I'm trying to test the utility of a new summary table for my data.
So I've created two procedures to fetch the data of a certain interval, each one using a different table source. So on my C# console application I just call one or another. The problem start when I want to repeat this several times to have a good pattern of response time.
I got something like this: 1199,84,81,81,81,81,82,80,80,81,81,80,81,91,80,80,81,80
Probably my Oracle 10g is making an inappropriate caching.
How I can solve this?
EDIT: See this thread on asktom, which describes how and why not to do this.
If you are in a test environment, you can put your tablespace offline and online again:
ALTER TABLESPACE <tablespace_name> OFFLINE;
ALTER TABLESPACE <tablespace_name> ONLINE;
Or you can try
ALTER SYSTEM FLUSH BUFFER_CACHE;
but again only on test environment.
When you test on your "real" system, the times you get after first call (those using cached data) might be more interesting, as you will have cached data. Call the procedure twice, and only consider the performance results you get in subsequent executions.
Probably my Oracle 10g is making a
inappropriate caching.
Actually it seems like Oracle is doing some entirely appropriate caching. If these tables are going to be used a lot then you would hope to have them in cache most of the time.
edit
In a comment on Peter's response Luis said
flushing before the call I got some
interesting results like:
1370,354,391,375,352,511,390,375,326,335,435,334,334,328,337,314,417,377,384,367,393.
These findings are "interesting" because the flush means the calls take a bit longer than when the rows are in the DB cache but not as long as the first call. This is almost certainly because the server has stored the physical records in its physical cache. The only way to avoid that, to truely run against an empty cache is to reboot the server before every test.
Alternatively learn to tune queries properly. Understanding how the database works is a good start. And EXPLAIN PLAN is a better tuning aid than the wall-clock. Find out more.
Related
I need your opinion in this situation. I’ll try to explain the scenario. I have a Windows service that stores data in an Oracle database periodically. The table where this data is being stored is partitioned by date (Interval-Date Range Partitioning). The database also has a dbms_scheduler job that, among other operations, truncates and drops older partitions.
This approach has been working for some time, but recently I had an ORA-00054 error. After some investigation, the error was reproduced with the following steps:
Open one sqlplus session, disable auto-commit, and insert data in the
partitioned table, without committing the changes;
Open another sqlplus session and truncate/drop an old partition (DDL
operations are automatically committed, if I’m not mistaken). We
will then get the ORA-00054 error.
There are some constraints worthy to be mentioned:
I don’t have DBA access to the database;
This is a legacy application and a complete refactoring isn’t
feasible;
So, in your opinion, is there any way of dropping these old partitions, without the risk of running into an ORA-00054 error and without the intervention of the DBA? I can just delete the data, but the number of empty partitions will grow everyday.
Many thanks in advance.
This error means somebody (or something) is working with the data in the partition you are trying to drop. That is, the lock is granted at the partition level. If nobody was using the partition your job could drop it.
Now you say this is a legacy app and you don't want to, or can't, refactor it. Fair enough. But there is clearly something not right if you have a process which is zapping data that some other process is using. I don't agree with #tbone's suggestion of just looping until the lock is released: you can't just get rid of data which somebody is using with establishing why they are still working with data that they apparently should not be using.
So, the first step is to find out what the locking session is doing. Why are they still amending this data your background job wants to retire? Here's a script which will help you establish which session has the lock.
Except that you "don't have DBA access to the database". Hmmm, that's a curly one. Basically this is not a problem which can be resolved without DBA access.
It seems like you have several issues to deal with. Unfortunately for you, they are political and architectural rather than technical, and there's not much we can do to help you further.
How about wrapping the truncate or drop in pl/sql that tries the operation in a loop, waiting x seconds between tries, for a max num of tries. Then use dbms_scheduler to call that procedure/function.
Maybe this can help. Seems to be the same issue as the one that you discribe.
(ignore the comic sans, if you can) :)
I have seen developers using WITH(nolock) in the query, is there any disadvantage of it?
Also, what is the default mode of execution of query? My database do not have any index.
