What is the best way in terms of speed of the platform and maintainability to access data (read only) on Dynamics CRM 4? I've done all three, but interested in the opinions of the crowd.
Via the API
Via the webservices directly
Via DB calls to the views
...and why?
My thoughts normally center around DB calls to the views but I know there are purists out there.
Given both requirements I'd say you want to call the views. Properly crafted SQL queries will fly.
Going through the API is required if you plan to modify data, but it isnt the fastest approach around because it doesnt allow deep loading of entities. For instance if you want to look at customers and their orders you'll have to load both up individually and then join them manually. Where as a SQL query will already have the data joined.
Nevermind that the TDS stream is a lot more effecient that the SOAP messages being used by the API & webservices.
UPDATE
I should point out in regard to the views and CRM database in general: CRM does not optimize the indexes on the tables or views for custom entities (how could it?). So if you have a truckload entity that you lookup by destination all the time you'll need to add an index for that property. Depending upon your application it could make a huge difference in performance.
I'll add to jake's comment by saying that querying against the tables directly instead of the views (*base & *extensionbase) will be even faster.
In order of speed it'd be:
direct table query
view query
filterd view query
api call
Direct table updates:
I disagree with Jake that all updates must go through the API. The correct statement is that going through the API is the only supported way to do updates. There are in fact several instances where directly modifying the tables is the most reasonable option:
One time imports of large volumes of data while the system is not in operation.
Modification of specific fields across large volumes of data.
I agree that this sort of direct modification should only be a last resort when the performance of the API is unacceptable. However, if you want to modify a boolean field on thousands of records, doing a direct SQL update to the table is a great option.
Relative Speed
I agree with XVargas as far as relative speed.
Unfiltered Views vs Tables: I have not found the performance advantage to be worth the hassle of manually joining the base and extension tables.
Unfiltered views vs Filtered views: I recently was working with a complicated query which took about 15 minutes to run using the filtered views. After switching to the unfiltered views this query ran in about 10 seconds. Looking at the respective query plans, the raw query had 8 operations while the query against the filtered views had over 80 operations.
Unfiltered Views vs API: I have never compared querying through the API against querying views, but I have compared the cost of writing data through the API vs inserting directly through SQL. Importing millions of records through the API can take several days, while the same operation using insert statements might take several minutes. I assume the difference isn't as great during reads but it is probably still large.
Related
My case is that a third party prepares a table in our schema domain on which we run different spring batch jobs that look for mutations (diff between the given third party table and our own tables). This table will contain about 200k records on average.
My question is simply: does generating a material view up front provide any benefits vs running the query at runtime?
Since the third party table will be populated on our command (basically it's a db boolean field that is set to 1, after which a scheduler picks it up to populate the table. Don't ask me why it's done this way), the query needs to run anyway.
Obviously from an application point of view, it seems more performant to query a flat material view. However, I'm not sure if there is any real performance benefit, since the material view needs to be built on db level.
Thanks.
The benefit of a materialized view here is if you are running the multiple times (more so if the query is expensive and / or there is a big drop in cardinality).
If you are only hitting the query once then you there isn't going to be a huge amount in it. You are running the same query either way and you have the overhead of inserting into the materialized view but you also have the benefit that you can tune this a lot easier than you could querying via JPA and could apply things like compression so less data is transferred back to the application but for 200k rows any difference is likely to be small.
All in all, unless you are running the same query multiple times then I wouldn't bother.
Update
One other thing to consider is coupling. Referencing a materialized view directly in JPA would allow you to update any logic without updating the application but the flip side of this is that logic is hidden outside the application which can make debugging a pain.
Also if you are just referencing a materialized view directly and not using any query rewrite or rollup features then am simple table created via CTAS would actually be better as you still have the precomputed data without the (small) overhead of maintaining the materialized view.
