I want to count the number of rows in a table three times depending on three filters/conditions. I want to know which one of the following two ways is better for performance and cost-efficiency. We are using AWS as our server, java spring to develop server-side API and MySQL for the database.
Use the count feature of MySQL to query three times in the database for three filtering criteria to get the three count result.
Fetch all the rows of the table from the database first using only one query. Then using java stream three times based on three filtering criteria to get the three count result.
It'll be better to go with option (1) in extreme cases. If it's slow to execute SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table then you should consider some tweak on SQL side. Not sure what you're using but I found this example for sql server
Assuming you go with Option (2) and you have hundreds of thousands of rows, I suspect that your application will run out of memory (especially under high load) before you have time to worry about slow response time from running SELECT count(*). Not to mention that you'll have lots of unnecessary rows and slow down transfer time between database and application
A basic argument against doing counts in the app is that hauling lots of data from the server to the client is time-consuming. (There are rare situations where it is worth the overhead.) Note that your client and AWS may be quite some distance apart, thereby exacerbating the cost of shoveling lots of data. I am skeptical of what you call "server-side API". But even if you can run Java on the server, there is still some cost of shoveling between MySQL and Java.
Sometimes this pattern lets you get 3 counts with one pass over the data:
SELECT
SUM(status='ready') AS ready_count,
SUM(status='complete') AS completed_count,
SUM(status='unk') AS unknown_count,
...
The trick here is that a Boolean expression has a value of 0 (for false) or 1 (for true). Hence the SUM() works like a 'conditional count'.
I have a Spring based Java application. I have two types of data.
First one is indexed document number at my application. Documents are indexed only 2 or 3 times a week.
Second one is number of searches. Many users searches something at my application. I want to visualize the search terms. Many data flows at any time.
What do you suggest me to store such kind of data using Java?
For first one I think that I can use RRD or something like that or I can even write data into a table at MySQL etc.
For second one I can use a more sophisticated database and I can use an in memory database as like H2 between my sophisticated database and user interface.
Any ideas?
Have you considered using Redis? It has great support for atomic increments if you wanted to track search counts and its also very fast since data is stored in-memory.
I have found the Jquery datatables plug in extremely useful for simple, read only applications where I'd like to give the user pagination, sorting and searching of very large sets of data (millions of rows using server side processing).
I have a system for reusing this code but I end up doing the same thing over and over alot. I'd like to write a very generalized api that I essentially just need to configure the sql needed to retrieve the data used in the table. I am looking for a good design pattern/approach to do this. I've seen articles like this http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/359750/jQuery-DataTables-in-Java-Web-Applications and have a complete understanding of how server side processing works (have done it in java and asp.net many times). For someone to answer you will probably need to have a deep understanding of how server side processing works in java but here are some issues that come up with attempting to do this:
I generally run three separate queries. A count without the search clause, a count with the clause included, the query for the actual data. I haven't found an efficient way to do all 3 at once and doing so requires a lot of extra data to come back from db (ie counts over and over). The api needs to support behavior based on these three different queries and complex queries at that. I generally row number () over an index for the pagination to be relatively speedy with large data.
*where clause changes dynamically (user can search over a variable number of rows).
*order by clause changes for the same reason.
overall, each case is often pretty specific to the data we need. Is there a good way to abstract this so that I can do minimal work when I want to use the plug in server side.
So, the steps are as follows in most projects:
*extract the params the plug on sends to the server (alot of times my own are added, mostly date ranges)
*build the unfiltered count query (this is rarely dynamic).
*build the filtered count query (is dynamic)
*build the data query
*construct a model object of the table and return it as json.
A lot of the issues occur setting the prepared statements with a variable number of parameters. Dynamically generating the sql in a general way (say based on just column names) seems unlikely. I am wondering if someone else has created something they are using for this or if it sounds like a specific pattern is applicable. It has just occurred to me that creating a reusable filter may be helpful in java. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to be language agnostic as the architecture is what I'm trying to figure out.
We have base search criteria where all request parameters relevant to DataTables are mapped onto class properties (fields) and custom search criteria class that extends base and contains specific to business logic fields for sutom search. Also on server side we have repository class that takes custom search criteria as an argument and makes queries to database.
If you are familiar with C#, you could check out custom binding code and example of usage.
You could do such custom binding in your Java code as well.
I am developing a search component of a web application using Lucene. I would like to save the user queries to an index and use them to suggest alternate queries to users, and to keep query statistics (most often used queries, top scoring queries, ...).
To use this data for alternate query suggestions, I would analyze the queries to see which terms are most often used with one another and use that to create a suggestion to the user.
But I can't figure out in which form to index the data. I was thinking of simply adding the queries into the index, but in that way there could be a lot of redundant data since many documents in the index would have the same content. Does anyone have any ideas about the way this can be accomplished?
Thanks for the help.
"I was thinking of simply adding the queries into the index, but in that way there could be a lot of redundant data since many documents in the index would have the same content"
You can tell Lucene not to store document content, which means that the principal overhead will be the unique Terms, and the index itself. So, it might not be a large overhead to store each query as a unique Document...this way you will not be throwing away any information.
