Our current system was architectured like;
We have around 5 million records in a DB table. Depending on the need, we get, say a resultset of 1 million records and keep them in cache throughout the application, when we are done, get rid of them.
Now, instead of using .NET application's memory, "Is it possible to use in-memory tables to keep those 1 million records in an in-memory table whilst disk based table still keeps 5 million records?"
That's possible. Performance will still be less than with in-process data. One of the most expensive things to do when executing a cheap SQL statement is all the overhead of executing anything at all (network, serialization, ...).
You will need to measure (or have a good understanding of) whether the now reduced performance is still enough.
If the existing system works without problems there is no need to change anything.
SQL Server already has advanced caching algorithms built-in. How big is your table? 5 million rows are not that big these days, the entire table might be already cached into memory and you can just use SELECT queries by primary key.
Related
I have an MVC application that needs to run several tillion calculations. Of those, I am interested in only about 8 million results. I have to do this work because I need to see an overall high and low score. I will save this data, and store it is in a single table of 16 floats. I have a few indexes too on this table for lookups. So far I have only processed 5% of my data.
As users enter data into my website, I have to do calculations based on their data. I have to determine the Best and Worst outcomes. This is only about 4 million calculations. Right now, that takes about a second or less to calculate on my local PC. Or it is a simple query that will always return 2 records from my stored data. The Best and The Worst. Right now, the query to get the results is the same speed or faster than calculating the result, but I don't have all 8 million records yet. I am worried that the DB will get slow.
I was thinking I would use the Database Lookup, and if performance became an issue, switch to runtime calculation.
QUESTION: Should I just save myself the trouble and do the runtime calculation anyway?
I am not sure which option is more scalable. I don't expect a large user base for this website.
The site needs to be snappy.
Your question is a little vague to provide a clear cut answer, but my guess is using the db to calculate the totals will be far more efficient than you writing the code on the website. Sql Server will attempt to optimize the query to use as much of the server resources as possible to make it more efficient. Your code won't do that unless you specifically write it to do so.
I would start by loading the data and doing tests before making an optimization strategy. You have no idea where the real bottlenecks of the system will be before you load data that is remotely close to what you are going to have to deal with.
If I understand the question performing the calculation is more scalable has it is on that single data set. As you add data to a table even with indexes lookups will get slower. Also the indexes increase table size and increase the time required to insert a record.
If I've understood you correctly, this is a question about caching - should you calculate on the fly, or lookup the results in a cache?
In most web architectures, your SQL database is a brilliant cache, right up to the point where it becomes a terrible cache. Scaling your (SQL) database is notoriously tricky - introducing clustering, sharding etc. becomes a production in its own right.
My - very general - advice is to use your relational database for managing transactional data, and to use caching technology for caching. 8 million records should fit into RAM on a decent server these days - and you can add web servers far more cheaply than scaling your database.
I have a reasonably complex query to extract the Id field of the results I am interested in based on parameters entered by the user.
After extracting the relevant Ids I am using the resulting set of Ids several times, in separate queries, to extract the actual output record sets I want (by joining to other tables, using aggregate functions, etc).
I would like to avoid running the initial query separately for every set of results I want to return. I imagine my situation is a common pattern so I am interested in what the best approach is.
The database is in MS SQL Server and I am using .NET 3.5.
It would definitely help if the question contained some measurements of the unoptimized solution (data sizes, timings). There is a variety of techniques that could be considered here, some listed in the other answers. I will assume that the reason why you do not want to run the same query repeatedly is performance.
If all the uses of the set of cached IDs consist of joins of the whole set to additional tables, the solution should definitely not involve caching the set of IDs outside of the database. Data should not travel there and back again if you can avoid it.
In some cases (when cursors or extremely complex SQL are not involved) it may be best (even if counterintuitive) to perform no caching and simply join the repetitive SQL to all desired queries. After all, each query needs to be traversed based on one of the joined tables and then the performance depends to a large degree on availability of indexes necessary to join and evaluate all the remaining information quickly.
