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Repeated querys to a db with JDBC or dump data to ArrayList and iterate over list whenever I want some data?

I am working on a trade's appointments agenda. The question is that what is better.
When application initialize, dump data from database to an ArrayList and iterate over ArrayList whenever that I want appointments of a day OR execute one query everytime that I want appointments of a day? The database is on localhost.
Java querys are PreparedStatement.
I ask this because when appointments will increase, Iterate over ArrayList is going to be less and less efficient.

You have different options based on how big your tables and how scalable you need your system to be.
If you have a pattern in showing the daily appointments, then I suggest you extract that pattern to have a generic solution to show the appointments of a day.
On top of this if you have validations to be running for a selected day, keep it simple and safe in your database, that way the whole point of persistence is not lost also.
Have a look at in memory databases as well.

Generally speaking I would leave database processing and the cache the database. I have done some measurements, and these show that processing records in a JVM is quite slow (filter, sort, distinct, group).
This is especially the case, if you are using higher level collections like ArrayList in contrast to arrays (like Customer[]).
I would not even worry with "remote" databases; in case of localhost databases just give the database more RAM for its cache or work memory, and it's hard to beat the database access planning/cache of a database with Java.
But you should follow the rule to query your database with a single SQL statement only. It doesn't really matter how complex that query is, but it's important that your request is done in a single query.
There is another adavantage: You have no cache to deal with explicitly. It's not hard to build caches in Java, but cache synchronization/invalidation can be difficult. So the codebase you have to maintain is much smaller.

Best way to sort the data : DB Query or in Application Code

I have a Mysql table with some data (> million rows). I have a requirement to sort the data based on the below criteria
1) Newest
2) Oldest
3) top rated
4) least rated
What is the recommended solution to develop the sort functionality
1) For every sort reuest execute a DBQuery with required joins and orderBy conditions and return the sorted data
2) Get all the data (un sorted) from table, put the data in cache. Write custom comparators (java) to sort the data.
I am leaning towards #2 as the load on DB is only once. Moreover, application code is better than DBQuery.
Please share your thoughts....
Thanks,
Karthik

Do as much in the database as you can. Note that if you have 1,000,000 rows, returning all million is nearly useless. Are you going to display this on a web site? I think not. Do you really care about the 500,000th least popular post? Again, I think not.
So do the sorts in the database and return the top 100, 500, or 1000 rows.

It's much faster to do it in the database:
1) the database is optimized for I/O operations, and can use indices, and other DB optimizations to improve the response time
2) taking the data from the database to the application will get all data into memory. The app will have to look all the data to redorder it without optimized algorithms
3) the database only takes the minimun necessary data into mamemory, which can be much less than all the data whihc has to be moved to java
4) you can always create extra indices on the database to improve the query performance.

I would say that operation on DB will be always faster. You should ensure that caching on DB is ON and working properly. Ensure that you are not using now() in your query because it will disable mysql cache. Take a look here how mysql query cache works. In basic. Query is cached based on string so if query string differs every time you fetch no cache is used.

AFAIK usually it should run faster if you let the DB sort your data.
And regarding code on application level vs db level I would agree in the case of stored procedures but sorting in SELECTs is fine IMHO.
If you want to show the data to the user also consider paging (in which case you're better off with sorting on the db level anyway).

Fetching a million rows from the database sounds like a terrible idea. It will generate a lot of networking traffic and require quite some time to transfer all the data. Not mentioning amounts of memory you would need to allocate in your application for storing million of objects.
So if you can fetch only a subset with a query, do that. Overall, do as much filtering as you can in the database.
And I do not see any problem in ordering in a single queue. You can always use UNION if you can't do it as one SELECT.

You do not have four tasks, you have two:
sort newest IS EQUAL TO sort oldest
AND
sort top rated IS EQUAL TO sort least rated.
So you need to make two calls to db. Yes sort in db. then instead of calling to sort every time, do this:
1] track the timestamp of the latest record in the db
2] before calling to sort and retrieve entire list, check if date has changed
3] if date has not changed, use the list you have in memory
4] if date has changed, update the list

I know this is an old thread, but it comes up in my search, so I'd like to post my opinion.
I'm a bit old school, but for that many rows, I would consider dumping the data from your database (each RDBMS has it's own method. Looks like MySQLDump command for MySQL: Link )
You can then process this with sorting algorithms or tools that are available in your java libraries or operating system.
Be careful about the work your asking your database to do. Remember that it has to be available to service other requests. Don't "bring it to it's knees" servicing only one request, unless it's a nightly batch cycle type of scenario and you're certain it won't be asked to do anything else.