I'm endeavoring to develop an application that uses Oracle as the database back-end. The application will calculate several statistics from the various tables in the database. The front-end will most likely be a web application and this front-end will display various charts and calculated statistics. Now, I imagine that it would be more efficient to perform the calculations in the database rather than in the service layer because said calculations would need to be performed for every web request. That being the case, I'm not sure which mechanism to use. (e.g. stored procedure, function, view) To illustrate what I'm going for, suppose I want to keep statistics of student grades for many students. I would like to have a web interface that lets me view those statistics on student-by-student basis and also an all-inclusive basis. Some of the stats are dependent on aggregates (e.g. average, min, max) of all of the student grades and some stats are dependent only on an individual student. In this situation, every time a record is added or updated, the aggregates would have to be recalculated. So I am speculating that if I had a special table that held all of the calculated values I need and a trigger(s) to recalculate everything when a record is added/updated then all I would need to do from a web request point-of-view is have the service layer pull the desired values from this special table. I'm just not sure if this is the best way to go or not so I am asking the community for any input/advice. Note: Although I'm using Oracle, I'm open to using PostgreSQL or mySQL.
Thanks in advance
The scenario you are describing would be ideal for using materialized views. They can be designed to refresh automatically (and incrementally) every time the source data is updated by your application. The calculations would be built in to the view definition. No triggers required, and likely no stored procedures unless your calculations involve multiple steps. Check here: https://oracle-base.com/articles/misc/materialized-views and here: https://medium.com/oracledevs/lightning-fast-sql-with-real-time-materialized-views-12-things-developers-will-love-about-oracle-54bcc9eac358 for more info.
I'm trying to make faster dashboards in Tableau by creating views of my calculations directly in BigQuery.
Based on my understating if the gcloud documentation here, the view will re-execute the query once it is accessed, so it kinda defeats my goal.*
*My goal is to eliminate calculations on the fly, be it in Tableau or BigQuery.
Is it possible to "save" these views, by way of scheduled scripts or workflows?
Thanks,
A view is best thought of as a way to reformat a table to make it look more convenient to further queries. The query still has to run on BigQuery so the benefits will be that the view may look simpler to Tableau than the raw table (particularly convenient if the view uses some complex SQL to create some of its columns). But it won't save calculation time.
But, if your view is doing some complex consolidation of a larger table then it might be worth saving the results as a new table instead of creating a view. This is OK if your underlying table doesn't change frequently (rule of thumb if you use the results every day and the table changes weekly, it is probably worthwhile and certainly so if the changes are monthly). Then Tableau will be querying pre-consolidated results rather than the much larger raw table. BigQuery storage and processing is cheap so this is often a reasonable solution.
Another alternative is to use a Tableau extract to bring the data into your local drive or server. This is only practical if the table is small enough to fit locally and will only work really well for speed if it fits into local memory (which can be a lot more than you might think). But extracts, at least on Tableau server, can be set to refresh on a schedule, making much faster user interaction and absolving you of having to remember to manually update the consolidated table.
I have been using cache for a long time. We store data against some key and fetch it from cache whenever required. I know that StackOverflow and many other sites heavily rely on cache. My question is do they always use key-value mechanism for caching or do they form some sql like query within a cache? For instance, I want to view last week report. This report's content will vary each day. Do i need to store different reports against each day (where day as a key) or can I get this result from forming some query that aggregate result across different key? Does any caching product (like redis) provide this functionality?
Thanks In Advance
Cache is always done as a key-value hash table. This is how it stays so fast. If you're doing querying then you're not doing cache.
What you may be trying to ask is... you could have in your database a table that contains agregated report data. And you could query against that pre-calculated table.
One of the reasons for cache (e.g. memcached ) being fast is its simplicity of data access and querying protocol.
The more functionality you add, more tradeoff you will have to do on the efficiency part. A full fledged SQL engine in a "caching" database is not a good design. Though you can utilize a data structures oriented database like Redis to design your cache data to suit your querying needs. For example: one set or one hash for each date.
A step further, you can use databases like MongoDb , or memsql which are pretty fast and have rich querying support.So an aggregation report once a while won't be an issue.
