Efficient way to find lots of "most recent" events in sqlite3 - performance

I've got an sqlite3 database that contains events. Each event is either "on" or "off" of something happening, and contains the time of the event as well as what the event is and some miscellaneous data which varies by event.
I want to query to find that last event of each type. So far this is the query I have come up with:
SELECT * from event where name='event1on' or name='event1off' ORDER BY t DESC LIMIT 1
This works, but it is slow when I have a lot of events I want to find the latest one of. I suspect this is because for each SELECT a full scan of the database must be made (several million rows), but I am at a loss to find a more efficient way to do this.

If you have SQLite 3.7.11 or later, you can use max to select other fields from the record that contains the maximum value:
SELECT *, max(t) FROM event GROUP BY name
To speed up this query, try creating one index on the name and t fields.

Related

Laravel - find offset of record in mysql results

I have a MySQL table of records with several fields.
These records are shown and updated live in the browser. They are displayed in an order choosen by the user, with optional filters also choosen by the user.
Sometimes a change is made to one of the records, and it may affect the order for a given user.
In order to position the message correctly in the list, I need to find where its new offset falls after the change to the record. Basically, I need to get the "id" for the record that now comes before it in the MySQL results, so that I can use Javascript on the client side to reposition the record on the screen.
In raw SQL, I'd do something like this:
SET #rank=0;
SELECT rank
FROM
(SELECT #rank:=#rank+1 AS rank,
subQuery.id AS innerQuery,
FROM ...{rest of custom query here}... as subQuery)
AS outerQuery WHERE outerQuery.innerQuery={ID TO FIND};
Then I can just subtract 1 from the resulting rank, and find the ID of the question that comes before the record in question.
Is this kind of query possible with Laravel's query builder? Or is there a better strategy than what I've come up with here to accomplish the same task?
EDIT: There are a lot of records. So if possible I'd like to avoid loading all the records into memory to find the offset of the record. They are originally loaded on the screen in an "infinite scroll" type method, since it would be too much to load all of them at once.

How to get the last "row" in a cassandra's long row

In Cassandra, a row can be very long and store units of time relevant data. For example, one row could look like the following:
RowKey: "weather"
name=2013-01-02:temperature, value=90,
name=2013-01-02:humidity, value=23,
name=2013-01-02:rain, value=false",
name=2013-01-03:temperature, value=91,
name=2013-01-03:humidity, value=24,
name=2013-01-03:rain, value=false",
name=2013-01-04:temperature, value=90,
name=2013-01-04:humidity, value=23,
name=2013-01-04:rain, value=false".
9 columns of 3 days' weather info.
time is a primary key in this row. So the order of this row would be time based.
My question is, is there any way for me to do a query like: what is the last/first day's humidity value in this row? I know I could use a Order By statement in CQL but since this row is already sorted by time, there should be some way to just get the first/last one directly, instead of doing another sort. Or is cassandra optimizing it already with Order By statement under the hood?
Another way I could think of is, store another column in this row called "last_time_stamp" that always updates itself as new data is inserted in. But that would require one more update every time I insert new weather data.
Thanks for any suggestion!:)
Without seeing more of your actual table, I suggest using a timestamp (or timeuuid if there is a possibility for collisions) as the second component in a compound primary key. Using this, you can get the last "row" by selecting ORDER BY t DESC LIMIT 1.
You could also change the clustering order in your schema to order it naturally for "last N" queries.
Please see examples and linked resource in this answer.