First, I believe that you should store the queries separately from the existing index. The problem is not redundant data but rather "watering down" your index - storing the queries in the same index may harm the relevance of your searches. Some options for this are:
Use a separate Lucene index.
Use Solr, with two separate cores, one for the documents and the other for the queries.
Use a query log. Store scores with the queries. Build query statistics using post-processing.As this is a web application, you can probably use a servlet container, such as Tomcat's, logs for this.
Second, Auto-Suggest From Popular Queries Using EdgeNGrams suggests an alternative implementation of query suggestion using Solr.
I have a simple data model that includes
USERS: store basic information (key, name, phone # etc)
RELATIONS: describe, e.g. a friendship between two users (supplying a relationship_type + two user keys)
COMMENTS: posted by users (key, comment text, user_id)
I'm getting very poor performance, for instance, if I try to print the first names of all of a user's friends. Say the user has 500 friends: I can fetch the list of friend user_ids very easily in a single query. But then, to pull out first names, I have to do 500 back-and-forth trips to the Datastore, each of which seems to take on the order of 30 ms. If this were SQL, I'd just do a JOIN and get the answer out fast.
I understand there are rudimentary facilities for performing two-way joins across un-owned relations in a relaxed implementation of JDO (as described at http://gae-java-persistence.blogspot.com) but they sound experimental and non-standard (e.g. my code won't work in any other JDO implementation).
Worse yet, what if I want to pull out all the comments posted by a user's friends. Then I need to get from User --> Relation --> Comments, i.e. a three-way join, which isn't even supported experimentally. The overhead of 500 back-and-forths to get a friend list + another 500 trips to see if there are any comments from a user's friends is already enough to push runtime >30 seconds.
How do people deal with these problems in real-world datastore-backed JDO applications? (Or do they?)
Has anyone managed to extract satisfactory performance from JDO/Datastore in this kind of (very common) situation?
-Bosh
First of all, for objects that are frequently accessed (like users), I rely on the memcache. This should speedup your application quite a bit.
If you have to go to the datastore, the right way to do this should be through getObjectsById(). Unfortunately, it looks like GAE doesn't optimize this call. However, a contains() query on keys is optimized to fetch all the objects in one trip to the datastore, so that's what you should use:
List myFriendKeys = fetchFriendKeys();
Query query = pm.newQuery(User.class, ":p.contains(key)");
query.execute(myFriendKeys);
You could also rely on the low-level API get() that accept multiple keys, or do like me and use objectify.
A totally different approach would be to use an equality filter on a list property. This will match if any item in the list matches. So if you have a friendOf list property in your user entity, you can issue a single Query friendOf == theUser. You might want to check this: http://www.scribd.com/doc/16952419/Building-scalable-complex-apps-on-App-Engine
You have to minimize DB reads. That must be a huge focus for any GAE project - anything else will cost you. To do that, pre-calculate as much as you can, especially oft-read information. To solve the issue of reading 500 friends' names, consider that you'll likely be changing the friend list far less than reading it, so on each change, store all names in a structure you can read with one get.
If you absolutely cannot then you have to tweak each case by hand, e.g. use the low-level API to do a batch get.
Also, rather optimize for speed and not data size. Use extra structures as indexes, save objects in multiple ways so you can read it as quickly as possible. Data is cheap, CPU time is not.
Unfortunately Phillipe's suggestion
Query query = pm.newQuery(User.class, ":p.contains(key)");
is only optimized to make a single query when searching by primary key. Passing in a list of ten non-primary-key values, for instance, gives the following trace
alt text http://img293.imageshack.us/img293/7227/slowquery.png
I'd like to be able to bulk-fetch comments, for example, from all a user's friends. If I do store a List on each user, this list can't be longer than 1000 elements long (if it's an indexed property of the user) as described at: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/datastore/overview.html .
Seems increasingly like I'm using the wrong toolset here.
-B
Facebook has 28 Terabytes of memory cache... However, making 500 trips to memcached isn't very cheap either. It can't be used to store a gazillion pieces of small items. "Denomalization" is the key. Such applications do not need to support ad-hoc queries. Compute and store the results directly for the few supported queries.
in your case, you probably have just 1 type of query - return data of this, that and the others that should be displayed on a user page. You can precompute this big ball of mess, so later one query based on userId can fetch it all.
when userA makes a comment to userB, you retrieve userB's big ball of mess, insert userA's comment in it, and save it.
Of course, there are a lot of problems with this approach. For giant internet companies, they probably don't have a choice, generic query engines just don't cut it. But for others? Wouldn't you be happier if you can just use the good old RDBMS?
If it is a frequently used query, you can consider preparing indexes for the same.
http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/index_building.html
The indexed property limit is now raised to 5000.
However you can go even higher than that by using the method described in http://www.scribd.com/doc/16952419/Building-scalable-complex-apps-on-App-Engine
Basically just have a bunch of child entities for the User called UserFriends, thus splitting the big list and raising the limit to n*5000, where n is the number of UserFriends entities.