I'm using MongoDB for my database. The query that I'm currently working on revealed a possible deficiency in my schema. Below is the relevant layout of my collections. Note that games.players is an array of 2 players since the game is chess.
users {_id, username, ...}
games {_id, players[], ...}
msgs {_id, username, gameid, time, msg}
The data that I need is:
All msgs for games which a user is in which is newer than a given timestamp.
In a SQL database, my query would look similar to:
SELECT * FROM msgs WHERE time>=$time AND gameid IN
(SELECT _id FROM games WHERE players=$username);
But, Mongo isn't a relational database, so doesn't support sub-queries or joins. I see two possible solutions. What would be better performance-wise and efficiency-wise?
Multiple Queries
Select games the user is in, then use $in to match msgs.gameid by.
Other?
Normalization
Make users.games contain all games a user is in.
Copy games.players to msgs.players by msgs.gameid
etc.,
I'm a relative newbie to MongoDB, but I find my self frequently using a combination of the two approaches. Some things - e.g. user names - are frequently duplicated to simplify queries used for display, but any time I need to do more than display information, I wind up writing multiple queries, sometimes 2 or 3 levels deep, using $in, to gather all the documents I need to work with for a given operation.
You can "normalize" yourself. I would add an array to users that list the games he is a member of;
users {_id, username, games={game1,game2,game3}}
now you can do a query on msgs where the time>time$ and the {games._id "is in" users.games}
You will have to maintain the games list on each user.
Related
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
I have trouble writing a filter for LDAP query.
I have two object classes - Person and Service. Database consists of a number of Persons, each having zero or more services as children. Each person has an identifier, personNumber attribute. I want to select several persons and all their services given person numbers. Is it possible to do so in one query?
For example, if we have the following set of objects:
personNumber=1,ou=root,o=org
serviceNumber=1,personNumber=1,ou=root,o=org
serviceNumber=2,personNumber=1,ou=root,o=org
personNumber=2,ou=root,o=org
serviceNumber=3,personNumber=2,ou=root,o=org
personNumber=3,ou=root,o=org
serviceNumber=4,personNumber=3,ou=root,o=org
, is it possible, given person numbers 1 and 2, to retrieve these objects:
personNumber=1,ou=root,o=org
serviceNumber=1,personNumber=1,ou=root,o=org
serviceNumber=2,personNumber=1,ou=root,o=org
personNumber=2,ou=root,o=org
serviceNumber=3,personNumber=2,ou=root,o=org
but not these:
personNumber=3,ou=root,o=org
serviceNumber=4,personNumber=3,ou=root,o=org
, using one query only? It is an example; it is possible to have more than two identifiers to load. They are not known a priori.
Also, is there a way to specify that attribute value should be in some collection of values, like IN (..) clause in SQL, other than generating big (|(a=..)(a=..)(a=..)..) filter?
The answer is No, per RFC https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2254, there is NO such filter.If the IN list is very large and you have lots of people in ldap, you need write a simple paged query to get all results using (objectClass=Person) filter, and filter the result after retrial. if your code is written in Java, you can checkout unboundid LDAP SDK
If person doesn't have a multivalued attribute holding the service there is no way this can be returned in one ldapsearch. You'll need at least a two stage rocket: first select person, for each person check on childnodes.
AFAIK there is no IN operator in LDAP filters. The RFC is clear about that. So you're stuck with your tedious (|(a=s1)(a=s2)(a=s3)...) construct.
Suppose I have a large (300-500k) collection of text documents stored in the relational database. Each document can belong to one or more (up to six) categories. I need users to be able to randomly select documents in a specific category so that a single entity is never repeated, much like how StumbleUpon works.
I don't really see a way I could implement this using slow NOT IN queries with large amount of users and documents, so I figured I might need to implement some custom data structure for this purpose. Perhaps there is already a paper describing some algorithm that might be adapted to my needs?
Currently I'm considering the following approach:
Read all the entries from the database
Create a linked list based index for each category from the IDs of documents belonging to the this category. Shuffle it
Create a Bloom Filter containing all of the entries viewed by a particular user
Traverse the index using the iterator, randomly select items using Bloom Filter to pick not viewed items.
If you track via a table what entries that the user has seen... try this. And I'm going to use mysql because that's the quickest example I can think of but the gist should be clear.
