Java multi-threaded handling of a rowset - java

I'm pulling down a table full of data, and I need to handle this and for every row do a bit of formatting and then push out to a REST API.
I use a PostgreSQL database and java implementation, the idea is to pull all data down, get the amount of rows and spin up threads to handle a chunk at a time.
I've got the connection set up and pulling the table into a cached row set, and using last(), getRow() and beforeFirst() to get row count.
I'm trying to find a way to split out a chunk of a rowset and hand it off to be handled, but I can't seem to see anything to do this.
There's limit x and things, but I want to avoid numerous database calls with data this size.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Here's the kind of thing I'm looking at
RowSet rst = RowSetProvider.newFactory().createCachedRowSet();
rst.setUrl(url);
rst.setUsername(username);
rst.setPassword(password);
String cmd = "select * from event_log";
rst.setCommand(cmd);
rst.execute();
ResultSetMetaData rsmd = rst.getMetaData();
int columnsNumber = rsmd.getColumnCount();
rst.last();
int size = rst.getRow();
int maxPerThread = 1000;
rst.beforeFirst();
int threadsToCreate = size / maxPerThread;
for (int loopCount = 0; loopCount < threadsToCreate; loopCount++)
{
//Create chunk
//Create thread
//Pass chunk into thread and start it
//Once chunk is finished then thread and chunk are destroyed
}

This is the proper way to think about JDBC interactions:
All queries are like an ad-hoc view: SELECT foo, bar BETWEEN a AND b AS baz FROM foo INNER JOIN whatever; - this effectively creates a new temporary table.
A ResultSet is a live interactive concept: A ResultSet is not a dump of the returned data. It is like the relationship between a FileInputStream and a file on disk: The ResultSet has methods that give you data, and that data is probably obtained by chatting to the database, 'live', to obtain this information. The ResultSet itself only has a few handles, and not actual data, though it may do some caching, you have no idea.
As a consequence:
ResultSet is utterly non-parallellizable. If you share a ResultSet object with more than one thread, you wrote a bug, and you can't recover from there.
In many DBs, 'ask for the length' is tantamount to running the entire query soup to nuts, and is therefore quite slow. You probably don't want to do that, and there is no real reason to do that from the perspective of 'I want to concurrently process the information I receieved'. You've picked the wrong approach.
ResultSets can (and generally, for performance reasons, should be!) configured as 'forward only', meaning: You can advance by one row by calling .next(), and once you did that, you can't go back. This significantly reduces the load on the DB server, as it doesn't have to be prepared to properly respond to the request to hop back to the start.
Here's what I suggest you do:
You have a single 'controller' thread which has the ResultSet and runs the query.
Once the query returns, you have no idea how many records you do have. But you do know how much you want to parallelize - how many threads you want to be concurrently churning away at processing this data.
Thus, the answer: Spin up that many threads in the form of an ExecutorPool. Then, have your controller pull rows (call resultSet.next() and pull all data into java types by invoking all the various .getFoo(idxOrColName) methods), marshalling it all into a single java object. I suggest you write a POJO that represents one row's worth of data and create one for each row.
Then, your controller thread will take this object and considers this object 'a job'.
You've now reduced the problem to a basic forkjoin style strategy: You have one thread that produces jobs, and you have some code that will take a single job and completes it. I've just described what ExecutorPool and friends are designed to do.
It is crucial that the ResultSet object is not accessible by your processor threads. There is no point to pull rows from the DB in parallel, because the DB isn't parallel and wouldn't be able to give you this information any faster than a single thread. The only parallelising win you can score here is to do the processing of the data in a concurrent fashion, which is why the above model cannot be improved upon without much more drastic changes.
If you're looking for drastic redesigns, you need to 'pre-chunk'. Let's say, for example, that you already know you have a database with a million rows, and each row has the property that it has a completely random ID. You also know you have X processor threads, where X is a dynamic number that depends on many factors, such as how many CPU cores the hardware you run on has.
Then:
You fire up X threads. You tell each thread its index (so, if you have 7 threads, one has 'index 0', another has 'index 1', all the way up to 'index 6'), and how many total threads there are.
Then, each thread runs the following query:
SELECT * FROM jobs WHERE unid % 7 = 5;
That's the query the 6th job thread would run.
This guarantees that each thread is running about an equal number of jobs, give or take.
Generally this is less efficient than the previous model, given that this most likely means the DB is just doing more work (running the same query 7-fold, instead of only once), and any given worker thread may start idling whilst others are still running, vs. the controller-that-pulls-and-hands-jobs-out model where you won't run into the situation that one thread is done whilst others still have lots of jobs left.
NB: RowSet and ResultSet work effectively the exact same way. In fact, the DB version of RowSet (JdbcRowSet) is implemented as a light wrapper around ResultSet.