The most intuitive approach to "caching" the set of IDs within the database is a temporary table (if named #something, it is private to the connection and therefore usable by parallel independent clients; or it can be named ##something and be global). If the table is going to have many records, indexes are necessary. For optimum performance, the index should be a clustered index (only one per table allowed), or be only created after constructing that set, where index creation is slightly faster.
Indexed views are cleary preferable to temporary tables except when the underlying data is read only during the whole process or when you can and want to ignore such updates to keep the whole set of reports consistent as far as the set goes. However, the ability of indexed views to always accurately project the underlying data comes at a cost of slowing down those updates.
One other answer to this question mentions stored procedures. This is largely a way of organizing your code. However, it if you go this way, it is preferable to avoid using temporary tables, because such references to a temporary table prevent pre-compilation of the stored procedure; go for views or indexed views if you can.
Regardless of the approach you choose, do not guess at the performance characteristics and query optimizer behavior. Learn to display query execution plans (within SQL Server Management Studio) and make sure that you see index accesses as opposed to nested loops combining multiple large sets of data; only add indexes that demonstrably and drastically change the performance of your queries. A well chosen index can often change the performance of a query by a factor of 1000, so this is somewhat complex to learn but crucial for success.
And last but not least, make sure you use UPDATE STATISTICS when repopulating the database (and nightly in production), or your query optimizer will not be able to put the indexes you have created to their best uses.
If you are planning to cache the result set in your application code, then ASP.NET has cache, Your Winform will have the object holding the data with it with which you can reuse the data.
If planning to do the same in SQL Server, you might consider using indexed views to find out the Id's. The view will be materialized and hence you can get the results faster. You might even consider using a staging table to hold the id's temporarily.
With SQL Server 2008 you can pass table variables as params to SQL. Just cache the IDs and then pass them as a table variable to the queries that fetch the data. The only caveat of this approach is that you have to predefine the table type as UDT.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb510489.aspx
For SQL Server, Microsoft generally recommends using stored procedures whenever practical.
Here are a few of the advantages:
http://blog.sqlauthority.com/2007/04/13/sql-server-stored-procedures-advantages-and-best-advantage/
* Execution plan retention and reuse
* Query auto-parameterization
* Encapsulation of business rules and policies
* Application modularization
* Sharing of application logic between applications
* Access to database objects that is both secure and uniform
* Consistent, safe data modification
* Network bandwidth conservation
* Support for automatic execution at system start-up
* Enhanced hardware and software capabilities
* Improved security
* Reduced development cost and increased reliability
* Centralized security, administration, and maintenance for common routines
It's also worth noting that, unlike other RDBMS vendors (like Oracle, for example), MSSQL automatically caches all execution plans:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms973918.aspx
However, for the last couple of versions of SQL Server, execution
plans are cached for all T-SQL batches, regardless of whether or not
they are in a stored procedure
The best approach depends on how often the Id changes, or how often you want to look it up again.
One technique is to simply store the result in the ASP.NET object cache, using the Cache object (also accessible from HttpRuntime.Cache). For example (from a page):
this.Cache["key"] = "value";
There are many possible variations on this theme.
You can use Memcached to cache values in the memory.
As I see there are some .net ports.
How frequently does the data change that you'll be querying? To me, this sounds like a perfect scenario for data warehousing, where you flatting the data for quicker data retrieval and create the tables exactly as your 'DTO' wants to see the data. This method is different than an indexed view in that it's simply a table which will have quick seek operations, and could especially be improved if you setup the indexes properly on the columns that you plan to query
You can create Global temporary Table. Create the table on the fly. Now insert the records as per your request. Access this table in your next request in your joins... for reusability
What is considering good practice using datatables in an asp.net applications?
I need to make multiple queries everytime the user clicks a control. Is it better to go directly to the sql server table or load that data in a datatable and use LINQ to get the data. In this case the table has 10 columns and a 3000+ rows.
That's really a fairly complex question (without a whole lot of detail here). At the highest level, you're trying to balance the optimization of holding data in memory vs. factors like concurrency and memory utilization. I'd bet if you did a little reading on caching strategies, you'd start to get a sense for how you can weigh these tradeoffs.