Is there any other way to increase database select statement performance?
The common misconception with nolock is that that it places no locks on the database whilst executing. Technically it does issues a schema-stability (sch-s) lock, so the 'no' part of the lock relates to the data side of the query.
Most of the time that I see this, it is a premature optimization by a developer because they have heard it makes the query faster.
Unless you have instrumented proof and validity in accepting a dirty read (and potentially reading the same row twice) then it should not be used - it definately should not be the default approach to queries, but an exception to the rule when it can be shown that it is required.
There are numerous articles on this on the net. The main risk is that with NOLOCK you can read uncomitted data from the table (dirty reads). See, for example, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa259216(v=sql.80).aspx or http://www.techrepublic.com/article/using-nolock-and-readpast-table-hints-in-sql-server/6185492
NOLOCK can be highly useful when you are reading old data from a frequently used table. Consider the following example,
You have a stored procedure to access data of inactive projects. You
don't want this stored procedure to lock the frequently used Projects
table while reading old data.
NOLOCK is also useful when dirty reads are not a problem and data is not frequently modified such as in the following cases,
Reading list of countries, currencies, etc... from a database to show
in the form. Here the data remains unchanged and a dirty read will
not cause a big problem as it will occur very rarely.
However starting with SQL server 2005 the benefits of NOLOCK is very little due to row versioning.
I’ve been tasked with optimizing a rather nasty stored procedure in a legacy system. It’s a database dedicated to search, and a new copy is being generate every day, with a lot of complex joins being de-normalized. No writes are being performed, only SELECTs, so I figured some easy improvements could be made by making the whole database read-only and changing the recovery model to “Simple”.
Much to my surprise, this didn’t help – at all! The stored procedure still takes the same amount of time of complete. If fact, I’m so surprised that I figured I did it wrong!
My questions:
Do I need to do anything other than setting “Database read-only” to “true”?
Am I wrong to expect significant performance improvement by making the database read-only?
Same for the recovery model: Shouldn’t “Simple” have some noticeable impact?
Are there other similar database-wide configurations that can improve performance in this scenario?
The stored procedure is huge, with temporary tables, 40+ tables joined in 20+ queries. But I’d like to optimize the database itself before I edit this proc.
Since no writes are performed by your SP, there is no reason to expect noticable performance improvement from changing recovery model and read-write mode.
As others mentioned, you should look into the query plan and optimize your queries.
Another hint: indexes in the database might get fragmented while the database is filled up. Since the data is not going to be modified any more, it might help to rebuild all the indexes with fillfactor 100 - this might help to get rid of fragmentation and to compact data.
Call this for each table in the database: ALTER INDEX ALL ON table_name REBUILD WITH (FILLFACTOR = 100).
Generally, I won't expect much of performance improvement from this, but it depends on the particular database.
Speaking of query optimization, there are very useful features in SQL Server 2005 and later: Execution Related and Index-Related Dynamic Management Views. In particular, sys.dm_exec_query_stats and missing indexes are of interest.
These give you almost the same information as Tuning Advisor, but using you real-life workload, so you don't need to simulate it and feed to the Advisor.
Have you tried using the Database Engine Tuning Advisor included in SQL Server? It will analyze your query and suggest new indexes that will improve the performance of the query. Some of them will be good, some will be bad (for example, I've seen it suggest adding every column in a table to an index, sometimes like 30 of them!), so I don't follow it blindly. Generally I'll add a few indexes and then retest, to find the suggestions that are the most important. I've used it to optimize many queries that I thought I had properly indexed, only to find I could get a lot more performance out of them.
I had a similar setup, large stored procedures with lots of large temp tables.
Our problem was that the joins with and between the temp tables was very slow.
I recommend that you look at your execution plan and try to add relevant indexes to the temp tables too if you have not already.
I have a report engine, performing PreparedStatements on Oracle 11, that is a highly prioritized task.
What I see is that first query invocation usually performs much much longer than the same query afterwards (query has different parameters and return different data).
