Fetch new entities only - google-cloud-datastore

I thought Datastore's key was ordered by insertion date, but apparently I was wrong. I need to periodically look for new entities in the Datastore, fetch them and process them.
Until now, I would simply store the last fetched key and wrongly query for anything greater than it.
Is there a way of doing so?
Thanks in advance.

Datastore automatically generated keys are generated with uniform distribution, in order to make search more performant. You will not be able to understand which entity where added last using keys.
Instead, you can try couple of different approaches.
Use Pub/Sub and architecture your app so another background task will consume this last added entities. On entities add in DB, you will just publish new Event into Pub/Sub with key id. You event listener (separate routine) will receive it.
Use names and generate you custom names. But, as you want to create sequentially growing names, this will case performance hit on even not big ranges of data. You can find more about this in Best Practices of Google Datastore.
https://cloud.google.com/datastore/docs/best-practices#keys
You can add additional creation time column, and still use automatic keys generation.

Related

Firebase Functions - Delete data without knowing the key

I am inserting data in Firebase Realtime Database in a table with the above structure. The key of the data is auto-generated based on push. After several such entries are created, sometime due to certain conditions I may need to delete one of the entries. At the point of deleting the entry, I may know some of the values of the node that I want to delete like createdAt and createdForPostID. But I will not know the key as it was auto-generated using push feature of firebase database. A combination of createdAt and createdForPostID makes a unique combination and only one such entry should exist in the database.
What would be the most efficient way to identify the entry without having to retrieve the entire node at OUTBOUND?
The reason I am using push is because Firebase claims it to be efficient and not subject to write conflicts. I also rely on the auto-sorting by date/time offered by push.
If no efficient way can be found, then I will generate my own key using date/time stamp. But I am hoping that this is a problem that someone has solved before and hence can guide me.
Any suggestions are welcome.
You'll need to run a query to find the items that match your conditions.
Since you seem to have multiple properties in your conditions, and the Firebase Database can only query on a single property, you'll need to combine the values into a single property as shown here.
Then you can run a query on that combined property and delete the items it returns:
var query = ref.orderByChild("createForPostID-createdAt").equalTo("20171229_124904-20171230_200343");
query.once("value", function(snapshot) {
snapshot.forEach(function(child) {
child.ref.remove();
})
Given Frank's answer I realised, I needed to create a unique property as per his suggestion because I will need it to do the future query. But then it seemed that I may be better off using that unique property as the key instead of using push
So it seems from an overall perspective, it might be more efficient to create your own key instead of push, if the app needs both create and delete functions. Reliance on push makes sense only if data is being created and deletion is not a big functionality of your app.
So, in conclusion, for Firebase data, the most efficient way to do both data create and delete needs creation of a unique key on your own.

How to dynamically add index on the server side in firebase?

Lets say I'm making an app with firebase where the user can create permanent lobbies in which they can send permanent dated messages to. The lobby's name is a key in my data structure. What I want to do is that each time a new lobby is created, an index is automatically created on the server side to sort the messages of that lobby by date.
That can probably be done if I have another server listening in to the creation of new lobbies but is there a way to do this without having an additional server? Just through the client? Without compromising the security of the app?
(Note: I'm using the Unity sdk)
There is no way to programmatically add an index, short from updating a rules.json file and uploading it with the Firebase tools/CLI, which I'd highly recommend against.
If you find you need to dynamically add indexes, you've probably structured your data wrong. But without seeing a minimal sample of the JSON (as text, no screenshots please) that reproduces the problem, it is impossible to say more than that.
You can use the Push() function on a database reference. This will create a unique key based on the timestamp so all values can easily be sorted chronologically.
Use Push() anytime you need to generate a new unique key on your database. You can use this for the lobby itself and even the conversations within the lobby.
Source

Get an object from a bucket in riak without knowing its key

I am using a riak bucket to store a list of messages, using a UUID as the key and a json message as value. This is working fine.
What I need is an efficient way to get a single message from the bucket without knowing its key, at least in one of these two scenarios:
Get the last inserted object (this is my prefered approach).
Get a random object from the bucket (if the first alternative is not possible).
Is there any efficient way to achieve that?
I think one alternative could be to retrieve the keys in the bucket and then get the first one. But this means making two calls to riak, one to obtain all the keys (just to discard all but one) and a second one to obtain the object. It does not seem very efficient.
As Riak is a key-value store, the by far most efficient way to retrieve data is through the keys. Listing or retrieving all keys in a bucket, even if you only end up using the one returned first, is one of the least efficient operations you can perform as it causes Riak to scan ALL keys in the system (not just the bucket), and it is usually recommended NEVER to use this on a production system.
The most efficient way to get the last inserted object would probably be to store the id in a separate, known record in a different bucket. This would however require you to perform two writes on every insert and two reads for every read, but would do so in the most efficient way. You could possibly implement a post-commit hook (would have to be in Erlang as it is not currently not possible to write records using JavaScript functions) on the bucket containing messages to get the system to perform the update for you, which would remove the need for the last write.
If you write a lot of data to the bucket containing messages, you may want to adjust the separate bucket so that it does not allow multiple values and that the last value wins. This way you would reduce the risk of having lots of siblings created due to frequent updates to this single record across the system. This would always give you one of the last written records, but not necessarily the last one (especially if you frequently write messages to the database), as Riak does not support any type of atomicity and is an eventually consistent database.
You could also create one or more secondary indexes if you are using the leveldb backend, and use this to limit your scan to only recent records, which would be more efficient than a scann of all keys. You could then either select the most recent key or a random one through mapreduce, but this would be much less efficient than the previously described approach.
I can not think of any efficient way to retrieve a random record in a bucket from Riak unless you know the range of keys you have inserted and can decide randomly on the client which one to get. One way to do this would be to generate all keys in sequence rather than using a UUID, but that is naturally not a good idea in a highly concurrent distributed system.
1st task is pretty easy to implement:
Add post-commit hook that will write the last inserted key to some predefined key/bucket place
Get the key from that predefined key/bucket and issue a get query using them
It's still two operations but both are just gets that are fast. Plus additional overhead on hook but nothing too heavy either.
2nd scenario is also easy, but it is way too inefficient to be used practically:
Get all keys (extremely expensive operation)
Pick random
Issue get
I have come up with the same scenario. In My scenario I have to save the users. For that I required an auto increment Id. So what I did is, I placed the last inserted key in a separate bucket as like mentioned by "Christian Dahlqvist", every time I want to insert new record I fetch the last inserted key from that key bucket. Here we have only one value in that bucket with the key as "LastKey" which is always known to us. And I incremented the key based on the fetched key and again updated the key bucket. So always the key bucket contains the latest key in it.