On a link being 'used'...
insert into viewed (userid, url_id) values ("jj", 123)
On looking for a link...
select p.url_id
from pages p left join viewed v on v.url_id = p.url_id
where v.url_id is null
order by rand()
limit 1
This causes the database to go ahead and do a 1 for 1 join, and your limiting your query to return only one entry that the user has not seen yet.
Just a suggestion.
Edit: It is possible to make this one operation but there's no guarantee that the url will be passed successfully to the user.
It depend on how users get it's random entries.
Option 1:
A user is paging some entities and stop after couple of them. for example the user see the current random entity and then moving to the next one, read it and continue it couple of times and that's it.
in the next time this user (or another) get an entity from this category the entities that already viewed is clear and you can return an already viewed entity.
in that option I would recommend save a (hash) set of already viewed entities id and every time user ask for a random entity- randomally choose it from the DB and check if not already in the set.
because the set is so small and your data is so big, the chance that you get an already viewed id is so small, that it will take O(1) most of the time.
Option 2:
A user is paging in the entities and the viewed entities are saving between all users and every time user visit your page.
in that case you probably use all the entities in each category and saving all the viewed entites + check whether a entity is viewed will take some time.
In that option I would get all the ids for this topic- shuffle them and store it in a linked list. when you want to get a random not viewed entity- just get the head of the list and delete it (O(1)).
I assume that for any given <user, category> pair, the number of documents viewed is pretty small relative to the total number of documents available in that category.
So can you just store indexed triples <user, category, document> indicating which documents have been viewed, and then just take an optimistic approach with respect to randomly selected documents? In the vast majority of cases, the randomly selected document will be unread by the user. And you can check quickly because the triples are indexed.
I would opt for a pseudorandom approach:
1.) Determine number of elements in category to be viewed (SELECT COUNT(*) WHERE ...)
2.) Pick a random number in range 1 ... count.
3.) Select a single document (SELECT * FROM ... WHERE [same as when counting] ORDER BY [generate stable order]. Depending on the SQL dialect in use, there are different clauses that can be used to retrieve only the part of the result set you want (MySQL LIMIT clause, SQLServer TOP clause etc.)
If the number of documents is large the chance serving the same user the same document twice is neglibly small. Using the scheme described above you don't have to store any state information at all.
You may want to consider a nosql solution like Apache Cassandra. These seem to be ideally suited to your needs. There are many ways to design the algorithm you need in an environment where you can easily add new columns to a table (column family) on the fly, with excellent support for a very sparsely populated table.
edit: one of many possible solutions below:
create a CF(column family ie table) for each category (creating these on-the-fly is quite easy).
Add a row to each category CF for each document belonging to the category.
Whenever a user hits a document, you add a column with named and set it to true to the row. Obviously this table will be huge with millions of columns and probably quite sparsely populated, but no problem, reading this is still constant time.
Now finding a new document for a user in a category is simply a matter of selecting any result from select * where == null.
You should get constant time writes and reads, amazing scalability, etc if you can accept Cassandra's "eventually consistent" model (ie, it is not mission critical that a user never get a duplicate document)
I've solved similar in the past by indexing the relational database into a document oriented form using Apache Lucene. This was before the recent rise of NoSQL servers and is basically the same thing, but it's still a valid alternative approach.
You would create a Lucene Document for each of your texts with a textId (relational database id) field and multi valued categoryId and userId fields. Populate the categoryId field appropriately. When a user reads a text, add their id to the userId field. A simple query will return the set of documents with a given categoryId and without a given userId - pick one randomly and display it.
Store a users past X selections in a cookie or something.
Return the last selections to the server with the users new criteria
Randomly choose one of the texts satisfying the criteria until it is not a member of the last X selections of the user.
Return this choice of text and update the list of last X selections.
I would experiment to find the best value of X but I have in mind something like an X of say 16?
I have a very large set of data on which I'm doing a great deal of post-query manipulation (sorting, filtering, etc etc). I would like do all this manipulation on an array of ActiveRecord objects that contains only the information necessary to the sorting, filtering, and paging, and then add the data necessary for display at the end.
For example, let's say I have a database with two tables: baseball_players and player_infos. The baseball_players table contains all of the interesting stuff (stats, team, name, birthday, etc etc etc). Player_infos contains player_id, player_rank, and player_position. I have 15000 players, and I want to find the numbers 100-150 of the best catchers of all times. I retrieve an array of all player_infos, filter to only catchers, sort by player_rank, and then retrieve records 100-150.
