DynamoDB table creation is too slow - amazon-dynamodb

I am doing some scalability testing for one of my programs. As part of this I have to insert millions of records into a dynamodb table take measurements and then rerun the test with different parameters. I need to start with an empty table for each run. Deleting each record from the table takes too much time and so I am deleting the table and recreating it. The table has a GSI which I am creating before each run and after I have set auto-scaling properties on that table it takes upto 1 hour in order for the table to be ready. What could be going wrong?

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SQL Server Data Archiving

I have a SQL Azure database on which I need to perform some data archiving operation.
Plan is to move all the irrelevant data from the actual tables into Archive_* tables.
I have tables which have up to 8-9 million records.
One option is to write a stored procedure and insert data in to the new Archive_* tables and also delete from the actual tables.
But this operation is really time consuming and running for more than 3 hrs.
I am in a situation where I can't have more than an hour's downtime.
How can I make this archiving faster?
You can use Azure Automation to schedule execution of a stored procedure every day at the same time, during maintenance window, where this stored procedure will archive the oldest one week or one month of data only, each time it runs. The store procedure should archive data older than X number of weeks/months/years only. Please read this article to create the runbook. In a few days you will have all the old data archived and the Runbook will continue to do the job from now and on.
You can't make it faster, but you can make it seamless. The first option is to have a separate task that moves data in portions from the source to the archive tables. In order to prevent table lock escalations and overall performance degradation I would suggest you to limit the size of a single transaction. E.g. start transaction, insert N records into the archive table, delete these records from the source table, commit transaction. Continue for a few days until all the necessary data is transferred. The advantage of that way is that if there is some kind of a failure, you may restart the archival process and it will continue from the point of the failure.
The second option that does not exclude the first one really depends on how critical the performance of the source tables for you and how many updates are happening with them. It if is not a problem you can write triggers that actually pour every inserted/updated record into an archive table. Then, when you want a cleanup all you need to do is to delete the obsolete records from the source tables, their copies will already be in the archive tables.
In the both cases you will not need to have any downtime.

Creation of GSI taking long time

I have a table with close to 2 billion rows already created in DynamoDB.
Due to a query requirement, I had to create a Global Secondary Index(GSI) in it. The process of GSI creation started 36 hours ago but still isn't completed. Portal shows Item Count to be around 100 million. So long way to go.
Questions:
Why does it take such a long time when sufficient WCU and RCU are
alotted( 30k in fact ).
GSI partition key I've used is something whose values are repetitive, could that be the reason why GSI creation is taking more time (ideal scenario is that we select a partition key which doesn't repeat for items to span across multiple partitions).
Is there a way to abort the creation of GSI while the process is on? it doesn't allow through AWS console.
Thanks.
A GSI has its own WCUs and RCUs, distinct and separate to the primary index. Could this be because you dont have enough WCUs on your GSI?
If your global secondary index is taking too long to create (common
when adding indexes on an existing large table), you can provision
additional write capacity by following these steps:
Open the DynamoDB console.
From the navigation pane, choose Tables,
and then select your table from the list.
Choose the Indexes tab.
Increase the write capacity of the index, and then choose Save.
After
about a minute, check the OnlineIndexPercentageProgress metric from
the Metrics tab to see if the creation of your global secondary index
is progressing satisfactorily.
EDIT: Above from the AWS Knowledge Center
'OnlineIndexPercentageProgress' instructions:
Creation of your global secondary index will begin. You can monitor
the progress on the Metrics tab:
Choose the Metrics tab.
Choose View all CloudWatch metrics.
In the CloudWatch console, choose DynamoDB. In the Search Metrics box, enter OnlineIndexPercentageProgress. Note: If the search returns an empty
list, wait about a minute for metrics to populate.
Choose the name of
the index to see the progress.

How can I improve performance while altering a large mysql table?