Related

Oracle 11g - System performace impacted as the data grows

Our system has quite a high level of concurrency with multiple java threads picking up one record at a time from a given Oracle 11g table which normally holds about two millions records.
There are always many records ready to be picked up for processing. The records ready to be processed are selected based on a relatively complex SQL statement but once selected the processing order is based on a FIFO algorithm (ID order).
It is crucial that the same record is not picked up by two distinct threads. Because of this we have a locking mechanism in place.
From a high level view the way in which it works at the moment is that java thread invokes a stored procedure which in turn will open a RECORD_READY_KEYS cursor and then it iterates trough that cursor and try to acquire a lock on a record on a locking table with that key. The locking attempt is done with SELECT FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED. If the lock succeeds the record to process is returned to the java thread for processing.
Everything works fine as long as the records ready to process are not too many. However when this number grows over a limit (from our observations when going over 15K) the SQL statement used to get the RECORD_READY_KEYS cursor starts decreasing in performance. Despite the fact it is fully optimised it starts taking close to 0.2 seconds to run which means you can only process maximum five records per second per java thread. In reality considering the time taken to acquire the lock, to travel over the network, to actually do the processing, commit the transaction, etc. will result in even slower processing.
Increasing the number of java threads is an option, however we cannot go over a certain limit as they will start putting pressure on the database/application server/system resources, etc.
The real problem is that we run an SQL statement to get the RECORD_READY_KEYS containing fifteen thousand keys out of a total of two millions and we then pick up the first available record from the top and the we discard the rest by closing the cursor.
My idea would be to have a KEYS_CACHE nested table defined at package level and store the result of RECORD_READY_KEYS selection in that nested table. Once a key is locked it will delete it from the KEYS_CACHE and will return it to the java thread. The process can go that way until the whole KEYS_CACHE gets consumed and when this happens it will populate it again.
Now my questions will be:
Q1. Can you see any weak point with this approach.
I can see multiple threads trying to lock the same record at the same time and such wasting a bit of time. On the java side we can make the stored procedure invocation synchronized to a given extend only as the invocation will happen from multiple JVMs. However I cannot see this a major issue.
Another issue would be when an unlikely rollback happens as there will be no easy way to put back the deleted key. The next RECORD_READY_KEYS selection will pick it back again and a delay of a few minutes will not really matter.
Q2. As the nested table gets less and less records it will become very sparse. Can you see this becoming a problem? If so should I limit the initial size to say 5000 keys or it does not really matter.
Q3. Can you see a problem with that package level KEYS_CACHE nested table being accessed concurrently by so many threads (we have between 25 to 100 of them)
Q4. Can you see an alternative approach that would not require a whole system redesign.
Thank you in advance
I think I was not very when explaining my situation. We do not lock the records to process in the two millions records table but we do the lock the key instead that are also saved on a different locking table.
Say I have this 2 million records table called messages:
And there are only messages with Key-A, Key-B, and Key-C that are ready to be processed a possible content of the key locking table may be:
Note the Key-X is in there even if no messages ready to be processed for that key because messages with such a key were just finished processing and the clean-up thread did not kicked off yet. That is OK and even desirable in case more new messages with Key-X will enter the system in a short while it will save a new insert.
So our select (fully optimised) will obtain a list with the Key-A, Key-C, and Key-B in this order (Key-C comes before Key-B because has a message with an Id = 2 which is smaller than the first Key-B message with the Id=6
Very simplified what we do here in fact is
SELECT key FROM messages WHERE ready = ‘Y’ GROUP BY key ORDER BY min(id)
Once we get that select in a cursor we fetch the key one by one and try to lock it in the key_locckings table. Once a lock succeeds the key get assigned to a thread (there is threads table for this) and will stay with that thread processing all messages that are ready for that key. As I mentioned in my first post it is crucial that messages with the same key be processed by the same thread as the key is how we link related messages which must be processed in sequence.
The SELECT above is instantly when the number of keys selected is up to a few thousands. It is still performing OK when it gets around 10000 keys. Once the number of retrieved keys gets over 15000 then the performance starts degrading. The time to run the SELECT is still OK (about 0.2 seconds) and we do have indexes on all fields involved in this selection. It is just that getting the WHERE, GROUP, ORDER BY applied to select 15000 keys out of two million records that take the time.
So the problem for us is that every single thread will run the same SELECT and will get 15000 records just to pick up one of them. The think I was considering was that rather than closing the cursor and throwing the hard work away as we do at the moment to try storing those keys in a package level nested table and delete the keys from there as we allocate them to the threads. My first three questions just wanted to capture some others opinions about this approach while the last one was about finding some alternative ideas (e.g. someone would say use advanced queues, etc)
I have an example to hand that is (I think) very similar.
You have a table, with lots of rows, and you have multiple consumer processes (the Java threads), that all want to work on the contents of that table.
First off, I recommend avoiding SKIP LOCKED. If you think you need it, consider if you've set your INITRANS high enough on the table. Consider that SKIP LOCKED means that Oracle will skip locked resources, not just locked rows. If a block's ITL is full, SKIP LOCKED will skip it, even if there are unlocked rows in the block!
For a more detailed discussion of this, see here:
https://markjbobak.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/unintended-consequences/
So, on to my suggestion. For each concurrent JAVA thread, define a thread number. So, suppose you have 10 concurrent threads, assign them each a thread number or thread id, 0-9. Now, if you have the flexibility to modify the table, you could add a column, THREAD_ID, and then use that in the select statement when selecting from the table. Each concurrent JAVA thread will select only those rows that match it's thread id. In this way, you can guarantee that you'll avoid collisions. If you don't have the ability to add a a column to the table, then you hopefully have a nice, numeric, sequence-driven primary key? If so, you can get the same effect by querying MOD(PRIMARY_KEY_COLUMN, 10) = :client_thread_id.
Additionally, do you have columns that specify a status of some sort, or something like that, which you'll use to determine which rows from the table are eligible to be processed by the Java thread? If so, and particularly if that criteria significantly improves selectivity, creating a virtual column that is only populated for the values which you're interested in, could be quite useful, if that column is then added to the index. (THREAD_ID, STATUS), for example.
Finally, you mentioned processing in a specific order. If THREAD_ID, STATUS is your selection criteria, then perhaps a PRIORITY or STATUS_DATE column may be your ordering requirement. In that case, it may be useful to continue to build out the index, to add in the column(s) specifying the required order, and top it off with the primary key of the table.
With a carefully constructed index, and using the THREAD_ID idea, it should be possible to construct an index that will allow you to:
avoid collisions (Use THREAD_ID or MOD() on primary key)
minimize the size of the index (vurtual columns)
avoid any ORDER BY operation (add order by columns to index)
avoid any TABLE ACCESS BY ROWID operation (add primary key column to end of index)
I made a few assumptions that may or may not apply.

