RowVersion and Performance - performance

I was wondering if there was an performance implications of adding a rowversion column on a table in a Sql-Server database?

There are few performance implications, rowversion is just a new name for the old timestamp datatype. So your database will need to store the additional binary field. Your performance will suffer much more when you try to do queries on this data such as:
SELECT *
FROM MyTable
WHERE rowVersion > #rowVersion
Which is the common way that can be used to get the list of updated items since last #rowVersion.
This looks fine and will work perfect for a table with say 10,000 rows. But when you get to 1M rows you will quickly discover that it has always been doing a tablescan and your performance hit is because your table now no longer fits entirely within the RAM of the server.
This is the common problem that is encountered with the rowVersion column, it is not magically indexed on it's own. Also, when you index a rowVersion column you have to accept that the index will often get very fragmented over time, because the new updated values are always going to be at the bottom of the index, leaving gaps throughout the index as you update existing items.
Edit: If you're not going use the rowVersion field for checking for updated items and instead you're going to use it for consistency to ensure that the record isn't updated since you last read, then this is going to be a perfectly acceptable use and will not impact.
UPDATE MyTable SET MyField = ' #myField
WHERE Key = #key AND rowVersion = #rowVersion

Related

Oracle compressed/b-tree index how and when to use

I would like to add a compressed index to the Oracle Applications workflow table hr.pqh_ss_transaction_history in order to access specific types of workflows (process_name) and workflows for specific people (selected_person_id).
There are lots of repeating values in process_name although the data is skewed. I would however want to access the TFG_HR_NEW_HIRE_PLACE_JSP_PRC and TFG_HR_TERMINATION_JSP_PRC process types.
"PROCESS_NAME","CNT"
"HR_GENERIC_APPROVAL_PRC",40347
"HR_PERSONAL_INFO_JSP_PRC",39284
"TFG_HR_NEW_HIRE_PLACE_JSP_PRC",18117
"TFG_HREMPSTS_TERMS_CHG_JSP_PRC",14076
"TFG_HR_TERMINATION_JSP_PRC",8764
"HR_ADV_INDIVIDUAL_COMP_PRC",4907
"TFG_HR_SIT_NOAPP",3979
"TFG_YE_TAX_PROV",2663
"HR_TERMINATION_JSP_PRC",1310
"HR_CHANGE_PAY_JSP_PRC",953
"TFG_HR_SIT_EXIT_JSP_PRC",797
"HR_SIT_JSP_PRC",630
"HR_QUALIFICATION_JSP_PRC",282
"HR_CAED_JSP_PRC",250
"TFG_HR_EMP_TERM_JSP_PRC",211
"PER_DOR_JSP_PRC",174
"HR_AWARD_JSP_PRC",101
"TFG_HR_SIT_REP_MOT",32
"TFG_HR_SIT_NEWPOS_NIB_JSP_PRC",30
"TFG_HR_SIT_NEWPOS_INBU_JSP_PRC",28
"HR_NEW_HIRE_PLACE_JSP_PRC",22
"HR_NEWHIRE_JSP_PRC",6
selected_person_id would obviously be more selective. Unfortunately there are 3774 nulls for this column and the highest count after that is 73 for one person. A lot of people would only have 1 row. The total row count is 136963.
My query would be in this format:
select psth.item_key,
psth.creation_date,
psth.last_update_date
from hr.pqh_ss_transaction_history psth
where nvl(psth.selected_person_id, :p_person_id) = :p_person_id
and psth.process_name = 'HR_TERMINATION_JSP_PRC'
order by psth.last_update_date
I am on Oracle 12c release 1.
I assume it would be a good idea to put a non-compressed b-tree index on selected_person_id since the values returned would fall in the less than 5% of the total rows scenario, but how do you handle the nulls in the column which would not go into the index when you select using nvl(psth.selected_person_id, :p_person_id) = :p_person_id? Is there a more efficient way to write the sql and how should you create this index?
For process_name I would like to use a compressed b-tree index. I am assuming that the statement is
CREATE INDEX idxname ON pqh_ss_transaction_history(process_name) COMPRESS
where there would be an implicit second column for rowid. Is it safe for it to use rowid here, since normally it is not advised to use rowid? Is the skewed data an issue (most of the time I would be selecting on the high volume side)? I don't understand how compressed indexes would be efficient. For b-tree indexes you would normally want to return 5% of the data, otherwise a full table scan is actually more efficient. How does the compressed index return so many rowids and then do lookup into the full table using those rowids, faster than a full table scan?
Or since the optimizer will only be able to use one of the two indexes should I rather create an uncompressed function based index with selected_person_id and process_name concatenated?
Perhaps you could create this index:
CREATE INDEX idxname ON pqh_ss_transaction_history
(process_name, NVL(selected_person_id,-1)) COMPRESS 1
Then change your query to:
select psth.item_key,
psth.creation_date,
psth.last_update_date
from hr.pqh_ss_transaction_history psth
where nvl(psth.selected_person_id, -1) in (:p_person_id,-1)
and psth.process_name = 'HR_TERMINATION_JSP_PRC'
order by psth.last_update_date