What is the best way to merge the resulting player_info records with their corresponding baseball_player records? Hash.merge would work perfectly, but I don't want to convert these objects to Hashes. Does ActiveRecord support something similar?
Note that I have a restriction where I cannot simply query the data using SQL - I have to manually sort and filter an object containing all 15000 player_info records.
I believe you are looking for ActiveRecord::Base#update.
I have a database of about 200k books. I wish to give my users a way to quickly search a book by the title. Now, some titles might have prefix like A, THE, etc. and also can have numbers in the title, so search for 12 should match books with "12", "twelve" and "dozen" in the title. This will work via AJAX, so I need to make sure database query is really fast.
I assume that most of the users will try to search using some words of the title, so I'm thinking to split all the titles into words and create a separate database table which would map words to titles. However, I fear this might not give the best results. For example, the book title could be some 2 or 3 commonly used words, and I might get a list of books with longer titles that contain all 2-3 words and the one I'm looking for lost like a needle in a haystack. Also, searching for a book with many words in the title might slow down the query because of a lot of OR clauses.
Basically, I'm looking for a way to:
find the results quickly
sort them by relevance.
I assume this is not the first time someone needs something like this, and I'd hate to reinvent the wheel.
P.S. I'm currently using MySQL, but I could switch to anything else if needed.
Using a SOUNDEX is the best way i think.
SELECT
id,
title
FROM products AS p
WHERE p.title SOUNDS LIKE 'Shaw'
// This will match 'Saw' etc.
For best database performances you can best calculate the SOUNDEX value of your titles and put this in a new column. You can calculate the soundex with SOUNDEX('Hello').
Example usage:
UPDATE `books` SET `soundex_title` = SOUNDEX(title);
You might want to have a look at Apache Lucene. this is a high performance java based Information Retrieval System.
you would want to create an IndexWriter, and index all your titles, and you can add parameters (have a look at the class) linking to the actual book.
when searching, you would need an IndexReader and an IndexSearcher, and use the search() oporation on them.
have a look at the sample at: src/demo and in: http://lucene.apache.org/java/2_4_0/demo2.html
using Information Retrieval techniques makes the indexing take longer, but every search will not require going through most of the titles, and overall you can expect better performance for searching.
also, choosing good Analyzer enables you to ignore words such "the","a"...
One solution that would easily accomodate your volume of data and speed requirment is to use the Redis key-value pair store.
The way I see it, you can go ahead with your solution of mapping titles to keywords and storing them under the form:
keyword : set of book titles
Redis already has a built-in set data-type that you can use.
Next, to get the titles of the books that contains the search keywords you can use the sinter command which will peform set intersection for you.
Everything is done in memory; therefore the response time is very fast.
Also, if you want to save your index, redis has a number of different persistance/caching mechanisms.
Apache Lucene with Solr is definitely a very good option for your problem
You can directly link Solr/Lucene to directly index your MySQL database. Here is a simple tutorial on how to link your MySQL database with Lucene/Solr: http://www.cabotsolutions.com/2009/05/using-solr-lucene-for-full-text-search-with-mysql-db/
Here are the advantages and pains of using Lucene-Solr instead of MySQL full text search: http://jayant7k.blogspot.com/2006/05/mysql-fulltext-search-versus-lucene.html
Keep it simple. Create an index on the title field and use wildcard pattern matching. You can not possibly make it any faster as your bottleneck is not the string matching but the number of strings you want to match against the title.
And just came up with a different idea. You say that some words can be interpreted differently. Like 12, Twelve, dozen. Instead of creating a query with different interpretations, why not store different interpretations of the titles in a separate table with a one to many to the books. You can then GROUP BY book_id to get unique book titles.
Say the book "A dime in a dozen". In books table it will be:
book_id=356
book_title='A dime in a dozen'
In titles table will be stored:
titles_id=123
titles_book_id=356
titles_title='A dime in a dozen'
--
titles_id=124
titles_book_id=356
titles_title='A dime in a 12'
--
titles_id=125
titles_book_id=356
titles_title='A dime in a twelve'
The query for this:
SELECT b.book_id, b.book_title
FROM books b JOIN titles t on b.book_id=t.titles_book_id
WHERE t.titles_title='%twelve%'
GROUP BY b.book_id
Now, insertions becomes a much bigger task, but creating the variants can be done outside the database and inserted in one swoop.