Best way to distribute database read jobs among Java threads

I have a MySQL database with a large number of rows.
I want to initialize multiple Threads (each with its own database connection) in Java and read/print the data simultaneously.
How to partition data between multiple threads so as no two Threads read the same record? What strategies can be used?
It depends on what kind of work are your threads going to do. For example i usually execute single SELECT for some kind of large dataset, add tasks to thread safe task queue and submit workers which picks up proper task from queue to process. I usually write to DB without synchronisation, but that depends on size of unit of work, and DB constrains (like unique keys etc). Works like charm.
Other method would be to just simply run multiple threads and let them work on their own. I strongly disadvice usage of some fancy LIMIT, OFFSET however. It still requires DB to fetch MORE data rows than it will actually return from query.
EDIT:
As you have added comment that you have same data, than yes, my solution is what are you looking for
Get dataset by single query
Add data to queue
Lunch your threads (by executors or new threads)
Pick data from queue and process it.
If the large dataset has an integer primary key, then one of the approaches would be as follows
Get the count of rows using the same select query.
Divide the entire dataset into equal number of partitions
Assign each partition to each thead. Each thread will have its own select query with primary key value range as constraint.
Note: the following issues with this approach
You (fire number of threads + 1) queries to database. So performance might be a problem.
All the partitions may not be equal (as there will be some ids which are deleted).
This approach is simple and makes sure that a row is strictly processed by only thread.
You can use a singleton class to maintain already read rows. So every thread can access the row number from that singleton.
Otherwise you can use static AtomicInteger variable from a common class. Every time threads will call getAndIncrement method. So you can partition data between the threads.