However, as a design decision, you will have to accept that their caching throughput will not be as much as memcached or redis.
Looking for a bit of advice on how to optimise one of our projects. We have a ASP.NET/C# system that retrieves data from a SQL2008 data and presents it on a DevExpress ASPxGridView. The data that's retrieved can come from one of a number of databases - all of which are slightly different and are being added and removed regularly. The user is presented with a list of live "companies", and the data is retrieved from the corresponding database.
At the moment, data is being retrieved using a standard SqlDataSource and a dynamically-created SQL SELECT statement. There are a few JOINs in the statement, as well as optional WHERE constraints, again dynamically-created depending on the database and the user's permission level.
All of this works great (honest!), apart from performance. When it comes to some databases, there are several hundreds of thousands of rows, and retrieving and paging through the data is quite slow (the databases are already properly indexed). I've therefore been looking at ways of speeding the system up, and it seems to boil down to two choices: XPO or LINQ.
LINQ seems to be the popular choice, but I'm not sure how easy it will be to implement with a system that is so dynamic in nature - would I need to create "definitions" for each database that LINQ could access? I'm also a bit unsure about creating the LINQ queries dynamically too, although looking at a few examples that part at least seems doable.
XPO, on the other hand, seems to allow me to create a XPO Data Source on the fly. However, I can't find too much information on how to JOIN to other tables.
Can anyone offer any advice on which method - if any - is the best to try and retro-fit into this project? Or is the dynamic SQL model currently used fundamentally different from LINQ and XPO and best left alone?
Before you go and change the whole way that your app talks to the database, have you had a look at the following:
Run your code through a performance profiler (such as Redgate's performance profiler), the results are often surprising.
If you are constructing the SQL string on the fly, are you using .Net best practices such as String.Concat("str1", "str2") instead of "str1" + "str2". Remember, multiple small gains add up to big gains.
Have you thought about having a summary table or database that is periodically updated (say every 15 mins, you might need to run a service to update this data automatically.) so that you are only hitting one database. New connections to databases are quiet expensive.
Have you looked at the query plans for the SQL that you are running. Today, I moved a dynamically created SQL string to a sproc (only 1 param changed) and shaved 5-10 seconds off the running time (it was being called 100-10000 times depending on some conditions).
Just a warning if you do use LINQ. I have seen some developers who have decided to use LINQ write more inefficient code because they did not know what they are doing (pulling 36,000 records when they needed to check for 1 for example). This things are very easily overlooked.
Just something to get you started on and hopefully there is something there that you haven't thought of.
Cheers,
Stu
As far as I understand you are talking about so called server mode when all data manipulations are done on the DB server instead of them to the web server and processing them there. In this mode grid works very fast with data sources that can contain hundreds thousands records. If you want to use this mode, you should either create the corresponding LINQ classes or XPO classes. If you decide to use LINQ based server mode, the LINQServerModeDataSource provides the Selecting event which can be used to set a custom IQueryable and KeyExpression. I would suggest that you use LINQ in your application. I hope, this information will be helpful to you.
I guess there are two points where performance might be tweaked in this case. I'll assume that you're accessing the database directly rather than through some kind of secondary layer.
First, you don't say how you're displaying the data itself. If you're loading thousands of records into a grid, that will take time no matter how fast everything else is. Obviously the trick here is to show a subset of the data and allow the user to page, etc. If you're not doing this then that might be a good place to start.
Second, you say that the tables are properly indexed. If this is the case, and assuming that you're not loading 1,000 records into the page at once and retreiving only subsets at a time, then you should be OK.
But, if you're only doing an ExecuteQuery() against an SQL connection to get a dataset back I don't see how Linq or anything else will help you. I'd say that the problem is obviously on the DB side.
So to solve the problem with the database you need to profile the different SELECT statements you're running against it, examine the query plan and identify the places where things are slowing down. You might want to start by using the SQL Server Profiler, but if you have a good DBA, sometimes just looking at the query plan (which you can get from Management Studio) is usually enough.