I need to perform a query 2.5 million times. This query generates some rows which I need to AVG(column) and then use this AVG to filter the table from all values below average. I then need to INSERT these filtered results into a table.
The only way to do such a thing with reasonable efficiency, seems to be by creating a TEMPORARY TABLE for each query-postmaster python-thread. I am just hoping these TEMPORARY TABLEs will not be persisted to hard drive (at all) and will remain in memory (RAM), unless they are out of working memory, of course.
I would like to know if a TEMPORARY TABLE will incur disk writes (which would interfere with the INSERTS, i.e. slow to whole process down)
Please note that, in Postgres, the default behaviour for temporary tables is that they are not automatically dropped, and data is persisted on commit. See ON COMMIT.
Temporary table are, however, dropped at the end of a database session:
Temporary tables are automatically dropped at the end of a session, or
optionally at the end of the current transaction.
There are multiple considerations you have to take into account:
If you do want to explicitly DROP a temporary table at the end of a transaction, create it with the CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE ... ON COMMIT DROP syntax.
In the presence of connection pooling, a database session may span multiple client sessions; to avoid clashes in CREATE, you should drop your temporary tables -- either prior to returning a connection to the pool (e.g. by doing everything inside a transaction and using the ON COMMIT DROP creation syntax), or on an as-needed basis (by preceding any CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE statement with a corresponding DROP TABLE IF EXISTS, which has the advantage of also working outside transactions e.g. if the connection is used in auto-commit mode.)
While the temporary table is in use, how much of it will fit in memory before overflowing on to disk? See the temp_buffers option in postgresql.conf
Anything else I should worry about when working often with temp tables? A vacuum is recommended after you have DROPped temporary tables, to clean up any dead tuples from the catalog. Postgres will automatically vacuum every 3 minutes or so for you when using the default settings (auto_vacuum).
Also, unrelated to your question (but possibly related to your project): keep in mind that, if you have to run queries against a temp table after you have populated it, then it is a good idea to create appropriate indices and issue an ANALYZE on the temp table in question after you're done inserting into it. By default, the cost based optimizer will assume that a newly created the temp table has ~1000 rows and this may result in poor performance should the temp table actually contain millions of rows.
Temporary tables provide only one guarantee - they are dropped at the end of the session. For a small table you'll probably have most of your data in the backing store. For a large table I guarantee that data will be flushed to disk periodically as the database engine needs more working space for other requests.
EDIT:
If you're absolutely in need of RAM-only temporary tables you can create a table space for your database on a RAM disk (/dev/shm works). This reduces the amount of disk IO, but beware that it is currently not possible to do this without a physical disk write; the DB engine will flush the table list to stable storage when you create the temporary table.
Related
I have a pretty complex query where we make use of a temporary table (this is in Oracle running on AWS RDS service).
INSERT INTO TMPTABLE (inserts about 25.000 rows in no time)
SELECT FROM X JOIN TMPTABLE (joins with temp table also in no time)
DELETE FROM TMPTABLE (takes no time in a copy of the production database, up to 10 minutes in the production database)
If I change the delete to a truncate it is as fast as in development.
So this change I will of course deploy. But I would like to understand why this occurs. AWS team has been quite helpful but they are a bit biased on AWS and like to tell me that my 3000 USD a month database server is not fast enough (I don't think so). I am not that fluent in Oracle administration but I have understood that if the redo logs are constantly filled, this can cause issues. I have increased the size quite substantially, but then again, this doesn't really add up.
This is a fairly standard issue when deleting large amounts of data. The delete operation has to modify each and every row individually. Each row gets deleted, added to a transaction log, and is given an LSN.
truncate, on the other hand, skips all that and simply deallocates the data in the table.
You'll find this behavior is consistent across various RDMS solutions. Oracle, MSSQL, PostgreSQL, and MySQL will all have the same issue.
I suggest you use an Oracle Global Temporary table. They are fast, and don't need to be explicitly deleted after the session ends.