Efficient way to query

My app has a class that saves picture that users upload. Each object in the class has a city property that holds the name of the city that the picture was taken at, and a like property that tracks the number of likes.
I want to be able to send a query that returns one picture per city and each picture should have the highest ranking of likes in the city it belongs to. How can I do that?
One way which I first thought about is doing multiple queries by fetching the most liked picture of a city and save it in an array, and then do the same to other cities.
However, each country has more than one city, thus it's not that efficient.
Parse doesn't support the ordinary operations used in databases. Besides, I tried to use a compound query. Unfortunately, I can't set limit or ordering on the subqueries. Any good solution for this?
It would be easy using group by. Unfortunately, Parse does not support "select distinct" or "group by" features.
As you've suggested you need to fetch for each country all the cities, and for each one get the top most rated photo.
BUT, since Parse has strict restrictions on the duration time execution of a request ( 3 sec for an event listener, 7 sec for a custom function ), I suggest you to do this in a background job, saving in a new table the top rated photo for each city. In this way you can easily query the db from client. The Background jobs can be executed up to 15 minuted before parse drop them, so you could make that kind of queries without timeouts.
Hope it helps

Can you sort a GET on a Cassandra column family by the Timestamp value created for each column entry, rather than the column Keys?

Basically I have a 'thread line' where new threads are made and a TimeUUID is used as a key. Which obviously provides sorting of a new thread quite easily, espically when say making a query of the latest 20 threads etc.
My problem is that when a new 'post' is made to a thread I want to be able to 'bump' that thread to the front of the 'thread line' which is where the problem comes in, how do I basically make this happen so I can still make queries that can still be selected in the right order without providing any kind of duplicates etc.
The only way I can see this working is if rather than a column family sorting via a TimeUUID I need the column family to sort via the insertion Timestamp, therefore I can use the unique thread IDs for column keys and retrieve these in the order they are inserted or reinserted rather than by TimeUUID? Is this possible or am I missing a simple trick that allows for this? As far as I know you have to set a particular comparitor or otherwise it defaults to bytes?
Columns within a row are always sorted by name with the given comparator. You cannot sort by timestamp or value or anything else, or Cassandra would not be able to merge multiple updates to the same column correctly.
As to your use case, I can think of two options.
The most similar to what you are doing now would be to create a second columnfamily, ThreadMostRecentPosts, with timeuuid columns (you said "keys" but it sounds like you mean "columns"). When a new post arrives, delete the old most-recent column and add a new one.
This has two problems:
The unit of replication is the row, so having this grow indefinitely could be problematic. (Using expiring columns to age out no-longer-relevant thread information might help.)
You need a lock manager so that multiple posts to the same thread don't race and possibly leave multiple entries in this row.
I would suggest instead creating a row per day (for instance), whose columns are the thread IDs and whose values are the most recent post. Adding a new post just updates the value in that column; no delete/re-add is done, so the race is not a problem anymore. You don't get sorting for free anymore but that's okay because you're limiting it to a small enough set that you can do that sort in memory (say, yesterday's threads and today's).
(Finally, I would add that I can say from experience that having a cutoff past which old threads don't get bumped to the front by a new reply is a Good Thing.)

