I have a read only database (product) that recides on its own Sql Server 2008.
I already optimized queries by looking at most expensive queries in activity monitor - report. I ordered the report by CPU-cost. I now have something like 50 queries/second and no query is longer than 300ms.
CPU-Time is ok (30%) and Memory is only used by 20% (out of 64GB).
There is one issue: disk time is at steady 100% (I looked at idle time performance counter and used ideras SQL diagnostic manager). I can see that the product db behaves different than my order db which is on a different machine and has smaller tables: If I look at a profiler trace I have queries in product-db that show a value in column "read" higher than 50.000. In my order DB these values are never higher than 1000. The queries in product-db use a lot of Common table expressions, work on large tables (some are around 5 Million entries).
I am not shure if I should invest time in optimizing queries for i/o performance or if I should just add a server. By otimizing for query duration I already added the missing indexes. Is optimizing for i/o something that is usually done?
In short, yes. Optimize for both CPU and IO.
Queries with high CPU tend to be doing unnecessary in-memory sorts, (sometimes inefficient) hash joins, or complex logic.
Queries with high IO (Page Reads) tend to be doing full table scans or working in other inefficient ways.
9 times out of 10, the same queries will be near the top of the list, but if you've worked on the high CPU and you still are unhappy with performance, then by all means, work on the high IO procs next.
There's always a next bottleneck.
they say.
Now that you've tuned CPU usage, it's only natural that I/O load emerges as dominant. Is your performance already acceptable? If yes stop, if no you have to estimate how many hours you will have to invest in further tuning and if buying another server or more hard disks might be cheaper.
Regarding the I/O tuning again, try to see what you can achieve with easy measures. Sometimes you can trade CPU for I/O and vice versa. Compression is an example for this. You would then tune that component that is your current bottlneck.
Before you seek to make the I/O faster try to reduce the I/O that is generated.
Look for obvious IO performance improvements for your query, but more importantly, look at how you can improve your IO performance at the server level.
If your other resources (CPU and memory) aren't overloaded, you probably don't need a new server. Consider adding an SSD for logs and temp files, and/or consider if you can affordably fit your whole DB onto an array of SSDs.
Of course, clearing out your disk IO bottleneck is likely to raise CPU usage, but if your performance is close to acceptable, this will probably improve things to the point that you can stop optimizing for now.
Unless you are using SSDs or a DB optimized SAN then IO is almost always the limit in database applications.
So yes, optimize to get rid of it as much as possible.
Table indexes are the first thing to do.
Then, add as much RAM as you possibly can, up to the complete size of your DB files.
Then partition your data tables (if that is a reasonable thing to do) so that any necessary table or index scans are done on only one or two table partitions.
Then I suppose you either buy bigger machines with even more RAM and/or buy SSDs or a SAN or a SAN with SSDs.
Alternatively you rebuild your entire database application to use something like NoSQL or database sharding, and implement all your relations, joins, constraints, etc in a middle interface layer.
Related
Just have some general questions on hardware choices for polling lots of low-medium density sensor data time series as fast as possible.
System Overview
The data consists of multiple time series of approx 50-100K data points from various sensors at different locations at different times. ~15 columns of data in the main table, but some columns have long array values in them. I'm interfacing with C#/python to send queries to a local database and then work on the returned data.
The Problem and Some Thoughts
As it stands, the logging server is on average hardware (budget 4tb hdds, basic quadcore, 8gb ram) and depending on the amount of data requested in the query, it takes forever (re: "annoying amounts of waiting") to return an entire time series. I have thousands of independent time series and I want to compare multiple ones against each other. Returning a single time series takes at least 30 for 50K rows with a * can take 30+ seconds, but as low as 100ms for only a few columns. A lot of different queries are used so I don't have the luxury of caching for repeated queries.
So what I was thinking of is, instead of work directly from the online server, make an offline copy of the database onto more dedicated hardware that can be used for faster analysis. I don't need all of the data at any one time (i.e. I can pick a a location and time range, copy that offline, and work on that)
The table design is very basic. The most often queried table data has primary key:
PRIMARY KEY (location_id, time_logged, sensor_id)
With simple query like
SELECT * FROM table
WHERE location_id = 2154321 AND sensor_id = 254;
This is most common, and will be used along with some additional WHERE conditions.
There are thousands of location_id and potentially dozens of sensor_id for each location_id
The Questions
(with regard to the above table/pk/query setup)
How much does more RAM help with faster queries. i.e. 64GB vs 8GB
How much does faster cpu / more cores help with faster queries. What kind of CPU (quad/6/12+) would provide the best speedup. Is there diminishing returns?