For example:
CREATE GLOBAL TEMPORARY TABLE TMP_T
(
ID NUMBER(32)
)
ON COMMIT DELETE ROWS;
See https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28310/tables003.htm#ADMIN11633
I have created some tables in Greenplum, performing insert update and delete operation. Regularly I am also performing vacuum operation. I Found bloat in it. Found solution to remove bloat https://discuss.pivotal.io/hc/en-us/articles/206578327-What-are-the-different-option-to-remove-bloat-from-a-table
However, if I truncate the table and reinsert the data, it removes bloat. Is it good practice to truncate the data from the table?
If you are performing UPDATE and DELETE statements on a heap table (default storage) and running VACUUM regularly, you will get some bloat by design. Heap storage, which is similar to the default PostgreSQL storage mechanism, provides read consistency using Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC).
When you UPDATE or DELETE a record, the old value is still in the table and is able to be read by transactions that are still inflight and started before you issued the UPDATE or DELETE command. This provides the read consistency to the table.
When you execute a VACUUM statement, the database will mark the stale rows as available to be overwritten. It doesn't shrink the files. It just marks rows so they can be overwritten. The next time you execute an INSERT or UPDATE, the stale rows are now able to be used for the new data.
So if you UPDATE or DELETE 10% of a table between running VACUUM, you will probably have about 10% bloat.
Greenplum also has Append-Optimized (AO) storage which doesn't use MVCC and uses a visibility map instead. The files are bit smaller too so you should get better performance. The stale rows are hidden with the visibility map and VACUUM won't do anything until you hit the gp_appendonly_compaction_threshold percentage. The default is 10%. When you have 10% bloat in an AO table and execute VACUUM, the table will automatically get rebuilt for you.
Append-Optimized is called "appendonly" for backwards compatibility reasons but it does allow UPDATE and DELETE. Here is an example of an AO table:
CREATE TABLE sales
(txn_id int, qty int, date date)
WITH (appendonly=true)
DISTRIBUTED BY (txn_id);
Instead of truncate it is better to use drop the table, create the table and then insert the data.
I am incrementally pulling records from a Web Service. I need to set the status of any records in our local table that were not returned by the Web Service to 'DELETED';
I had intended to store the complete list of record IDs in a PL/SQL table and then perform a single UPDATE statement based on that.
I now estimate the memory usage of the record set to be ~615MB. How does the memory footprint of a PL/SQL table compare to using a global temporary table instead? Would it use a different part of Oracle's memory, PGA vs SGA for instance?
Performance isn't a major concern because this nightly job already runs in Production in an acceptable amount of time. I don't believe adding the 'DELETED' status piece will increase the run duration to affect users.
A global temporary table would not use memory in that way. It stores the values in a temporary segment to which only your session has access, and which is dropped when no longer needed.
Have you considered what happens if your session disconnects? In either method you lose the values you have accumulated. You might like to just use a regular table.
I came accross creating the temporary table in oracle. But could not understand the best use of this.
Can someone help me to understand what is the features and benefits of using a temporary table in Oracle (create temporary table temp_table) over an ordinary table (create table temp_table)
)
From the concepts guide:
A temporary table definition persists in the same way as a permanent
table definition, but the data exists only for the duration of a
transaction or session. Temporary tables are useful in applications
where a result set must be held temporarily, perhaps because the
result is constructed by running multiple operations.
And:
Data in a temporary table is private to the session, which means that
each session can only see and modify its own data.
So one aspect is that the data is private to your session. Which is also true of uncommitted data in a permanent table, but with a temporary table the data can persist and yet stay private across a commit (based on the on commit clause on creation).
Another aspect is that they use temporary segments, which means you generate much less redo and undo overhead using a temporary table than you would if you put the same data temporarily into a permanent table, optionally updated it, and then removed it when you'd finished with it. You also avoid contention and locking issues if more than one session needs its own version of the temporary data.