DataTable is okay, using SqlDataAdapter is slow compared to SqlDataReader. I like to read data into my own custom structures for easy retrieval.
10 columns * 3000 rows is very small and you'd be fine keeping that in memory if it was important data. if you assume 1k per cell, that is only 30k, tiny, and if you have a lot of traffic to the page it will be faster to much faster depending on the speed of the query that retrieves the data from the database.
One thing to keep in mind is you will probably need to think about refreshing your data from time to time, or managing changes to the data. ASP has a Cache object that you can use for this purpose, it allows you set expiration times in various ways.
If the data is subject to change very often and from many different sources, it can be complicated to manage concurrency of changes. When I use a caching strategy I try to use it on non critical data that isn't subject to constant change. This isn't to say it's impossible to cache data that changes a lot, it's just more complicated.
Use data cache, depending on your application size and complexity you will decide on a distributed system or not:
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CommentView.aspx?guid=3109dc37-49f8-4249-baf1-56d4c6158321
http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/07/memcached
Background: I am using SQLite database in my flex application. Size of the database is 4 MB and have 5 tables which are
table 1 have 2500 records
table 2 have 8700 records
table 3 have 3000 records
table 4 have 5000 records
table 5 have 2000 records.
Problem: Whenever I run a select query on any table, it takes around (approx 50 seconds) to fetch data from database tables. This has made the application quite slow and unresponsive while it fetches the data from the table.
How can i improve the performance of the SQLite database so that the time taken to fetch the data from the tables is reduced?
Thanks
As I tell you in a comment, without knowing what structures your database consists of, and what queries you run against the data, there is nothing we can infer suggesting why your queries take much time.
However here is an interesting reading about indexes : Use the index, Luke!. It tells you what an index is, how you should design your indexes and what benefits you can harvest.
Also, if you can post the queries and the table schemas and cardinalities (not the contents) maybe it could help.
Are you using asynchronous or synchronous execution modes? The difference between them is that asynchronous execution runs in the background while your application continues to run. Your application will then have to listen for a dispatched event and then carry out any subsequent operations. In synchronous mode, however, the user will not be able to interact with the application until the database operation is complete since those operations run in the same execution sequence as the application. Synchronous mode is conceptually simpler to implement, but asynchronous mode will yield better usability.
The first time SQLStatement.execute() on a SQLStatement instance, the statement is prepared automatically before executing. Subsequent calls will execute faster as long as the SQLStatement.text property has not changed. Using the same SQLStatement instances is better than creating new instances again and again. If you need to change your queries, then consider using parameterized statements.
You can also use techniques such as deferring what data you need at runtime. If you only need a subset of data, pull that back first and then retrieve other data as necessary. This may depend on your application scope and what needs you have to fulfill though.
Specifying the database with the table names will prevent the runtime from checking each database to find a matching table if you have multiple databases. It also helps prevent the runtime will choose the wrong database if this isn't specified. Do SELECT email FROM main.users; instead of SELECT email FROM users; even if you only have one single database. (main is automatically assigned as the database name when you call SQLConnection.open.)
If you happen to be writing lots of changes to the database (multiple INSERT or UPDATE statements), then consider wrapping it in a transaction. Changes will made in memory by the runtime and then written to disk. If you don't use a transaction, each statement will result in multiple disk writes to the database file which can be slow and consume lots of time.
Try to avoid any schema changes. The table definition data is kept at the start of the database file. The runtime loads these definitions when the database connection is opened. Data added to tables is kept after the table definition data in the database file. If changes such as adding columns or tables, the new table definitions will be mixed in with table data in the database file. The effect of this is that the runtime will have to read the table definition data from different parts of the file rather than at the beginning. The SQLConnection.compact() method restructures the table definition data so it is at the the beginning of the file, but its downside is that this method can also consume much time and more so if the database file is large.
Lastly, as Benoit pointed out in his comment, consider improving your own SQL queries and table structure that you're using. It would be helpful to know your database structure and queries are the actual cause of the slow performance or not. My guess is that you're using synchronous execution. If you switch to asynchronous mode, you'll see better performance but that doesn't mean it has to stop there.