I have 600 Millions records in a table and I am not able to add a column in this table as every time I try to do it, it times out.
Suppose in your MYSQL database you have a giant table having 600 Millions of rows, having some schema operation such as adding a unique key, altering a column, even adding one more column to it is a very cumbersome process which will takes hours to process and sometimes there is a server time out. In order to overcome that, one to have to come up with very good migration plan, one of which I jotting below.
1) Suppose there is table Orig_X in which I have to add a new column colNew with default value as 0.
2) A Dummy table Dummy_X is created which is replica of Orig_X except with a new column colNew.
3) Data is inserted from the Orig_X to Dummy_X with the following settings.
4) Auto commit is set to zero, so that data is not committed after each insert statement hindering the performance.
5) Binary logs are set to zero, so that no data will be written in these logs.
6) After insertion of data bot the feature are set to one.
SET AUTOCOMMIT = 0;
SET sql_log_bin = 0;
Insert into Dummy_X(col1, col2, col3, colNew)
Select col1, col2, col3, from Orig_X;
SET sql_log_bin = 1;
SET AUTOCOMMIT = 1;
7) Now primary key can be created with the newly inserted column, which is now the part of primary key.
8) All the unique keys can now be created.
9) We can check the status of the server by issuing the following command
SHOW MASTER STATUS
10) It’s also helpful to issue FLUSH LOGS so MySQL will clear the old logs.
11) In order to boost performance to run the similar type of queries such as above insert statement, one should have query cache variable on.
SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'have_query_cache';
query_cache_type = 1
Above were the steps for the migration strategy for the large table, below I am witting so steps to improve the performance of the database/queries.
1) Remove any unnecessary indexes on the table, pay particular attention to UNIQUE indexes as these when disable change buffering. Don't use a UNIQUE index if you have no reason for that constraint, prefer a regular INDEX.
2) If bulk loading a fresh table, delay creating any indexes besides the PRIMARY KEY. If you create them once all after data is loaded, then InnoDB is able to apply a pre-sort and bulk load process which is both faster and results in typically more compact indexes.
3) More memory can actually help in performance optimization. If SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS shows any reads/s under BUFFER POOL AND MEMORY and the number of Free buffers (also under BUFFER POOL AND MEMORY) is zero, you could benefit from more (assuming you have sized innodb_buffer_pool_size correctly on your server.
4) Normally your database table gets re-indexed after every insert. That's some heavy lifting for you database, but when your queries are wrapped inside a Transaction, the table does not get re-indexed until after this entire bulk is processed. Saving a lot of work.
5) Most MySQL servers have query caching enabled. It's one of the most effective methods of improving performance that is quietly handled by the database engine. When the same query is executed multiple times, the result is fetched from the cache, which is quite fast.
6) Using the EXPLAIN keyword can give you insight on what MySQL is doing to execute your query. This can help you spot the bottlenecks and other problems with your query or table structures. The results of an EXPLAIN query will show you which indexes are being utilized, how the table is being scanned and sorted etc...
7) If your application contains many JOIN queries, you need to make sure that the columns you join by are indexed on both tables. This affects how MySQL internally optimizes the join operation.
8) In every table have an id column that is the PRIMARY KEY, AUTO_INCREMENT and one of the flavors of INT. Also preferably UNSIGNED, since the value cannot be negative.
9) Even if you have a user’s table that has a unique username field, do not make that your primary key. VARCHAR fields as primary keys are slower. And you will have a better structure in your code by referring to all users with their id's internally.
10) Normally when you perform a query from a script, it will wait for the execution of that query to finish before it can continue. You can change that by using unbuffered queries. This saves a considerable amount of memory with SQL queries that produce large result sets, and you can start working on the result set immediately after the first row has been retrieved as you don't have to wait until the complete SQL query has been performed.
11) With database engines, disk is perhaps the most significant bottleneck. Keeping things smaller and more compact is usually helpful in terms of performance, to reduce the amount of disk transfer.
12) The two main storage engines in MySQL are MyISAM and InnoDB. Each have their own pros and cons.MyISAM is good for read-heavy applications, but it doesn't scale very well when there are a lot of writes. Even if you are updating one field of one row, the whole table gets locked, and no other process can even read from it until that query is finished. MyISAM is very fast at calculating
SELECT COUNT(*)
types of queries.InnoDB tends to be a more complicated storage
engine and can be slower than MyISAM for most small applications. But it supports row-based locking, which scales better. It also supports some more advanced features such as transactions.

websql performance, can we shard tables

I am using websql to store data in a phonegap application. One of table have a lot of data say from 2000 to 10000 rows. So when I read from this table, which is just a simple select statement it is very slow. I then debug and found that as the size of table increases the performance deceases exponentially. I read somewhere that to get performance you have to divide table into smaller chunks, is that possible how?
One idea is to look for something to group the rows by and consider breaking into separate tables based on some common category - instead of a shared table for everything.
I would also consider fine tuning the queries to make sure they are optimal for the given table.
Make sure you're not just running a simple Select query without a where clause to limit the result set.

Updating records one by one

I have 5000 records I am calculating salary of one user and update his data in database. So it’s taking quit long to update 5000 records. I want to calculate all users’ salary first and then update to records in db.
Is there any other way we can update db in single click
It really depends on how your are managing your data access layer and what data you need for doing the calculation? Do you have all the data you need in just one table or for each record you need to fetch some other data from another tables?
One way is to retrieve each record and do the calculation in a transaction and then store it on the database. In this way, you can also take advantage of ajax UI to inform the user about the progress of calculation. In this way, you should use SqlDataReader to fetching the data as it is very optimized and has less overhead than using DataSet and DataTables and also you can prevent several type-castings. In addition, you can also make it optimized by taking advantage of TPL or make it configurable for fetching/updating N records each time. This approach works if you have the ID of the records. You also need to have a field for your records to track your calculations in case of any disconnection or crashes or iisreset execution so that you can resume the calculation instead of rerunning it again.

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