MySQL and Java: Insert efficiently as data comes in via events with high frequency

When an external event occurs (incoming measurement data) an event handler in my Java code is being called. The data should be written to a MySQL database. Due to the high frequency of these calls (>1000 per sec) I'd like to handle the inserts efficiently. Unfortunately I'm not a professional developer and an idiot with databases.
Neglecting the efficiency aspect my code would look roughly like this:
public class X {
public void eventHandler(data) {
connection = DriverManager.getConnection()
statement = connection.prepareStatement("insert …")
statement.setString(1, data)
statement.executeUpdate()
statement.close()
connection.close()
}
}
My understanding is that by calling addBatch() and executeBatch() on statement I could limit the physical disk access to let's say every 1000th insert. However as you can see in my code sketch above the statement object is newly instantiated with every call of eventHandler(). Therefore my impression is that the batch mechanism won't be helpful in this context. Same for turning off auto-commit and then calling commit() on the connection object since that one is closed after every insert.
I could turn connection and statement from local variables into class members and reuse them during the whole runtime of the program. But wouldn't it be bad style to keep the database connection open at all time?
A solution would be to buffer the data manually and then write to the database only after collecting a proper batch. But so far I still hope that you smart guys will tell me how to let the database do the buffering for me.
I could turn connection and statement from local variables into class
members and reuse them during the whole runtime of the program. But
wouldn't it be bad style to keep the database connection open at all
time?
Considering that most (database-)connection pools are usually configured to keep at least one or more connections open at all times, I wouldn't call it "bad style". This is to avoid the overhead of starting a new connection on each database operation (unless necessary, if all the already opened connections are in use and the pool allows for more).
I'd probably go with some form of batching in this case (but of course I don't know all your requirements/environment etc). If the data doesn't need to be immediately available somewhere else, you could build some form of a job queue for writing the data, push the incoming data there and let other thread(s) take care of writing it to database in N size batches. Take a look what classes are available in the java.util.concurrent-package.
I would suggest you use a LinkedList<> to buffer the data(like a queue), then store the data into the dbms as and when required in a separate thread, executed at regular intervals(maybe every 2 seconds?)
See how to construct a queue using linkedlist in java

java jdbc design pattern : handle many inserts

I would like to ask for some advices concerning my problem.
I have a batch that does some computation (multi threading environement) and do some inserts in a table.
I would like to do something like batch insert, meaning that once I got a query, wait to have 1000 queries for instance, and then execute the batch insert (not doing it one by one).
I was wondering if there is any design pattern on this.
I have a solution in mind, but it's a bit complicated:
build a method that will receive the queries
add them to a list (the string and/or the statements)
do not execute until the list has 1000 items
The problem : how do I handle the end ?
What I mean is, the last 999 queries, when do I execute them since I'll never get to 1000 ?
What should I do ?
I'm thinking at a thread that wakes up every 5 minutes and check the number of items in a list. If he wakes up twice and the number is the same , execute the existing queries.
Does anyone has a better idea ?
Your database driver needs to support batch inserting. See this.
Have you established your system is choking on network traffic because there is too much communication between the service and the database? If not, I wouldn't worry about batching, until you are sure you need it.
You mention that in your plan you want to check every 5 minutes. That's an eternity. If you are going to get 1000 items in 5 minutes, you shouldn't need batching. That's ~ 3 a second.
Assuming you do want to batch, have a process wake up every 2 seconds and commit whatever is queued up. Don't wait five minutes. It might commit 0 rows, it might commit 10...who cares...With this approach, you don't need to worry that your arbitrary threshold hasn't been met.
I'm assuming that the inserts come in one at a time. If your incoming data comes in n at once, I would just commit every incoming request, no matter how many inserts happen. If your messages are coming in as some sort of messaging system, it's asynchronous anyway, so you shouldn't need to worry about batching. Under high load, the incoming messages just wait till there is capacity to handle them.
Add a commit kind of method to that API that will be called to confirm all items have been added. Also, the optimum batch size is somewhere in the range 20-50. After that the potential gain is outweighed by the bookkeeping necessary for a growing number of statements. You don't mention it explicitly, but of course you must use the dedicated batch API in JDBC.
If you need to keep track of many writers, each in its own thread, then you'll also need a begin kind of method and you can count how many times it was called, compared to how many times commit was called. Something like reference-counting. When you reach zero, you know you can flush your statement buffer.
This is most amazing concept , I have faced many time.So, according to your problem you are creating a batch and that batch has 1000 or more queries for insert . But , if you are inserting into same table with repeated manner.
To avoid this type of situation you can make the insert query like this:-
INSERT INTO table1 VALUES('4','India'),('5','Odisha'),('6','Bhubaneswar')
It can execute only once with multiple values.So, better you can keep all values inside any collections elements (arraylist,list,etc) and finally make a query like above and insert it once.
Also you can use SQL Transaction API.(Commit,rollback,setTraction() ) etc.
Hope ,it will help you.
All the best.