How would one set up hard disk drives to help with faster queries (RAID cluster with SSD or mechanical).
Would getting a couple or even 4+ cheap mechanical hard disk drives provide a significant speedup in RAID?
I've read about columnar store and how it can be useful for time series (https://www.citusdata.com/blog/76-postgresql-columnar-store-for-analytics). Can anyone shed any insight on this and is it worth setting up?
Will increasing the planner statistics value help significantly?
Any general recommendations / first steps to get the best kind of query speedup? Another dedicated PC with multi-core and lots of ram? A NAS? Dedicated PC with multi-drive RAID
I'm relatively new to working with databases so don't really know what to expect in terms of performance so any pointers would be helpful.
thanks!
We have a mongodb with 336GB data on it.
Unfortunately there is only 8GB memory on that server.
Is it true to say that this will slow the db down, especially when I try to traverse the entire collection?
What can I do to improve performance?
To get things right, this isn't a "BIG" production setup; it is actually relatively small.
That aside:
Is it true to say that this will slow the db down, especially when I try to traverse the entire collection?
It is true yes. As you iterate the collection MongoDB will need to page in your data, this is true even if you have indexes on the collection.
The exception to this is when you use indexOnly cursors whereby all the data comes only from the index, including the returned document; these are otherwise known as covered queries.
The problem you have here is that your dataset is 42x greater than your RAM amount, assuming you are allowed to use all your RAM (this is not true of course, the OS and other programs will reserve amounts off for themselves). This means that if you expect to iterate the entire collection you will not be able to do it performantly, instead MongoDB could be page thrashing its allocated memory.
What can I do to improve performance?
Get a little more RAM.
You could also try a bit of sharding if getting too much RAM on that one server is a pain.
I would aim for about 20x more data than RAM, that shouldn't be too bad in most cases.
You should index your collection http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/applications/indexes/ to improve performance, but bear in mind that memory is utilised by mongodb when querying indexes so make sure each index you create can fit within the memory you have on your server.
You could also shard your collection but you will need more servers to do this. http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/sharding/
And I know it's obvious but get more memory - its cheap!
Mongodb uses memory-mapped files to map the data in to the systems virtual memory. If you try to access more data than the available memory of the system, the performance will be poor. You'll have to consider other options like sharding, indexing, increasing RAM etc. Indexing may improve the performance but not by much if done on a large data set, because indexes also need memory. A few references:
First 3 questions talk about memory-mapped files: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/faq/storage/
On sharding: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/faq/sharding/
Ensuring index fit into the RAM: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/applications/indexes/#ensure-indexes-fit-ram
The other answers say either "have enough memory to fit your data" or "have enough memory for each index" or "have some multiple of your RAM in data". None of those are very effective nor very precise for capacity planning.
You need to know what your access patterns will be and then decide what indexes you will need to effectively be able to use your data. If all of your indexes fit in available RAM with some room to spare for most recently touched documents, then you should be okay.
When your working set (accessed data + indexes) cannot fit in RAM then your performance will be correlated more with disk access speed than anything else. Depending on how fast your disks are and on your throughput and latency requirements, it may work out okay or it may not.
While there is not enough information to say with certainty whether you will succeed or fail on this particular machine, you should be able to collect enough information to determine that for yourself by analyzing your indexing needs, etc.
Can Vertica Database be used for OLTP data?
And if so what are the pros and cons on doing this?
Looking for a Vertica vs Oracle fight :)Since Oracle license is so costly, would Vertica do it job for a better price ?
thx all
Using Vertica as a transactional database is a bad idea. It's designed to be a data warehousing tool. Essentially, it reads and writes data in an optimized fashion. Lots of transactions? That's not what it is designed to do.
I would recommend that you look into VoltDB. Michael Stonebreaker who is the force behind Vertica founded that company as well. His basic philosophy is that Oracle, SQL Server, et al do not do well for high performance since they are designed to do everything. The future is having databases designed for specific tasks.
So he had some concepts for a data warehousing which became Vertica. For transactional databases, there's VoltDB. Not owned by HP, for the record.
For the record, I haven't used VoltDB. From what I know, it isn't as mature as Vertica is as a solution but it looks like it has a ton of promise.
HP Vertica is a column store database. The nature of the way that data is organised within a column store does not lend itself to rapid writes.
HP Vertica gets around this by having a WOS (Write Optimised Store) and ROS (Read Optimised Store which is file based).
