Fetching documents in xquery - xquery

I need to fetch documents from DB in xquery between dates [from date and to date].
From Date - 30 days before from Current Date
To Date - current date
In every document, I have an attribute named "loadDate". I have to fetch without creating an index for this attribute. Is that possible?
Please help.
Thanks,
-N

Assuming that your 'loadDate' attribute has type xs:date, and making up an imaginary structure for your documents, it sounds as if your query is simply:
/myns:doc
[#loadDate gt (current-date() - xs:dayTimeDuration('P30D'))]
Such a query might be slower without an index, but why would it not be possible? In a declarative query language, the general principle is that the existence of an index should not change the meaning of any query, only the speed with which it can be evaluated.

Related

In XQuery Marklogic how to sort dynamically?

In XQuery Marklogic how to sort dynamically?
let $sortelement := 'Salary'
for $doc in collection('employee')
order by $doc/$sortelement
return $doc
PS: Sorting will change based on user input, like data, name in place of salary.
If Salary is the name of the element, then you could more generically select any element in the XPath with * and then apply a predicate filter to test whether the local-name() matches the variable for the selected element value $sortelement:
let $sortelement := 'Salary'
for $doc in collection('employee')
order by $doc/*[local-name() eq $sortelement]
return $doc
This manner of sorting all items in the collection may work with smaller number of documents, but if you are working with hundreds of thousands or millions of documents, you may find that pulling back all docs is either slow or blows out the Expanded Tree Cache.
A more efficient solution would be to create range indexes on the elements that you intend to sort on, and could then perform a search with options specified to order the results by cts:index-order with an appropriate reference to the indexed item, such as cts:element-reference(), cts:json-property-reference(), cts:field-reference().
For example:
let $sortelement := 'Salary'
return
cts:search(doc(),
cts:collection-query("employee"),
cts:index-order(cts:element-reference(xs:QName($sortelement)))
)
Not recommended because the chances of introducing security issues, runtime crashes and just 'bad results' is much higher and more difficult to control --
BUT available as a last resort.
ALL XQuery can be dynamically created as a string then evaluated using xdmp:eval
Much better to follow the guidance of Mads, and use the search apis instead of xquery FLOWR expressions -- note that these APIs actually 'compile down' to a data structure. This is what the 'cts constructors' do : https://docs.marklogic.com/cts/constructors
I find it helps to think of cts searches as a structured search described by data -- which the cts:xxx are simply helper functions to create the data structure.
(they dont actually do any searching, they build up a data structure that is used to do the searching)
If you look at the source to the search:xxx apis you can see how this is done.

Querying on Global Secondary indexes with a usage of contains operator

I've been reading a DynamoDB docs and was unable to understand if it does make sense to query on Global Secondary Index with a usage of 'contains' operator.
My problem is as follows: my dynamoDB document has a list of embedded objects, every object has a 'code' field which is unique:
{
"entities":[
{"code":"entity1Code", "name":"entity1Name"},
{"code":"entity2Code", "name":"entity2Name"}
]
}
I want to be able to get all documents that contain entities with entity.code = X.
For this purpose I'm considering adding a Global Secondary Index that would contain all entity.codes that are present in current db document separated by a comma. So the example above would look like:
{
"entities":[
{"code":"entity1Code", "name":"entity1Name"},
{"code":"entity2Code", "name":"entity2Name"}
],
"entitiesGlobalSecondaryIndex":"entityCode1,entityCode2"
}
And then I would like to apply filter expression on entitiesGlobalSecondaryIndex something like: entitiesGlobalSecondaryIndex contains entityCode1.
Would this be efficient or using global secondary index does not make sense in this way and DynamoDB will simply check the condition against every document which is similar so scan?
Any help is very appreciated,
Thanks
The contains operator of a query cannot be run on a partition Key. In order for a query to use any sort of operators (contains, begins with, > < ect...) you must have a range attributes- aka your Sort Key.
You can very well set up a GSI with some value as your PK and this code as your SK. However, GSIs are replication of the table - there is a slight potential for the data ina GSI to lag behind that of the master copy. If the query you're doing against this GSI isn't very often, then you're probably safe from that.
However. If you are trying to do this to the entire table at once then it's no better than a scan.
If what you need is a specific Code to return all its documents at once, then you could do a GSI with that as the PK. If you add a date field as the SK of this GSI it would even be time sorted. If you query against that code in that index, you'll get every single one of them.
Since you may have multiple codes, if they aren't too many per document, you maybe could use a Sparse Index - if you have an entity with code "AAAA" then you also have an attribute named AAAA (or AAAAflag or something.) It is always null/does not exist Unless the entities contains that code. If you do a GSI on this AAAflag attribute, it will only contain documents that contain that entity code, and ignore all where this attribute does not exist on a given document. This may work for you if you can also provide a good PK on this to keep the numbers well partitioned and if you don't have too many codes.
Filter expressions by the way are different than all of the above. Filter expressions are run on tbe data that would be returned, after it is already read out of the table. This is useful I'd you have a multi access pattern setup, but don't want a particular call to get all the documents associated with a particular PK - in the interests of keeping the data your code is working with concise. The query with a filter expression still retrieves everything from that query, but only presents what makes it past the filter.
If are only querying against a particular PK at any given time and you want to know if it contains any entities of x, then a Filter expressions would work perfectly. Of course, this is only per PK and not for your entire table.
If all you need is numbers, then you could do a count attribute on the document, or a meta document on that partition that contains these values and could be queried directly.
Lastly, and I have no idea if this would work or not, if your entities attribute is a map type you might very well be able to filter against entities code - and maybe even with entities.code.contains(value) if it was an SK - but I do not know if this is possible or not