Given below are some points why and when we should temporary table :-
1)Temporary tables are created for storing the data in a tabular form, for easy retrieval of it when needed, with in that particular session.
2)It also add a security purpose of keeping the data available only for that particular session.
3) When a code goes long and a lot of cursors are opened it better to put the data in a temporary table so that it can be easily fetched at the time needed.
I have tried to find examples but they are all simple with a single where clause. Here is the situation. I have a bunch of legacy data transferred from another database. I also have the "good" tables in that same database. I need to transfer (data-conversion) data from the legacy tables to thew tables. Because this is a different set of tables the data-conversion requires complex joins to put the old data into the new tables correctly.
So, old tables old data.
New tables must have the old data but it requires lots of joins to get that old data into the new tables correctly.
Can I use direct path with lots of joins like this? INSERT SELECT (lots of joins)
Does direct path apply to tables that are already on the same database (transfer between tables)? Is it only for loading tables from say a text file?
Thank you.
The query in your SELECT can be as complex as you'd like with a direct-path insert. The direct-path refers only to the destination table. It has nothing to do with the way that data is read or processed.
If you're doing a direct-path insert, you're asking Oracle to insert the new data above the high water mark of the table so you bypass the normal code that reuses space in existing blocks for new rows to be inserted. It also has to block other inserts since you can't have the high water mark of the table change during a direct-path insert. This probably isn't a big deal if you've got a downtime window in which to do the load but it would be quite problematic if you wanted the existing tables to be available for other applications during the load.
No, on the contrary, it means you need to do a backup after a NOLOGGING load, not that you can't backup the database.
Allow me to elaborate a bit. Normally, when you do DML in Oracle, the before images of the changes you are are making get logged in UNDO, and all the changes (including the UNDO changes) are first written to REDO. This is how Oracle manages transactions, instance recovery, and database recovery. If a transaction is aborted or rolled back, Oracle uses the information in UNDO to undo the changes your transaction made. If the instance crashes, then on instance restart, Oracle will use the information in REDO and UNDO to recover up to the last committed transaction. First, Oracle will read the REDO and roll forward, then, use UNDO to roll back all the transactions that were not committed at the time of the crash. In this way, Oracle is able to recover up to the last committed transaction.
Now, when you specify an APPEND hint on an insert statement, Oracle will execute the INSERT with direct load. This means that data is loaded into brand new, never before used blocks, from above the highwater mark. Because the blocks being loaded are brand new, there is no "before image", so, Oracle can avoid writing UNDO, which improves performance. If the database is in NOARCHIVELOG mode, then Oracle will also not write REDO. On a database in ARCHIVELOG mode, Oracle will still write REDO, unless, before you do the insert /*+ append */, you set the table to NOLOGGING, (i.e. alter table tab_name nologging;). In that case, REDO logging is disabled for the table. However, this is where you could run into backup/recovery implications. If you do a NOLOGGING direct load, and then you suffer a media failure, and the datafile containing the segment with the nologging operation is restored from a backup taken before the nologging load, then the redo log will not contain the changes required to recover that segment. So, what happens? Well, when you do a NOLOGGING load, Oracle writes extent invaldation records to the redo log, instead of the actual changes. Then, if you use that redo in recovery, those data blocks will be marked logically corrupt. Any subsequent queries against that segment will get an ORA-26040 error.
So, how to avoid this? Well, you should always take a backup imediately following any NOLOGGING direct load. If you restore/recover from a backup taken after the nologging load, there is no problem, because the data will be in the datablocks in the file that was restored.
Hope that's clear,
-Mark
Yes, there should not be any arbitrary limits on query complexity.
If you do
insert /*+ APPEND */ into target_table select .... from source1, source2..., sourceN where
It should work fine. Consider though, that the performance of the load will be limited by the performance of that query, so, be sure it's well-tuned, if you're expecting good performance.
Finally, consider whether setting NOLOGGING on the target table would improve performance significantly. But, also consider the backup recovery implications, if you decide to implement NOLOGGING.
Hope that helps,
-Mark