Data is moved out of the WOS into the ROS fairly rapidly and the ROS itself has a "merge up" process that takes small ROS files and merges them together to form larger and therefore more easily scanned files.
If you tried to use Vertica for OLTP then what would happen would be that you'd get loads of ROS containers and possibly hit the default limit of 1024 ROS containers very quickly.
If you fronted the store with some form a queuing mechanism to pass through records in larger batches then this would result in fewer and larger ROS files. It would work but if you wanted to take your OLTP system to be reading very close to its writing activity it would not fit the use case.
The WOS/ROS mechanism is a neat work around for the fundamental performance penalty of writes in a column store DB but fundamentally Vertica is not an OLTP DB but rather a data mart technology that can ingest data in near real time
I think there are different ways to read into this question.
Can you use Vertica as an OLTP database?
First I'll define this question a bit. An OLTP database means the database itself is responsible for the transaction processing, not simply receiving somewhat normalized data.
My answer here is absolutely not, unless perhaps it is a single user database. There is practically no RI, no RI locking, table locks on DELETE/UPDATE, and you're likely to accumulate a delete vector in normal OLTP type usage.
You can work around some of these with some extensive middleware programming (distributed locks, heavy avoidance of DELETE/UPDATE, etc). But why? There are tons of options out there that are not Oracle, don't carry a huge price tag but give you everything you need for OLTP.
Can you use Vertica to ingest and query OLTP data?
Yes, definitely. Best to use Vertica towards its strengths, though. Queries in Vertica tend to have a fair amount of overhead, and you can plow through large amounts of data with ease, even normalized. I would not be using Vertica to primary run point queries, grabbing a few rows here and there. It isn't that you can't, but you can't with the same concurrency as other databases that are meant for this purpose.
TL;DR Use the right tool for the right job. I really love using Vertica, but just because I like to swing a hammer doesn't mean that every problem is a nail.
This question is a little old now but i'll share my experience.
I would not suggest vertica as OLTP unless you very carefully consider your workload.
As mentioned in other answers, Vertica has 2 types of storage. ROS is the Read Optimized Storage and WOS is the Write Optimized Storage. WOS is purely in memory so it performs better for inserts but queries slower as all the small updates need to be queried and unioned. Vertica can handle small loads in theory but in practice it didn't work out very well for us performance wise. Also there are drawbacks to WOS namely being that when the database fails WOS is not necessarily preserved when it rolls back to last good epoch. (ROS isn't either but in practice you lose a lot less from ROS).
ROS is a lot more reliable and gives better read performance but you will never be able to handle more than a certain number of queries without a careful design. Although vertica is horizontally scalable, in practice large tables get segmented across all nodes and therefore queries must run on all nodes. So adding more nodes doesn't mean handling more concurrent queries it just means less work per query. If your tables are small enough to be unsegmented then this might not be an issue for you.
Also worth noting is the OLTP typically implies lots concurrent transactions so you'll need to plan resource pools very carefully. By default vertica has a planned concurrency for the general resource pool of the minimum of number of cores per server or RAM/2GB. Essentially what this value does is determine the default memory allocation PER NODE for a segmented query. Therefore by default vertica will not let you run more queries than cores. You can adjust this value but once you hit a cap on memory theres no much you can do because the memory is allocated per node so adding more nodes doesn't even help. If you hit any errors at all for resource pool memory allocations that is the first config your should look at.
Additionally, Vertica is bad with deletes and updates (which resolve to a delete and an insert in the background) so if these are a regular part of your workload then Vertica is probably a bad choice. Personally we use MySQL for our dimension tables that require deletes/updates and then sync that data periodically into vertica to use for joins.
Personally I use Vertica as an OLTP-ish realtime-ish database. We batch our loads into 5 minute intervals which makes vertica happy in terms of how many/large the inserts are. These batches are inserted using COPY DIRECT so that they avoid WOS entirely (only do this if they are large batches as this forces ROS container creation and can be bad if you do it too often). As many projections as we can have are unsegmented to allow better scale out since this makes queries hit only 1 node and allocate memory on only 1 node. It has worked well for us so far and we load about 5 billion rows a day with realtime querying from our UI.
Up_one - considering the telecom use-case - are you doing CDR or something else?
To answer your original question yes Vertica may be a great fit but it depends on how you are loading the data, how you are doing updates, what your data size is and what your SLA is. I am really familiar in this space because I implemented Vertica at a telecom that I worked for at the time.
