query and manipulate the data.
Core Data is very good at maintaining an object graph and using faults to bring parts into memory as needed. In that manner, it could be good on a server for reducing memory requirements even with a large data set.
Core Data is not very good at manipulating collections of objects without loading them into memory, making a change, and writing them back out to disk. Brent Simmons wrote a blog post about this, where he decide to stop using Core Data for some of his RSS reader's model objects because an operation like "mark all as read" didn't scale. While you would like to be able to say something like UPDATE articles SET status = 'read', Core Data must load each article, set its status property, then write it back to disk.
This isn't because Apple engineers are stupid, but because the query layer can't make assumptions about the storage layer (you could be using XML instead of SQLite) and it also must take into account cascading changes and the fact that some article objects may already be loaded into memory and will need to be updated there.
Note that you can also write your own storage providers for Core Data, see Aaron Hillegass's BNRPersistence project. So if Core Data was "mostly good" you might be able to improve on it for your application.
So, a possible answer to your question is that Core Data may be appropriate to your application, as long as you do not need to rely on batch updates to large number of objects. In general, no algorithm or data structure is appropriate for every scenario. Engineering is about wisely choosing between trade-offs. You won't find anything that works well for many clients in every case. It always matters what you are doing.

Performance problems with external data dependencies

I have an application that talks to several internal and external sources using SOAP, REST services or just using database stored procedures. Obviously, performance and stability is a major issue that I am dealing with. Even when the endpoints are performing at their best, for large sets of data, I easily see calls that take 10s of seconds.
So, I am trying to improve the performance of my application by prefetching the data and storing locally - so that at least the read operations are fast.
While my application is the major consumer and producer of data, some of the data can change from outside my application too that I have no control over. If I using caching, I would never know when to invalidate the cache when such data changes from outside my application.
So I think my only option is to have a job scheduler running that consistently updates the database. I could prioritize the users based on how often they login and use the application.
I am talking about 50 thousand users, and at least 10 endpoints that are terribly slow and can sometimes take a minute for a single call. Would something like Quartz give me the scale I need? And how would I get around the schedular becoming a single point of failure?
I am just looking for something that doesn't require high maintenance, and speeds at least some of the lesser complicated subsystems - if not most. Any suggestions?
This does sound like you might need a data warehouse. You would update the data warehouse from the various sources, on whatever schedule was necessary. However, all the read-only transactions would come from the data warehouse, and would not require immediate calls to the various external sources.
This assumes you don't need realtime access to the most up to date data. Even if you needed data accurate to within the past hour from a particular source, that only means you would need to update from that source every hour.
You haven't said what platforms you're using. If you were using SQL Server 2005 or later, I would recommend SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) for updating the data warehouse. It's made for just this sort of thing.
Of course, depending on your platform choices, there may be alternatives that are more appropriate.
Here are some resources on SSIS and data warehouses. I know you've stated you will not be using Microsoft products. I include these links as a point of reference: these are the products I was talking about above.
SSIS Overview
Typical Uses of Integration Services
SSIS Documentation Portal
Best Practices for Data Warehousing with SQL Server 2008

Resources