I suppose this is due to hard parsing done by Oracle, on first query invocation.
I wonder, is there a way of hinting to Oracle, that this query is highly prioritized query which would be performed often, and which performance is critical, so it should remain in shared pool, no matter what?
I know that I can fix execution plan in Oracle 11, but I don't want to fix it, I want Oracle still to be able to change it, as system changes, all I want is to exclude query hard parsing.
Perhaps you should change your "I suppose..." into a "I tested and have determined..." :)
The query performance may be affected by more than just parsing; when it executes it has to fetch blocks from disk into the buffer cache - subsequent executions quite possibly are taking advantage of the blocks being found in memory and so are faster.
EDIT: to answer your immediate question - a workaround may be to have a job run periodically that parses the query but doesn't execute it. You might even be able to use this to determine whether parsing or fetching is the locus of the problem.
You can try pinning to shared pool using dbms_shared_pool.keep
But I would first make sure that you have an aging out problem first
Anton,
if your query is using bind variables it will be re-used. The cursor will be cached and as long as it is re-used, it will remain in the cursor cache. Make sure that it uses bind variables. This increases re-usability and scalability.
If you don't trust the rdbms you can pin it using dbms_shared_pool.keep.
See http://psoug.org/reference/dbms_shared_pool.html
You need to find your cursor in order to do so.
Normally there is an other problem that should be fixed.
Ronald.
http://ronr.blogspot.com
I'm about to have to rewrite some rather old code using SQL Server's BULK INSERT command because the schema has changed, and it occurred to me that maybe I should think about switching to a stored procedure with a TVP instead, but I'm wondering what effect it might have on performance.
Some background information that might help explain why I'm asking this question:
The data actually comes in via a web service. The web service writes a text file to a shared folder on the database server which in turn performs a BULK INSERT. This process was originally implemented on SQL Server 2000, and at the time there was really no alternative other than chucking a few hundred INSERT statements at the server, which actually was the original process and was a performance disaster.
The data is bulk inserted into a permanent staging table and then merged into a much larger table (after which it is deleted from the staging table).
The amount of data to insert is "large", but not "huge" - usually a few hundred rows, maybe 5-10k rows tops in rare instances. Therefore my gut feeling is that BULK INSERT being a non-logged operation won't make that big a difference (but of course I'm not sure, hence the question).
The insertion is actually part of a much larger pipelined batch process and needs to happen many times in succession; therefore performance is critical.
The reasons I would like to replace the BULK INSERT with a TVP are:
Writing the text file over NetBIOS is probably already costing some time, and it's pretty gruesome from an architectural perspective.
I believe that the staging table can (and should) be eliminated. The main reason it's there is that the inserted data needs to be used for a couple of other updates at the same time of insertion, and it's far costlier to attempt the update from the massive production table than it is to use an almost-empty staging table. With a TVP, the parameter basically is the staging table, I can do anything I want with it before/after the main insert.
I could pretty much do away with dupe-checking, cleanup code, and all of the overhead associated with bulk inserts.
No need to worry about lock contention on the staging table or tempdb if the server gets a few of these transactions at once (we try to avoid it, but it happens).
I'm obviously going to profile this before putting anything into production, but I thought it might be a good idea to ask around first before I spend all that time, see if anybody has any stern warnings to issue about using TVPs for this purpose.
So - for anyone who's cozy enough with SQL Server 2008 to have tried or at least investigated this, what's the verdict? For inserts of, let's say, a few hundred to a few thousand rows, happening on a fairly frequent basis, do TVPs cut the mustard? Is there a significant difference in performance compared to bulk inserts?
Update: Now with 92% fewer question marks!
(AKA: Test Results)
The end result is now in production after what feels like a 36-stage deployment process. Both solutions were extensively tested:
Ripping out the shared-folder code and using the SqlBulkCopy class directly;
Switching to a Stored Procedure with TVPs.
