Meaning of Azure Analysis Services memory metric - azure-analysis-services

The memory measure in the Azure Analysis Services Metrics page, is it the memory used by Azure AS after compression has been applied? I've loaded a 31 GB SQL DW table into Azure AS and the memory measure shows 24 GB. Is this the expected compression rate (23%)?

The memory metric is the amount of memory used by your model after compression is applied. If you are re-processing your model then more memory is used for a shadow copy, this also shows in the metric.
With regards to the expected compression ratio, the success of the compression processes depend on the number of distinct values in each column and how fast the values change from one row to the next (e.g. is the column sorted). There is a very good explanation of these two factors in Alberto Ferrari's presentation to a Swedish user group, the first 25 minutes or so where he discusses run-length and dictionary encoding is the bit you want.

Related

Storage cost / supportability / performance tradeoffs using compact attributes in DynamoDB

I'm working on large scale component that generates unique/opaque tokens representing business entities. Over time there will be many billions of these records, but for the first year we're not expecting growth to exceed more than 2 billion individual items (probably less than 500 million).
The system itself is horizontally scaled but needs token generation to be idempotent; data integrity is maintained by using a contained but reasonably complex combination of transactional writes with embedded condition expressions AND standalone condition check write items.
The tokens themselves are UUIDs, and 'being efficient' are persisted as Binary attribute values (16 bytes) rather than the string representation (36 bytes), however the downside is that the data doesn't visualise nicely in query consoles making support hard if we encounter any bugs and/or broken data. Note there is no extra code complexity since we implement attributevalue.Marshaler interface to bind UUID (language) types to DynamoDB Binary attributes, and similarly do the same for any composite attributes.
My question relates to (mostly) data size/saving. Since the tokens are the partition keys, and some mapping columns are [token] -> [other token composite attributes], for example two UUIDs concatenated together into 32 bytes.
I wanted to keep really tight control over storage costs knowing that, over time, we will be spending ~$0.25/GB per month for this. My question is really three parts:
Are the PK/SK index size 'reserved' (i.e. padded) so it would make no difference at all to storage cost if we compress the overall field sizes down to the minimum possible size? (... I read somewhere that 100 bytes is typically reserved.
If they ARE padded, the cost savings for the data would be reasonably high, because each (tree) index node will be nearly as big as the data being mapped. (I assume a tree index is used once hashed PK has routed the query to the right server node/disk etc.)
Is there any observable query time performance benefit to compacting 36 bytes into 16 (beyond saving a few bytes across the network)? i.e. if Dynamo has to read fewer pages it'll work faster, but in practice are we talking microseconds at best?
This is a secondary concern, but is worth considering if there is a lot of concurrent access to the data. UUIDs will distribute partitions but inevitably sometimes we will have some more active partitions than others.
Are there any tools that can parse bytes back into human-readable UUIDs (or that we customise to inject behaviour to do this)?
This is concern, because making things small and efficient is ok, but supporting and resolving data issues will be difficult without significant tooling investment, and (unsurprisingly) the DynamoDB console, DynamoDB IntelliJ plugin and AWS NoSQL Workbench all garble the binary into unreadable characters.
No, the PK/SK types are not padded. There's 100 bytes of overhead per item stored.
Sending less data certainly won't hurt your performance. Don't expect a noticeable improvement though. If shorter values can keep your items at 1,024 bytes instead of 1,025 bytes then you save yourself a Write Unit during the save.
For the "garbled" binary values I assume you're looking at the base64 encoded values, which is a standard binary encoding standard which can be reversed by lots of tooling (now that you know the name of it).

Does DynamoDB latency depend on number of items per partition

Newbie to DDB here. I've been using a DDB table for a year now. Recently, I made improvements by compressing the payload using gzip (and representing it as a binary in DDB) and storing the new data in another newly created beta table. Overall compression was 3x. I expected the read latency(GetItem) to improve as well as it's less data to be transported over the wire. However, I'm seeing that the read latency has increased from ~ 50ms p99.9 to ~114 ms p99.9. I'm not sure how that happened and was wondering if because of the compression, now I have a lot of rows per partition (which I think is defined as <= 10 GB). I now have 3-4x more rows per partition. So, I'm wondering that once dynamoDb determines the right partition for a partition key, then within the partition how does it find the correct item? Gut feel is that this shouldn't lead to an increase in latency as a simplified representation of the partition can be a giant hashmap so it'd just be a simple lookup. I'd appreciate any help here.
My DDB schema:
partition-key - user-id,dataset-name
range-key - update-timestamp
payload - used to be string, now is compressed/binary.
In my GetItem requests, I specify both partition key and range key.
According to your description, your change included two unrelated parts: You compressed the payload, and increased the number of items per partition. The first change - the compression - probably has little effect on the p99 latency (it could have a more noticable effect on the mean latency - which, according to Little's Law is related to throughput, if your client has fixed concurrency - but I'd expect it to lower, not increase).
Some guesses as to what might have increased the p99 latency:
More items per partition means that DynamoDB (which uses a B-tree) needs to do more disk reads to find a specific item. Since each disk access has rare delays caused by queueing, this adds to the tail latency.
You said that the change caused each partition to hold more items, I guess this means you now have fewer partitions. If you have too few of them, you can start getting unbalanced load on the different DynamoDB partitions, and more contention and latency for specific "hot" partitions.
I don't know how you measure your latency. Your client now needs (I guess) to uncompress the returned result, maybe it is now busier, adding queening delays in the client? Can you lower your client's concurrency (how many client threads run in parallel) and see if the high tail latency is an artifact of the server design, or the client's design?