Mongodb automatically write into capped collection

I need to manage the acquisition of many record at hour. About 1000000 records. And I need to get every second the last insert value for every primary key. It works quit well with sharding. I was thinking to try the use os capped collection to get only the last record for every primary key. In order to do this, I made two separated insert, there is a way, into mongodb, to make some kind of trigger to propagate the insert into a collection to another collection?
MongoDB does not have any support for triggers or similar behavior.
The only way to do this is to make it happen in your code. So the code that writes the first entry should also write the second.
People have definitely requested triggers. If they are necessary for your solution, please cast a vote on the feature request.
I disagree with "triggers is needed". People, MongoDB was created to be very fast and to provide as basic functionalities as can be. This is a power of this solution.
I think that here the best think is to create triggers inside Your application as a part of Data Access layer.

Bulk Collection Manipulation through a REST (RESTful) API

I'd like some advice on designing a REST API which will allow clients to add/remove large numbers of objects to a collection efficiently.
Via the API, clients need to be able to add items to the collection and remove items from it, as well as manipulating existing items. In many cases the client will want to make bulk updates to the collection, e.g. adding 1000 items and deleting 500 different items. It feels like the client should be able to do this in a single transaction with the server, rather than requiring 1000 separate POST requests and 500 DELETEs.
Does anyone have any info on the best practices or conventions for achieving this?
My current thinking is that one should be able to PUT an object representing the change to the collection URI, but this seems at odds with the HTTP 1.1 RFC, which seems to suggest that the data sent in a PUT request should be interpreted independently from the data already present at the URI. This implies that the client would have to send a complete description of the new state of the collection in one go, which may well be very much larger than the change, or even be more than the client would know when they make the request.
Obviously, I'd be happy to deviate from the RFC if necessary but would prefer to do this in a conventional way if such a convention exists.
You might want to think of the change task as a resource in itself. So you're really PUT-ing a single object, which is a Bulk Data Update object. Maybe it's got a name, owner, and big blob of CSV, XML, etc. that needs to be parsed and executed. In the case of CSV you might want to also identify what type of objects are represented in the CSV data.
List jobs, add a job, view the status of a job, update a job (probably in order to start/stop it), delete a job (stopping it if it's running) etc. Those operations map easily onto a REST API design.
Once you have this in place, you can easily add different data types that your bulk data updater can handle, maybe even mixed together in the same task. There's no need to have this same API duplicated all over your app for each type of thing you want to import, in other words.
This also lends itself very easily to a background-task implementation. In that case you probably want to add fields to the individual task objects that allow the API client to specify how they want to be notified (a URL they want you to GET when it's done, or send them an e-mail, etc.).
Yes, PUT creates/overwrites, but does not partially update.
If you need partial update semantics, use PATCH. See http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-dusseault-http-patch-14.html.
You should use AtomPub. It is specifically designed for managing collections via HTTP. There might even be an implementation for your language of choice.
For the POSTs, at least, it seems like you should be able to POST to a list URL and have the body of the request contain a list of new resources instead of a single new resource.
As far as I understand it, REST means REpresentational State Transfer, so you should transfer the state from client to server.
If that means too much data going back and forth, perhaps you need to change your representation. A collectionChange structure would work, with a series of deletions (by id) and additions (with embedded full xml Representations), POSTed to a handling interface URL. The interface implementation can choose its own method for deletions and additions server-side.
The purest version would probably be to define the items by URL, and the collection contain a series of URLs. The new collection can be PUT after changes by the client, followed by a series of PUTs of the items being added, and perhaps a series of deletions if you want to actually remove the items from the server rather than just remove them from that list.
You could introduce meta-representation of existing collection elements that don't need their entire state transfered, so in some abstract code your update could look like this:
{existing elements 1-100}
{new element foo with values "bar", "baz"}
{existing element 105}
{new element foobar with values "bar", "foo"}
{existing elements 110-200}
Adding (and modifying) elements is done by defining their values, deleting elements is done by not mentioning it the new collection and reordering elements is done by specifying the new order (if order is stored at all).
This way you can easily represent the entire new collection without having to re-transmit the entire content. Using a If-Unmodified-Since header makes sure that your idea of the content indeed matches the servers idea (so that you don't accidentally remove elements that you simply didn't know about when the request was submitted).
Best way is :
Pass Only Id Array of Deletable Objects from Front End Application To Web API
2. Then You have Two Options:
2.1 Web API Way : Find All Collections/Entities using Id arrays and Delete in API , but you need to take care of Dependant entities like Foreign Key Relational Table Data too
2.2. Database Way : Pass Ids to your database side, find all records in Foreign Key Tables and Primary Key Tables and Delete in same order i.e. F-Key Table records then P-Key Table records

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