Just so readers can get an idea of what exactly was tested, to allay any doubts as to the reliability of this data, here is a more detailed explanation of what this import process actually does:
Start with a temporal data sequence that is ordinarily about 20-50 data points (although it can sometimes be up a few hundred);
Do a whole bunch of crazy processing on it that's mostly independent of the database. This process is parallelized, so about 8-10 of the sequences in (1) are being processed at the same time. Each parallel process generates 3 additional sequences.
Take all 3 sequences and the original sequence and combine them into a batch.
Combine the batches from all 8-10 now-finished processing tasks into one big super-batch.
Import it using either the BULK INSERT strategy (see next step), or TVP strategy (skip to step 8).
Use the SqlBulkCopy class to dump the entire super-batch into 4 permanent staging tables.
Run a Stored Procedure that (a) performs a bunch of aggregation steps on 2 of the tables, including several JOIN conditions, and then (b) performs a MERGE on 6 production tables using both the aggregated and non-aggregated data. (Finished)
OR
Generate 4 DataTable objects containing the data to be merged; 3 of them contain CLR types which unfortunately aren't properly supported by ADO.NET TVPs, so they have to be shoved in as string representations, which hurts performance a bit.
Feed the TVPs to a Stored Procedure, which does essentially the same processing as (7), but directly with the received tables. (Finished)
The results were reasonably close, but the TVP approach ultimately performed better on average, even when the data exceeded 1000 rows by a small amount.
Note that this import process is run many thousands of times in succession, so it was very easy to get an average time simply by counting how many hours (yes, hours) it took to finish all of the merges.
Originally, an average merge took almost exactly 8 seconds to complete (under normal load). Removing the NetBIOS kludge and switching to SqlBulkCopy reduced the time to almost exactly 7 seconds. Switching to TVPs further reduced the time to 5.2 seconds per batch. That's a 35% improvement in throughput for a process whose running time is measured in hours - so not bad at all. It's also a ~25% improvement over SqlBulkCopy.
I am actually fairly confident that the true improvement was significantly more than this. During testing it became apparent that the final merge was no longer the critical path; instead, the Web Service that was doing all of the data processing was starting to buckle under the number of requests coming in. Neither the CPU nor the database I/O were really maxed out, and there was no significant locking activity. In some cases we were seeing a gap of a few idle seconds between successive merges. There was a slight gap, but much smaller (half a second or so) when using SqlBulkCopy. But I suppose that will become a tale for another day.
Conclusion: Table-Valued Parameters really do perform better than BULK INSERT operations for complex import+transform processes operating on mid-sized data sets.
I'd like to add one other point, just to assuage any apprehension on part of the folks who are pro-staging-tables. In a way, this entire service is one giant staging process. Every step of the process is heavily audited, so we don't need a staging table to determine why some particular merge failed (although in practice it almost never happens). All we have to do is set a debug flag in the service and it will break to the debugger or dump its data to a file instead of the database.
In other words, we already have more than enough insight into the process and don't need the safety of a staging table; the only reason we had the staging table in the first place was to avoid thrashing on all of the INSERT and UPDATE statements that we would have had to use otherwise. In the original process, the staging data only lived in the staging table for fractions of a second anyway, so it added no value in maintenance/maintainability terms.
Also note that we have not replaced every single BULK INSERT operation with TVPs. Several operations that deal with larger amounts of data and/or don't need to do anything special with the data other than throw it at the DB still use SqlBulkCopy. I am not suggesting that TVPs are a performance panacea, only that they succeeded over SqlBulkCopy in this specific instance involving several transforms between the initial staging and the final merge.
So there you have it. Point goes to TToni for finding the most relevant link, but I appreciate the other responses as well. Thanks again!
I don't really have experience with TVP yet, however there is an nice performance comparison chart vs. BULK INSERT in MSDN here.
They say that BULK INSERT has higher startup cost, but is faster thereafter. In a remote client scenario they draw the line at around 1000 rows (for "simple" server logic). Judging from their description I would say you should be fine with using TVP's. The performance hit - if any - is probably negligible and the architectural benefits seem very good.