Improve SQL Server 2005 Query Performance

I have a course search engine and when I try to do a search, it takes too long to show search results. You can try to do a search here
http://76.12.87.164/cpd/testperformance.cfm
At that page you can also see the database tables and indexes, if any.
I'm not using Stored Procedures - the queries are inline using Coldfusion.
I think I need to create some indexes but I'm not sure what kind (clustered, non-clustered) and on what columns.
Thanks
You need to create indexes on columns that appear in your WHERE clauses. There are a few exceptions to that rule:
If the column only has one or two unique values (the canonical example of this is "gender" - with only "Male" and "Female" the possible values, there is no point to an index here). Generally, you want an index that will be able to restrict the rows that need to be processed by a significant number (for example, an index that only reduces the search space by 50% is not worth it, but one that reduces it by 99% is).
If you are search for x LIKE '%something' then there is no point for an index. If you think of an index as specifying a particular order for rows, then sorting by x if you're searching for "%something" is useless: you're going to have to scan all rows anyway.
So let's take a look at the case where you're searching for "keyword 'accounting'". According to your result page, the SQL that this generates is:
SELECT
*
FROM (
SELECT TOP 10
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY sq.name) AS Row,
sq.*
FROM (
SELECT
c.*,
p.providername,
p.school,
p.website,
p.type
FROM
cpd_COURSES c, cpd_PROVIDERS p
WHERE
c.providerid = p.providerid AND
c.activatedYN = 'Y' AND
(
c.name like '%accounting%' OR
c.title like '%accounting%' OR
c.keywords like '%accounting%'
)
) sq
) AS temp
WHERE
Row >= 1 AND Row <= 10
In this case, I will assume that cpd_COURSES.providerid is a foreign key to cpd_PROVIDERS.providerid in which case you don't need an index, because it'll already have one.
Additionally, the activatedYN column is a T/F column and (according to my rule above about restricting the possible values by only 50%) a T/F column should not be indexed, either.
Finally, because searching with a x LIKE '%accounting%' query, you don't need an index on name, title or keywords either - because it would never be used.
So the main thing you need to do in this case is make sure that cpd_COURSES.providerid actually is a foreign key for cpd_PROVIDERS.providerid.
SQL Server Specific
Because you're using SQL Server, the Management Studio has a number of tools to help you decide where you need to put indexes. If you use the "Index Tuning Wizard" it is actually usually pretty good at tell you what will give you the good performance improvements. You just cut'n'paste your query into it, and it'll come back with recommendations for indexes to add.
You still need to be a little bit careful with the indexes that you add, because the more indexes you have, the slower INSERTs and UPDATEs will be. So sometimes you'll need to consolidate indexes, or just ignore them altogether if they don't give enough of a performance benefit. Some judgement is required.
Is this the real live database data? 52,000 records is a very small table, relatively speaking, for what SQL 2005 can deal with.
I wonder how much RAM is allocated to the SQL server, or what sort of disk the database is on. An IDE or even SATA hard disk can't give the same performance as a 15K RPM SAS disk, and it would be nice if there was sufficient RAM to cache the bulk of the frequently accessed data.
Having said all that, I feel the " (c.name like '%accounting%' OR c.title like '%accounting%' OR c.keywords like '%accounting%') " clause is problematic.
Could you create a separate Course_Keywords table, with two columns "courseid" and "keyword" (varchar(24) should be sufficient for the longest keyword?), with a composite clustered index on courseid+keyword
Then, to make the UI even more friendly, use AJAX to apply keyword validation & auto-completion when people type words into the keywords input field. This gives you the behind-the-scenes benefit of having an exact keyword to search for, removing the need for pattern-matching with the LIKE operator...
Using CF9? Try using Solr full text search instead of %xxx%?
You'll want to create indexes on the fields you search by. An index is a secondary list of your records presorted by the indexed fields.
Think of an old-fashioned printed yellow pages - if you want to look up a person by their last name, the phonebook is already sorted in that way - Last Name is the clustered index field. If you wanted to find phone numbers for people named Jennifer or the person with the phone number 867-5309, you'd have to search through every entry and it would take a long time. If there were an index in the back with all the phone numbers or first names listed in order along with the page in the phonebook that the person is listed, it would be a lot faster. These would be the unclustered indexes.
I would try changing your IN statements to an EXISTS query to see if you get better performance on the Zip code lookup. My experience is that IN statements work great for small lists but the larger they get, you get better performance out of EXISTS as the query engine will stop searching for a specific value the first instance it runs into.
<CFIF zipcodes is not "">
EXISTS (
SELECT zipcode
FROM cpd_CODES_ZIPCODES
WHERE zipcode = p.zipcode
AND 3963 * (ACOS((SIN(#getzipcodeinfo.latitude#/57.2958) * SIN(latitude/57.2958)) +
(COS(#getzipcodeinfo.latitude#/57.2958) * COS(latitude/57.2958) *
COS(longitude/57.2958 - #getzipcodeinfo.longitude#/57.2958)))) <= #radius#
)
</CFIF>

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