High memory consumption in hana table partitioning

I have a big table having records around 4 billion ,table is partitioned but i need to perform the partitioning again. while doing the partitioning memory consumption of the hana system reached to its limit 4TB and started impacting other system.
How we can optimize the partitioning so get completed without consuming that much of memory
To re-partition tables, both the original table structure as well as the new table structure needs to be kept in memory at the same time.
For the target table structures, data will be inserted into delta stores and later on merged, which again consumes memory.
To increase performance, re-partitioning happens in parallel threads, which, you may guess, again uses additional memory.
The administration guide provides a hint to lower the number of parallel threads:
Parallelism and Memory Consumption
Partitioning operations consume a
high amount of memory. To reduce the memory consumption, it is
possible to configure the number of threads used.
You can change the
default value of the parameter split_threads in the partitioning
section of the indexserver.ini configuration file.
By default, 16 threads are used. In the case of a parallel partition/merge, the
individual operations use a total of the configured number of threads
for each host. Each operation takes at least one thread.
So, that's the online option to re-partition if your system does not have enough memory for parallel threads.
Alternatively, you may consider an offline re-partitioning that would involve exporting the table (as CSV!), truncating(!) the table, altering the partitioning on the now empty table and re-importing the data.
Note, that I wrote "truncate" as this will preserve all privileges and references to the table (views, synonyms, roles, etc.) which would be lost if you dropped and recreated the table.

Apache Ignite 2.4 uneven partitioning of data causing nodes to run out of memory and crash

Environment:
Apache Ignite 2.4 running on Amazon Linux. VM is 16CPUs/122GB ram. There is plenty of room there.
5 nodes, 12GB each
cacheMode = PARTITIONED
backups = 0
OnheapCacheEnabled = true
atomicityMode = ATOMIC
rebalacneMode = SYNC
rebalanceBatchSize = 1MB
copyOnread = false
rebalanceThrottle = 0
rebalanceThreadPoolSize = 4
Basically we have a process that populates the cache on startup and then receives periodic updates from Kafka, propagating them to the cache.
The number of elements in the cache is more or less stable over time (there is just a little fluctuation since we have a mixture of create, update and delete events), but what we have noticed is that the distribution of data across the different nodes is very uneven, with one of the nodes having at least double the number of keys (and memory utilization) as the others. Over time, that node either runs out of memory, or starts doing very long GCs and loses contact with the rest of the cluster.
My expectation was that Ignite would balance the data across the different nodes, but reality shows something completely different. Am I missing something here? Why do we see this imbalance and how do we fix it?
Thanks in advance.
Bottom line, although our hash function had good distribution, the default affinity function was not yielding a good distribution of keys (and, consequently, memory) across the nodes in the cluster. We replaced it with a very naive one (partition # % # of nodes), and that improved the distribution quite a bit (less than 2% variance).
This not a generic solution; it works for us because our entire cluster is in one VM and we don't use replication. For massive clusters crossing VM boundaries and replication, keeping the replicated data in separate servers is mandatory, and the naive approach won't cut it.

Fragmentation in SQLite used in a round-robin fashion without VACUUM

There's an SQLite database being used to store static-sized data in a round-robin fashion.
For example, 100 days of data are stored. On day 101, day 1 is deleted and then day 101 is inserted.
The number of rows is the same between days. The the individual fields in the rows are all integers (32-bit or less) and timestamps.
The database is stored on an SD card with poor I/O speed,
something like a read speed of 30 MB/s.
VACUUM is not allowed because it can introduce a wait of several seconds
and the writers to that database can't be allowed to wait for write access.
So the concern is fragmentation, because I'm inserting and deleting records constantly
without VACUUMing.
But since I'm deleting/inserting the same set of rows each day,
will the data get fragmented?
Is SQLite fitting day 101's data in day 1's freed pages?
And although the set of rows is the same,
the integers may be 1 byte day and then 4 bytes another.
The database also has several indexes, and I'm unsure where they're stored
and if they interfere with the perfect pattern of freeing pages and then re-using them.
(SQLite is the only technology that can be used. Can't switch to a TSDB/RRDtool, etc.)
SQLite will reuse free pages, so you will get fragmentation (if you delete so much data that entire pages become free).
However, SD cards are likely to have a flash translation layer, which introduces fragmentation whenever you write to some random sector.
Whether the first kind of fragmentation is noticeable depends on the hardware, and on the software's access pattern.
It is not possible to make useful predictions about that; you have to measure it.
In theory, WAL mode is append-only, and thus easier on the flash device.
However, checkpoints would be nearly as bad as VACUUMs.

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