Justification of the need for an in-memory database

My use case is as follows --
I have a database table with around 1000+ entries and this table is updated/edited infrequently but i expect this to change in future. Some of the columns in the table contain strings that are of considerable length.
Now I am in the process of writing a UI application that will have some mouseover events that will display texts derived from the aforementioned database table.
I have, for my use case, decided to write a backend 'server' that will host an in-memory database that will have all the data that was present in the aforementioned table. The UI app will now, on startup, cache the required data from the in-memory database present or hosted by the backend server.
Does my use case justify using an in-memory database ? If not, what are the alternatives I should consider ?
EDIT 1 --
My use case also involves running multiple searches of varying complexity on the database very frequently.
Thanks
p1ng

Seems like an excellent use-case for an in-memory database. Writing it yourself, on the other hand, is probably not the way to go.
There are plenty of existing options for just about any imaginable scenario: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-memory_database
If you're doing complex searches on text data, Lucene is quite excellent. It has special in-memory storage backends, but really, it doesn't matter for such a tiny dataset - it will always be quickly cached anyway.

Is a good idea do processing of a large amount of data directly on database?

I have a database with a lot of web pages stored.
I will need to process all the data I have so I have two options: recover the data to the program or process directly in database with some functions I will create.
What I want to know is:
do some processing in the database, and not in the application is a good
idea?
when this is recommended and when not?
are there pros and cons?
is possible to extend the language to new features (external APIs/libraries)?
I tried retrieving the content to application (worked), but was to slow and dirty. My
preoccupation was that can't do in the database what can I do in Java, but I don't know if this is true.
ONLY a example: I have a table called Token. At the moment, it has 180,000 rows, but this will increase to over 10 million rows. I need to do some processing to know if a word between two token classified as `Proper Name´ is part of name or not.
I will need to process all the data. In this case, doing directly on database is better than retrieving to application?

My preoccupation was that can't do in the database what can I do in
Java, but I don't know if this is true.
No, that is not a correct assumption. There are valid circumstances for using database to process data. For example, if it involves calling a lot of disparate SQLs that can be combined in a store procedure then you should do the processing the in the stored procedure and call the stored proc from your java application. This way you avoid making several network trips to get to the database server.
I do not know what are you processing though. Are you parsing XML data stored in your database? Then perhaps you should use XQuery and a lot of the modern databases support it.
ONLY an example: I have a table called Token. At the moment, it has
180,000 rows, but this will increase to over 10 million rows. I need
to do some processing to know if a word between two token classified
as `Proper Name´ is part of name or not.
Is there some indicator in the data that tells it's a proper name? Fetching 10 million rows (highly susceptible to OutOfMemoryException) and then going through them is not a good idea. If there are certain parameters about the data that can be put in a where clause in a SQL to limit the number of data being fetched is the way to go in my opinion. Surely you will need to do explains on your SQL, check the correct indices are in place, check index cluster ratio, type of index, all that will make a difference. Now if you can't fully eliminate all "improper names" then you should try to get rid of as many as you can with SQL and then process the rest in your application. I am assuming this is a batch application, right? If it is a web application then you definitely want to create a batch application to do the staging of the data for you before web applications query it.
I hope my explanation makes sense. Please let me know if you have questions.

Directly interacting with the DB for every single thing is a tedious job and affects the performance...there are several ways to get around this...you can use indexing, caching or tools such as Hibernate which keeps all the data in the memory so that you don't need to query the DB for every operation...there are tools such as luceneIndexer which are very popular and could solve your problem of hitting the DB everytime...

Strategies for designing a database (being accessed by hibernate) which will have a lot of archivial data

I am developing an application which will be integrated with thousands of sensors sending information at every 15 minute interval. Let's assume that the format of the data for all sensors is same. What is the best strategy of storing this data so that every thing is archived (is accessible) and does not have a negative impact due to large size of growing data.
Th question is related to general database design I suppose, but I would like to mention that I am using Hibernate (with Spring Roo) so perhaps there is some thing already out there addressing it.
Edit: sensors are dumb, and off the shelf. It is not possible to extend them. In the case of a network outage all information is lost. Since the sensors work on GPRS this scenario will be some what unlikely (as the GPRS provider is a rather good one here in Sweden, but yes it can go down and one can do nothing about it).
A queuing mechanism was foremost in consideration and spring roo provides easy to work with prototype code based on ACTIVEMQ.

I'd have a couple of concerns about this design:
Hibernate is an ORM tool. It demands an object model on one side and a relational one on the other. Do you have an object representation? If not, I'd say that Hibernate isn't the way to go. If it's a simple table mapping mechanism you'll be fine.
Your situation sounds like war: long periods of boredom surrounded by instants of sheer terror. I don't know if your design uses asynchronous mechanisms between the receipt of the sensor data and the back end, but I'd want to have some kind of persistent queuing mechanism to guarantee delivery of all the data and an orderly line while they were waiting to be persisted. As long as you don't need to access the data in real time, a queue will guarantee delivery and make sure you don't have thousands of requests showing up at a bottleneck at the same time.
How are you time stamping the sensor items as they come in? You might want to use a column that goes down to nanoseconds to get these right.
Are the sensors event-driven or timed?
Sounds like a great problem. Good luck.