Dynamodb: Index on List attribute and query NOT_CONTAINS

I am trying to figure out (at this point I think the answer is No) if it is possible to build a index on a List Attribute and query NOT_CONTAINS on that attribute.
Example table:
Tasks
Task_id: string
solved_by: List<String> # stores list of user_ids who previously solved this task.
My query would be:
Get me all the tasks not yet solved by current_user
select * from tasks where tasks.solved_by NOT_CONTAINS current_user_id
Is it possible to do this without full scans. I tried creating an attribute of type L but aws cli errors out saying Member must satisfy enum value set: [B, N, S]
If this is not possible with dynamodb, please suggest what datastore I can use.
Any help is highly appreciated. Thanks!
As you found out, and as the error you got suggests, this is NOT possible.
However, I'd argue if your design couldn't be improved. Storing a potentially unbound list of entries (users in your case) inside a single item, which is limited to 400kb seems dangerous.
If instead, you'd store for each task the information that a particular user resolved it as a separate item (partition key - task_id, sort key - user_id) than you could easily look up if a user solved a task or not. You could also store additional information about the particular solution or attempts.
If you haven't heard of DynamoDB single table design yet, or how to overload indexes, I can recommend looking at
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/bp-modeling-nosql-B.html
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/bp-gsi-overloading.html
https://www.dynamodbbook.com/
Update
I just realised, you care about a negation (NOT_CONTAINS) - for those, you can't use an index anyway. For the sort key you can only use positive comparison (=, <, >, <=, >=, between, begins_with): https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/Query.html#Query.KeyConditionExpressions
So you might have to rethink the whole approach, to better pre-process the data stored in DDB, so it's easier to fetch, or pick a different database.
In your original question, you defined your access pattern as
Get me all the tasks not yet solved by current_user
In a later comment, you clarified that the access pattern is
A solver should be shown a task that is not yet solved by them.
which is a slightly different access pattern.
Here's one way you could fetch a task not yet solved by a user.
In this data model, I chose to model Users and Tasks as separate items. Tasks have numerically increasing ID's. Each User item should start with the lastSolved attribute set to 1. Each time you fetch a new Task for a user, you fetch TASK#{last_solved+1} and increment the lastSolved attribute by 1.
You could probably take a similar approach by using timestamps instead of numbers... anything sortable, really.

Whats the best way to query DynamoDB based on date range?

As part of migrating from SQL to DynamoDB I am trying to create a DynamoDB table. The UI allows users to search based on 4 attributes start date, end date, name of event and source of event.
The table has 6 attributes and the above four are subset of it with other attributes being priority and location. The query as described above makes it mandatory to search based on the above four values. whats the best way to store the information in DynamoDB that will help me in querying based on start date and end date fairly easy.
I thought of creating a GSI with hashkey as startdate, rangekey as end date and GSI on the rest two attributes ?
Inshort:
My table in DynamoDB will have 6 attributes
EventName, Location, StartDate, EndDate, Priority and source.
Query will have 4 mandatory attributes
StartDate, EndDate, Source and Event Name.
Thanks for the help.
You can use greater than/less than comparison operators as part of your query http://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/QueryAndScan.html
So you could try to build a table with schema:
(EventName (hashKey), "StartDate-EndDate" (sortKey), other attributes)
In this case the sort-key is basically a combination of start and end date allowing you to use >= (on the first part) and <= (on the second part)... dynamodb uses ASCII based alphabetical ordering... so lets assume your sortKey looks like the following: "73644-75223" you could use >= "73000-" AND <= "73000-76000" to get the given event.
Additionally, you could create a GSI on your table for each of your remaining attributes that need to be read via query. You then could project data into your index that you want to fetch with the query. In contrast to LSI, queries from GSI do not fetch attributes that are not projected. Be aware of the additional costs (read/write) involved by using GSI (and LSI)... and the additional memory required by data projections...
Hope it helps.

How to store and get datetime value in SQLite

My table contains Birthdate field which has datatype as datetime.
I want to get all records having birthday today.
How can I get it?
Try this query:
SELECT * FROM mytable
WHERE strftime('%m-%d', 'now') = strftime('%m-%d', birthday)
Having a special datetime type has always seemed like unnecessary overhead to me, integers are fast, flexible, and use less space.
For general datetime values use Unix Epoch timestamps. Easy to work with, extremely flexible, as well as timezone (and even calender!) agnostic. (I recently wrote an article on using them, which I really have to plug...)
That said, if you're only interested in dates in the Gregorian calendar you may want to use a large integer in the following format: YYYYMMDD, eg 19761203. For you particular usage you could even create a four digit integer like MMDD, say 1703 — that's got to result in fast selects!
SQLite has very poor support for storing dates. You can use the method suggested by Nick D above but bear in mind that this query will result in full table scan since dates are not indexed correctly in SQLite (actually SQLite does not support dates as a built-in type at all).
If you really want to do a fast query then you'll have to add a separate (integral) column for storing the birth day (1-31) and attach an index for it in the database.
If you only want to compare dates then you can add a single (INTEGER) column that will store the date UTC value (but this trick won't allow you to search for individual date components easily).
Good Luck

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