Bulk insert in Java using prepared statements batch update

I am trying to fill a resultSet in Java with about 50,000 rows of 10 columns
and then inserting them into another table using the batchExecute method of PreparedStatement.
To make the process faster I did some research and found that while reading data into resultSet the fetchSize plays an important role.
Having a very low fetchSize can result into too many trips to the server and a very high fetchSize can block the network resources, so I experimented a little bit and set up an optimum size that suits my infrastructure.
I am reading this resultSet and creating insert statements to insert into another table of a different database.
Something like this (just a sample, not real code):
for (i=0 ; i<=50000 ; i++) {
statement.setString(1, "a#a.com");
statement.setLong(2, 1);
statement.addBatch();
}
statement.executeBatch();
Will the executeBatch method try to send all the data at once ?
Is there a way to define the batch size?
Is there any better way to speed up the process of bulk insertion?
While updating in bulk (50,000 rows 10 cols), is it better to use a updatable ResultSet or PreparedStaement with batch execution?
I'll address your questions in turn.
Will the executeBatch method tries to send all the data at once?
This can vary with each JDBC driver, but the few I've studied will iterate over each batch entry and send the arguments together with the prepared statement handle each time to the database for execution. That is, in your example above, there would 50,000 executions of the prepared statement with 50,000 pairs of arguments, but these 50,000 steps can be done in a lower-level "inner loop," which is where the time savings come in. As a rather stretched analogy, it's like dropping out of "user mode" down into "kernel mode" and running the entire execution loop there. You save the cost of diving in and out of that lower-level mode for each batch entry.
Is there a way to define the batch size
You've defined it implicitly here by pushing 50,000 argument sets in before executing the batch via Statement#executeBatch(). A batch size of one is just as valid.
Is there any better way to speed up the process of bulk insertion?
Consider opening a transaction explicitly before the batch insertion, and commit it afterward. Don't let either the database or the JDBC driver impose a transaction boundary around each insertion step in the batch. You can control the JDBC layer with the Connection#setAutoCommit(boolean) method. Take the connection out of auto-commit mode first, then populate your batches, start a transaction, execute the batch, then commit the transaction via Connection#commit().
This advice assumes that your insertions won't be contending with concurrent writers, and assumes that these transaction boundaries will give you sufficiently consistent values read from your source tables for use in the insertions. If that's not the case, favor correctness over speed.
Is it better to use a updatable ResultSet or PreparedStatement with batch execution?
Nothing beats testing with your JDBC driver of choice, but I expect the latter—PreparedStatement and Statement#executeBatch() will win out here. The statement handle may have an associated list or array of "batch arguments," with each entry being the argument set provided in between calls to Statement#executeBatch() and Statement#addBatch() (or Statement#clearBatch()). The list will grow with each call to addBatch(), and not be flushed until you call executeBatch(). Hence, the Statement instance is really acting as an argument buffer; you're trading memory for convenience (using the Statement instance in lieu of your own external argument set buffer).
Again, you should consider these answers general and speculative so long as we're not discussing a specific JDBC driver. Each driver varies in sophistication, and each will vary in which optimizations it pursues.
The batch will be done in "all at once" - that's what you've asked it to do.
50,000 seems a bit large to be attempting in one call. I would break it up into smaller chunks of 1,000, like this:
final int BATCH_SIZE = 1000;
for (int i = 0; i < DATA_SIZE; i++) {
statement.setString(1, "a#a.com");
statement.setLong(2, 1);
statement.addBatch();
if (i % BATCH_SIZE == BATCH_SIZE - 1)
statement.executeBatch();
}
if (DATA_SIZE % BATCH_SIZE != 0)
statement.executeBatch();
50,000 rows shouldn't take more than a few seconds.
If it's just data from one/more tables in the DB to be inserted into this table and no intervention (alterations to the resultset), then call statement.executeUpdate(SQL) to perform INSERT-SELECT statment, this is quicker since there is no overhead. No data going outside of the DB and the entire operation is on the DB not in the application.
Bulk unlogged update will not give you the improved performance you want the way you are going about it. See this

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