Let's assume you have 10,000 sensor sending information every 15 minutes. To have better performance on database side you may have to partition your database possibly by date/time, sensor type or category or some other factor. This also depend on how you will be query your data.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_(database)
Other bottle neck would be your Java/Java EE application itself. This depends on your business like, are all 150,000 sensors gonna send information at same time? and what architecture your java application gonna follow. You will have to read articles on high scalablity and performance.
Here is my recommendation for Java/Java EE solution.
Instead of single, have a cluster of applications receiving the data.
Have a controller application that controls link between which sensor sends data to which instance of application in the cluster. Application instance may pull data from sensor or sensor can push data to an application instance but controller is the one who will control which application instance is linked to which set of sensors. This controller must be dynamic such that sensors can be added or removed or updated as well application instances can join or leave cluster at any time. Make sure that you have some fail over capability into your controller.
So if you have 10,000 sensors and 10 instances of application in cluster, you have 1000 sensors linked to an application at any given time. If you still want better performance, you can have say 20 instances of application in cluster and you will have 500 sensors linked to an application instance.
Application instances can be hosted on same or multiple machines so that vertical as well as horizontal scalability is achieved. Each application instance will be multi threaded and have a local persistence. This will avoid bottle neck on to main database server and decrease your transaction response time. This local persistence can be a SAN file(s) or local RDBMS (like Java DB) or even MQ. If you persist locally in database, then you can use Hibernate for same.
Asynchronously move data from local persistence to main database. This depends on how have you persisted data locally.
If you use file based persistence, you need a separate thread that reads data from file and inserts in main database repository.
If you use a local database then this thread can use Hibernate to read data locally and insert it on main database repository.
If you use MQ, you can have thread or separate application to move data from queue to main database repository.
Drawback to this solution is that there will be some lag between sensor having reported some data and that data appearing in main database.
Advantage in this solution is that it will give you high performance, scalability, and fail-over.

This means you are going to get about 1 record/second multiplied by how many thousand sensors you have, or about 2.5 million rows/month multiplied by how many thousand sensors you have.
Postgres has inheritance and partitioning. That would make it practical to have tables like:
sensordata_current
sensordata_2010_01
sensordata_2009_12
sensordata_2009_11
sensordata_2009_10
.
.
.
each table containing measurements for one month. Then a parent table sensordata can be created that "consists" of these child tables, meaning queries against sensordata would automatically go through the child tables, but only the ones which the planner deduces can contain data for that query. So if you say partitioned your data by months (which is a date range), and you expressed that wish with a date constraint on each child table, and you query by date range, then the planner - based on the child table constraints - will be able to exclude those child tables from execution of the query which do not contain rows satisfying the date range.
When a month is complete (say 2010 Jan just turned 2010 Feb), you would rename sensordata_current to the just completed month (2010_01), create a new sensordata_current, move over any rows from 2010_01 into the newly created sensordata_current that have a timestamp in Feb, add finally a constraint to 2010_01 that expresses that it only has data in 2010 Jan. Also drop unneeded indices on 2010_01. In Postgres this all can be made atomic by enclosing it into a transaction.
Alternatively, you might need to leave _current alone, and create a new 2010_01 and move over all January rows into it from _current (then optionally vacuum _current to immediately reclaim the space - though if your rows are consant size, with recent Postgres versions there is not much point in doing that). Your move (SELECT INTO / DELETE) will take longer in this case, but you won't have to write code to recreate indices, and this would also preserve other details (referential integrity, etc.).
With this setup removing old data is as quick and efficient as dropping child tables. And migrating away old data is efficient too since child tables are also accessible directly.
For more details see Postgres data partitioning.

Is it a requirement that these sensors connect directly to an application to upload their data? And this application is responsible for writing the data to the database?
I would consider having the sensors write data to a message queue instead, and having your "write to DB" application be responsible for picking up new data from the queue and writing it to the database. This seems like a pretty classic example of "message producers" and "message consumers", i.e. the sensors and the application, respectively.
This way, the sensors are not affected if your "write to DB" application has any downtime, or if it has any performance issues or slowdowns from the database, etc. This would also allow you to scale up the number of message consumers in the future without affecting the sensors at all.
It might seem like this type of solution simply moves the possible point of failure from your consumer application to a message queue, but there are several options for making the queue fault-reliant - clustering, persistent message storage, etc.
Apache MQ is a popular message queue system in the Java world.