I am curious if anybody did benchmarks for accessing of data in NoSQL databases vs Oracle (particularly I am talking about Oracle RAC)?
The project requires to work with at least 10mil+ of records, search among them (but not necessary have to be real time), the read is very important for speed, and it's also very important to guarantee HA and reliability (can't lose records!!!)
I can see for myself how say Cassandra/MongoDB might be better fit (because key value storage will provide faster reads than SQL when you go over 10mil records), but I find difficult to articulate all of them nicely. Any links? Suggestions? Bullet points?
Thanks!
10 million records. Assume 250 bytes per record. That is about 2.5 Gb of data, which is well within the capacity of a basic desktop / laptop PC. The data volumes are insignificant (unless each record is sized in Mb, such as picture or audio).
What you do need to talk about is transaction volumes (separated into read and write) and what you consider HA. Read-only HA is easy relative to "Read-write HA". It can be trivial to replicate a read-only data set off to multiple servers at different geographic locations and distribute a query workload on them.
It's much harder to scale out an update heavy workload, which is why you often hear about systems going into meltdown when tickets for a big concert are released. Quite simply there's a fixed number of seats and you can't have ten duplicated systems each selling what they think is available. There has to be a single source of truth, which means a bottleneck (and potentially a single point of failure).
On the HA aspect, RAC is a shared storage technology which generally means your RAC nodes are in close proximity. That can make them vulnerable to localized events such as a building fire or telecoms breakdown. Data Guard is the Oracle technology that relates to off-site replication and failover.
Mostly when you come to comparison of NoSQL vs SQL, you have to understand a very important difference between them. Data in NoSQL may be inconsistent in cost order to achieve HA.
What do I mean by inconsistent? It depends, but usually around 3-5 seconds to propagate the data around nodes. NoSQL database provide mechanism to manage and eliminate that, but if you want all your data be consistent in real time, then you simply use classic SQL, like Oracle RAC.
Coming back to speed comparison: it's simply incomparable which one is faster, because it relays on factors like network infrastructure, computing power and database model etc. But important thing is that at some point you may reach the moment that SQL is economically inefficient to maintain and you have to switch to NoSQL.
I need to load over 1 billion keys into Berkley DB and therefore I want to tune it in advance to get better performance. With standard configuration it takes me now about 15min to load 1'000'000 keys which is too slow.
Is there a proper way to tune for example the B+Tree of Berkley DB (node size etc...)?
(As an comparision, after tuning tokyo cabinet, it loads 1 billion keys in 25min).
P.S.
I'm looking for tuning tips as a code and not parameters to set for a running system (like jvm size etc...)
I'm curious, when TokyoCabinet loads 1B keys in 25 minutes what are the sizes of the keys/values being stored? What's the I/O systems and the storage system you're using? Are you using the term "load" to mean 1B transactional commits to permanent stable storage? That would be ~666,666 inserts/second, which is physically impossible given any I/O system I'm aware of. Multiply that number times the key and value size and now you're hopelessly beyond physical limits.
Please take a look at Gustavo Duarte's blog, read a bit about I/O systems and how things work in hardware and then review your statement. I'm very interested in finding out what exactly TokyoCabinet is doing and what it isn't doing. If I had to guess I'd say that either it's committing to file-system cache in the operating system, but not flushing (fdsync()-ing) those buffers to disk.
Full Disclosure: I'm a product manager at Oracle for Oracle Berkeley DB (a direct competitor of TokyoCabinet), I've been playing with these databases and the best hardware around for them for about ten years so I'm both biased and skeptical.
Berkeley DB has flags you can set on the transaction handle which mimic this and other similar methods of trading off durability (the "D" in ACID) for speed.
As far as how to make Berkeley DB Java Edition (BDB-JE) faster you can try the following:
Deferred writes: this delays writing
to the transaction log for as long as
possible (when buffers are full, it
flushes the data)
Sort your keys in advance: most
B-Trees (ours included) do much
better with in-order insertions for
fast load times-
Increasing the size of the log
files from the default of 10MiB to
something larger, like 100MiB, this
reduces I/O cost-
It's very important to be clear about claims of performance with databases. They seems simple, but it turns out to be very very tricky to get them right so that they don't ever corrupt data or lose committed transactions.
I hope this helps you a bit.
Bulk inserts on BDB-JE are an order of magnitude faster if you group them into a single transaction. The reason is that each single commit causes (by default) a sync write to disk while a transaction is synchronized on commit. In my application writing 100'000 small keys as single commits tooks more than a minute while in a transaction it takes just a few seconds.