The Adobe Flex documentation online has more information on improving database performance and best practices working with local SQL databases.
You could try indexing some of the columns used in the WHERE clause of your SELECT statements. You might also try minimizing usage of the LIKE keyword.
If you are joining your tables together, you might try simplifying the table relationships.
Like others have said, it's hard to get specific without knowing more about your schema and the SQL you are using.
We've developed a system with a search screen that looks a little something like this:
(source: nsourceservices.com)
As you can see, there is some fairly serious search functionality. You can use any combination of statuses, channels, languages, campaign types, and then narrow it down by name and so on as well.
Then, once you've searched and the leads pop up at the bottom, you can sort the headers.
The query uses ROWNUM to do a paging scheme, so we only return something like 70 rows at a time.
The Problem
Even though we're only returning 70 rows, an awful lot of IO and sorting is going on. This makes sense of course.
This has always caused some minor spikes to the Disk Queue. It started slowing down more when we hit 3 million leads, and now that we're getting closer to 5, the Disk Queue pegs for up to a second or two straight sometimes.
That would actually still be workable, but this system has another area with a time-sensitive process, lets say for simplicity that it's a web service, that needs to serve up responses very quickly or it will cause a timeout on the other end. The Disk Queue spikes are causing that part to bog down, which is causing timeouts downstream. The end result is actually dropped phone calls in our automated VoiceXML-based IVR, and that's very bad for us.
What We've Tried
We've tried:
Maintenance tasks that reduce the number of leads in the system to the bare minimum.
Added the obvious indexes to help.
Ran the index tuning wizard in profiler and applied most of its suggestions. One of them was going to more or less reproduce the entire table inside an index so I tweaked it by hand to do a bit less than that.
Added more RAM to the server. It was a little low but now it always has something like 8 gigs idle, and the SQL server is configured to use no more than 8 gigs, however it never uses more than 2 or 3. I found that odd. Why isn't it just putting the whole table in RAM? It's only 5 million leads and there's plenty of room.
Poured over query execution plans. I can see that at this point the indexes seem to be mostly doing their job -- about 90% of the work is happening during the sorting stage.
Considered partitioning the Leads table out to a different physical drive, but we don't have the resources for that, and it seems like it shouldn't be necessary.
In Closing...
Part of me feels like the server should be able to handle this. Five million records is not so many given the power of that server, which is a decent quad core with 16 gigs of ram. However, I can see how the sorting part is causing millions of rows to be touched just to return a handful.
So what have you done in situations like this? My instinct is that we should maybe slash some functionality, but if there's a way to keep this intact that will save me a war with the business unit.
Thanks in advance!
Database bottlenecks can frequently be improved by improving your SQL queries. Without knowing what those look like, consider creating an operational data store or a data warehouse that you populate on a scheduled basis.
Sometimes flattening out your complex relational databases is the way to go. It can make queries run significantly faster, and make it a lot easier to optimize your queries, since the model is very flat. That may also make it easier to determine if you need to scale your database server up or out. A capacity and growth analysis may help to make that call.
Transactional/highly normalized databases are not usually as scalable as an ODS or data warehouse.
Edit: Your ORM may have optimizations as well that it may support, that may be worth looking into, rather than just looking into how to optimize the queries that it's sending to your database. Perhaps bypassing your ORM altogether for the reports could be one way to have full control over your queries in order to gain better performance.
Consider how your ORM is creating the queries.
If you're having poor search performance perhaps you could try using stored procedures to return your results and, if necessary, multiple stored procedures specifically tailored to which search criteria are in use.
determine which ad-hoc queries will most likely be run or limit the search criteria with stored procedures.. can you summarize data?.. treat this
app like a data warehouse.
create indexes on each column involved in the search to avoid table scans.
create fragments on expressions.
periodically reorg the data and update statistics as more leads are loaded.
put the temporary files created by queries (result sets) in ramdisk.
consider migrating to a high-performance RDBMS engine like Informix OnLine.
Initiate another thread to start displaying N rows from the result set while the query
continues to execute.