Edit: On a side note you can avoid the server-local file and still use bulk copy by using the SqlBulkCopy object. Just populate a DataTable, and feed it into the "WriteToServer"-Method of an SqlBulkCopy instance. Easy to use, and very fast.
The chart mentioned with regards to the link provided in #TToni's answer needs to be taken in context. I am not sure how much actual research went into those recommendations (also note that the chart seems to only be available in the 2008 and 2008 R2 versions of that documentation).
On the other hand there is this whitepaper from the SQL Server Customer Advisory Team: Maximizing Throughput with TVP
I have been using TVPs since 2009 and have found, at least in my experience, that for anything other than simple insert into a destination table with no additional logic needs (which is rarely ever the case), then TVPs are typically the better option.
I tend to avoid staging tables as data validation should be done at the app layer. By using TVPs, that is easily accommodated and the TVP Table Variable in the stored procedure is, by its very nature, a localized staging table (hence no conflict with other processes running at the same time like you get when using a real table for staging).
Regarding the testing done in the Question, I think it could be shown to be even faster than what was originally found:
You should not be using a DataTable, unless your application has use for it outside of sending the values to the TVP. Using the IEnumerable<SqlDataRecord> interface is faster and uses less memory as you are not duplicating the collection in memory only to send it to the DB. I have this documented in the following places:
How can I insert 10 million records in the shortest time possible? (lots of extra info and links here as well)
Pass Dictionary<string,int> to Stored Procedure T-SQL
Streaming Data Into SQL Server 2008 From an Application (on SQLServerCentral.com ; free registration required)
TVPs are Table Variables and as such do not maintain statistics. Meaning, they report only having 1 row to the Query Optimizer. So, in your proc, either:
Use statement-level recompile on any queries using the TVP for anything other than a simple SELECT: OPTION (RECOMPILE)
Create a local temporary table (i.e. single #) and copy the contents of the TVP into the temp table
I think I'd still stick with a bulk insert approach. You may find that tempdb still gets hit using a TVP with a reasonable number of rows. This is my gut feeling, I can't say I've tested the performance of using TVP (I am interested in hearing others input too though)
You don't mention if you use .NET, but the approach that I've taken to optimise previous solutions was to do a bulk load of data using the SqlBulkCopy class - you don't need to write the data to a file first before loading, just give the SqlBulkCopy class (e.g.) a DataTable - that's the fastest way to insert data into the DB. 5-10K rows isn't much, I've used this for up to 750K rows. I suspect that in general, with a few hundred rows it wouldn't make a vast difference using a TVP. But scaling up would be limited IMHO.
Perhaps the new MERGE functionality in SQL 2008 would benefit you?
Also, if your existing staging table is a single table that is used for each instance of this process and you're worried about contention etc, have you considered creating a new "temporary" but physical staging table each time, then dropping it when it's finished with?
Note you can optimize the loading into this staging table, by populating it without any indexes. Then once populated, add any required indexes on at that point (FILLFACTOR=100 for optimal read performance, as at this point it will not be updated).
Staging tables are good! Really I wouldn't want to do it any other way. Why? Because data imports can change unexpectedly (And often in ways you can't foresee, like the time the columns were still called first name and last name but had the first name data in the last name column, for instance, to pick an example not at random.) Easy to research the problem with a staging table so you can see exactly what data was in the columns the import handled. Harder to find I think when you use an in memory table. I know a lot of people who do imports for a living as I do and all of them recommend using staging tables. I suspect there is a reason for this.
Further fixing a small schema change to a working process is easier and less time consuming than redesigning the process. If it is working and no one is willing to pay for hours to change it, then only fix what needs to be fixed due to the schema change. By changing the whole process, you introduce far more potential new bugs than by making a small change to an existing, tested working process.
And just how are you going to do away with all the data cleanup tasks? You may be doing them differently, but they still need to be done. Again, changing the process the way you describe is very risky.
Personally it sounds to me like you are just offended by using older techniques rather than getting the chance to play with new toys. You seem to have no real basis for wanting to change other than bulk insert is so 2000.