Adding Index To A Column Having Flag Values

I am a novice in tuning oracle queries thus need help.
If I have a sql query like:
select a.ID,a.name.....
from a,b,c
where a.id=b.id
and ....
and b.flag='Y';
then will adding index to the FLAG column of table b help to tune the query by any means? The FLAG column has only 2 values Y and N
With a standard btree index, the SQL engine can find the row or rows in the index for the specified value quickly due to its binary structure, then use the physical address (the rowid) stored in the index to access the desired row in a second hop. It's like looking in the index of a book to find the page number. So that is:
Go to index with the key value you want to look up.
The index tells you the physical address in the table.
Go straight to that physical address.
That is nice and quick for something like a unique customer ID. It's still OK for something nonunique, like a customer ID in a table of orders, although the database has to go through the index entries and for each one go to the indicated address. That can still be faster than slogging through the entire table from top to bottom.
But for a column with only two distinct values, you can see that it is going to be more work going through all of the index entries for 'Y' for example, and for each one going to the indicated location in the table, than it would be to just forget the index and scan the whole table in one shot.
That's unless the values are unevenly distributed. If there are a million Y rows and ten N rows then an index will help you find those N rows fast but be no use for Y.
Adding an index to a column with only 2 values normally isn't very useful, because Oracle might just as well do a full table scan.
From your query it looks like it would be more useful to have an index on id, because that would help with the join a.id=b.id.
If you really want to get into tuning then learn to use "explain plan", as that will give you some indication of how much work Oracle needs to do for a query. Add (or remove) an index, then rerun the explain plan.

Set sort on first column as default in TOAD

I'm using Toad for Oracle 12.5 and a little thing anoy me : when I look into the "Data" tab of a table, the row order is all jumbled up.
On any other DB software I used (SQL developper, phpmyadmin, etc), the default data view would retur the rows ordered by the primary key
So, I would like it to automaticly by default sort the data in the "Data" tab of each table to the first column, or even better, to the table primary key.
I've looked in the options but I can't see anything related to this.
Have some of you had the same problem ?
No oracle client that I have seen ever tacks an "order by" onto a statement on its own accord. It returns what the query returns in the order (or lack thereov) that it receives it.
Now it may LOOK ordered if the rows were inserted in order, but that is a fluke. Period.
And frankly, I'd be upset if a UI arbitrarily added expensive sorts to my queries unless I specifically told it to.
I have some BIG tables. presuming that I want the UI to take the time to scan the index and grab the lowest PK values just because I opened the DATA tab? No. Dear me - NO!
If I want it ordered, I will open the sort/filter dialog and specify so, or click on the appropriate column header to sort the results.
ADDITION:
If there ARE some tables where you want this behaviour (I can see the convenience if checking code tables for example), then use the sort/filter dialog on the data grid for that table to set an order by and TOAD will remember that setting for that table in this schema until you remove it. So you CAN set this behaviour where you want and not deal with the performance aspects where you don't.

Should one store a search_data tsvector in the same table or external table?

I am implementing full text search in postgres.
I would like to search all posts in my system. The posts fulltext index is an amalgamation of the post title and post body.
I have two ways of achieving this:
create a tsvector column in the posts table, trigger an update to it.
create a second table (posts_search) with a post_id and tsvector column containing the index data.
create a simple gin index ... (out of the question, cause my real world problem needs data in multiple tables for the index)
What is going to perform better, considering I sometimes need to filter down the search by other attributes in the table (like deleted_at is null and so on).
Is it a better approach to keep the tsvector column in the same table as the data (side effect select * now sucks) or a separate table (side effect, join required, index filtering is complicated)?
In my experiments, typical size of tsvector column is about 1% of the size of text field this tsvector was computed from using to_tsvector().
With this in mind, storing tsvector column in another table should provide performance benefit. For example, even if you do not use SELECT * (and you shouldn't, really), any seqscan in original single table will still have to load pages which contain original text. If you offload tsvector field to separate table, page loading will be faster by 100x.
In other words, I would favor second solution of offloading tsvector field to separate table. Or, alternatively, offloading posts (original text) deeper into your table hierarchy (but I guess it is almost the same thing).
Note that for full text search to work, original text is not necessary. You way want to even not store it in database, or store it in highly compressed format (and not necessarily easily accessible by SQL routines). It would work as long as something can create tsvector based on original text, or update when it changes.

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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