riak - unable to delete keys in a bucket - riak

I am using riak version 1.4.10 and it is in a ring with two hosts. I am unable to get rid of keys left over from previous operations using simple delete operations on keys. When I list the keys for a bucket, it shows me the old keys, however if I try to retrieve the data associated with a key, no data is found. When I try to delete the key, it still persists. What could be the cause of this? Is there a way to wipe the keys in the bucket so it starts from a clean slate? I don't care about any of the data in riak, but I would rather not have to reinstall everything again.

You are probably seeing the tombstones of the old data. Since Riak is an eventually consistent data store, it needs to keep track of deletes as if they were ordinary writes, at least for a little while.
If data is present on one node, but not another, how do you tell if it is a PUT that hasnt' propagated yet, or a DELETE?
Riak solves this by using a tombstone. Whenever you delete something, instead of just wiping the data immediately, Riak replaces the existing value with a special value that it knows means deleted. This special value contains a vclock that is descended from the previous value, and metadata indicating deleted. So when it comes time to decide the above question, Riak simply compares the vclock of the value with that of the tombstone. Whichever descends from the other must be the correct one.
To solve the problem of an ever growing data size that contains mostly tombstones, tombstones are reaped after a time. The time is set using the delete_mode setting. After the DELETE is processed, and the tombstone has been written to the primary vnodes, the delete process issues a GET request for the key. Whenever the GET process encounters a tombstone, and all of the primary vnodes responded with the same tombstone, it schedules the tombstone to be reaped according to the delete_mode setting.
So if you want to actually get rid of the tombstones, check your delete_mode setting to make sure it is not set to 'keep', and issue a get for each one to make sure it is really gone.
Or if you are just wiping the data store to restart your tests, stop Riak, delete all the files under the data_root for the backend you are using, and restart.

Related

Can MariaDB return incomplete data?

I am using MySQL Connector to connect to a MariaDB server.
A function in my program periodically retrieves all entries in a table (with a select * from ... without any wheres, limits, etc.).
After it gets the data, it checks if these rows (using an auto-incremented id) are already present in its memory, and if not it adds them. But if a row does not exist in the retrieved list but presents in the memory-list, then that row must be deleted from memory.
Deleting that row from memory is not the only thing that's gonna happen. It also deletes a bunch of other tables/files linked to that row. So, if the connector somehow fails, does not retrieve the full list, and does not report this, then I'll get into trouble.
It might be a tad stupid question but I couldn't make sure if I needed any additional safety measures.

Delete all keys from rocksdb (drop all)

I have a rocksdb instance with multithreaded read/write access. At some point an arbitrary thread needs to process a request to clear the whole database, basically delete all keys. How can I do it with the smallest disturbance to the other threads? Obviously, as everything is parallel, there is no need for a definite moment at which the database gets cleared and the new writes go to an empty one, and it is okay if some parallel reads are still getting the old data for some time.
I see DeleteRange, but my keys are irregular, there is no such thing as an upper bound
I see DeleteFile, but the comment says it will be gone in rocksdb 7.0. Also, this looks like a bad idea in a multithreaded environmnet
Interestingly, I could not find a recipe for such seemingly common use case
I see DeleteRange, but my keys are irregular, there is no such thing as an upper bound
Do they have a common prefix? Generally you would prefix the keys with the 'table name' like 'users' or 'messages' and then you can drop the entire messages range which would be like dropping the entire table
If you don't - then I would suggest rereading the docs to make sure you are using rocksdb correctly but the only other option is to loop over and delete each entry
An alternative, is to grab a lock and swap out to a new clean DB and delete the old data folder entirely

Retrieving Random Single Items in Dynamo

We are trying to get our heads wrapped around a design question, which is not really easy in any DB. We have 100,000 random items, (could be a lot more), (we are talking a truly random key, we'll use UUIDs,) and we want to hand them out one at a time. Order is not important. We are thinking that we'll create a dynamo table of the items, then delete them out of that table as they are assigned. We can do a conditional delete to make sure that we have not already given the item away. But, when trying to find an item in the first place, if we do a scan or a query with a limit of 1, will it always hit the same first available record? I'm wondering what the ramifications are. Dynamo will shard on the UUID. We are worried about everyhone trying to hit on the same record all the time. First one would of course get delete, then they could all hit on the second one, etc.
We could set up a memcache/redis instance in elastic cache, and keep a list of the available UUDS in there. We can do a random select of items from this using redis SPOP, which gets a random item and deletes it. We might have a problem where we could get out of sync between the two, but for the most part this would work.
Any thoughts on how to do this without the cache would be great. If dynamo does scans starting at different points, that would be dandy.
I have the same situation with you that have a set of million of UUID as key in DynamoDB and I need to random select some of them in a API call. For the performance issue and easy implementation. I did use Redis as you said.
add the UUID to a Set in Redis
when the call comes, SPOP a UUID from the set
with that UUID, del in DynamoDB
The performance of Scan operation is bad, should try to avoid it as best as you can.

Riak: are my 2is broken?

we're having some weird things happening with a cleanup cronjob and riak:
the objects we store (postboxes) have a 2i for modification date (which is a unix timestamp).
there's a cronjob running freqently deleting all postboxes that have not been modified within 180 days. however we've found evidence that postboxes that some (very little) postboxes that were modified in the last three days were deleted by this cronjob.
After reviewing and debugging several times over every line of code, I am confident, that this is not a problem of the cronjob.
I also traced back all delete calls to that bucket - and no one else is deleting objects there.
Of course I also checked with Riak to read the postboxes with r=ALL: they're definitely gone. (and they are stored with w=QUORUM)
I also checked the logs: updating the post boxes did succeed (there were no errors reported back from the write operations)
This leaves me with two possible causes for this:
riak loses data (which I am not willing to believe that easily)
the secondary indexes are corrupt and queries to them return wrong keys
So my questions are:
Can 2is actually break?
Is it possible to verify that?
Am I missing something completely different?
Cheers,
Matthias
Secondary index queries in Riak are coverage queries, which means that they will only use one of the stored replicas, and not perform a quorum read.
As you are writing with w=QUORUM, it is possible that one (or more) of the replicas may not get updated if you have n_val set to 3 or higher while the operation still is deemed successful. If this is the one selected for the coverage query, you could end up deleting based on the old value. In order to avoid this, you will need to perform updates with w=ALL.

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.

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