I am playing around (learning experience) with writing an analytic system using the Play! Framework(2)(java),
I want to write efficient code and due to this I am struggling to decide on the following:
For every view a page gets there is a record being added, specifying the website (example.org) , page (/index.html) and the date that was viewed. As you can guess, the amount of rows is going to be huge.
To use the data I am then selecting all rows where the website is "example.org", looping through the results to build a hash map containing the date and how many views it had on that date and then using this to build a graph.
There must be a more better way of doing this,
For example, rather than having a row per view would it be better to update an existing record adding one view to the record.
Any assistance would be appreciated.
Thank you
You can just add some more conditions (like the date) in your WHERE clause, then you can perform a Count over the result. This way you'll have directly the result from your database.
The query would look like:
SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM YOUR_TABLE
WHERE SITE = 'thesite'
AND DATE = '<date>'
GROUP BY SITE, DATE
There must be a better way of doing this,
The web server logs HTML requests. Most analytical systems use the web server logs.
Since you mentioned that you're doing this to learn, you're gathering statistics in the most flexible way possible.
My only suggestion would be to remove all indexes from the statistics table that your web applications are writing to. Make a copy of the statistics table for generating the statistics. The copy would have all of the necessary indexes.
This way, you get the fastest writes, because there are no indexes to update.
If necessary, you can have a primary index or clustering index on the write table.
Related
I am using the displaytag for the pagination purpose.
Now from the DB, I have a millions of records, to go one from the other page, its taking a quite longer time.
Is there a way we can cache the objects which needs to be shown, and so that traversing in between the pages can be faster.
Requirement : We are querying and displaying the number of files in the directory under Linux environment. each folders has thousands of files..
How are your reading from DB? It would be good to see some more from your implementation.
As a general guideline:
If you read all your data into a list from the DB and only display a page, you will be wasting resources (processing and memory). This can kill your app. Try an approach that will just go for the page you're needing.
If you are using a framework like Hibernate, you can implement caching and paging without much trouble.
If you are using direct JDBC, you will have to limit registers in your query. Here the proper technique might depend on the Database Engine you're using. Please provide this information.
Be aware that your problem might be the amount of read information rather than a caching problem (just depends on the implementation).
As a sample, in Oracle, you would need to know the page and the pagesize. With both, you could limit the query with "where rownum < pagesize * page" (or something similar depending on how you index, and navigate to the first register you need with the absolute(int) method of Resultset. On other Engines it might be more efficient.
Now, if you're paginating with some framework, normally they support some implementation of a "DataProvider" so you can control how to fetch results for each page.
I have 3000 records in an employee table which I have fetched from my database with a single query. I can show 20 records per page. So there will be 150 pages for with each page showing 20 records. I have two questions on pagination and sortable column approach:
1) If I implement a simple pagination without sortable columns, should I send all 3000 records to client and do the pagination client side using javascript or jquery. So if user clicks second page, call will not go to server side and it will be faster. Though I am not sure what will be the impact of sending 3000 or more records on browser/client side? So what is the best approach either sending all the records to client in single go and do the sorting there or on click of page send the call to server side and then just return that specific page results?
2) In this scenario, I need to provide the pagination along with sortable columns (6 columns). So here user can click any column like employee name or department name, then names should be arranged in ascending or descending order. Again I want to know the best approach in terms of time response/memory?
Sending data to your client is almost certainly going to your bottleneck (especially for mobile clients), so you should always strive to send as little data as possible. With that said, it is almost definitely better to do your pagination on the server side. This is a much more scalable solution. It is likely that the amount of data will grow, so it's a safer bet for the future to just do the pagination on the server.
Also, remember that it is fairly unlikely that any user will actually bother looking through hundreds of result pages, so transferring all the data is likely wasteful as well. This may be a relevant read for you.
I assume you have a bean class representing records in this table, with instances loaded from whatever ORM you have in place.
If you haven't already, you should implement caching of these beans in your application. This can be done locally, perhaps using Guava's CacheBuilder, or remotely using calls to Memcached for example (the latter would be necessary for multiple app servers/load balancing). The cache for these beans should be keyed on a unique id, most likely the mapping to the primary key column of the corresponding table.
Getting to the pagination: simply write your queries to return only IDs of the selected records. Include LIMIT and OFFSET or your DB language's equivalent to paginate. The caller of the query can also filter/sort at will using WHERE, ORDER BY etc.
Back in the Java layer, iterate through the resulting IDs of these queries and build your List of beans by calling the cache. If the cache misses, it will call your ORM to individually query and load that bean. Once the List is built, it can be processed/serialized and sent to the UI.
I know this doesn't directly answer the client vs server side pagination, but I would recommend using DataTables.net to both display and paginate your data. It provides a very nice display, allows for sorting and pagination, built in search function, and a lot more. The first time I used it was for the first web project I worked on, and I, as a complete noobie, was able to get it to work. The forums also provide very good information/help, and the creator will answer your questions.
DataTables can be used both client-side and server-side, and can support thousands of rows.
As for speed, I only had a few hundred rows, but used the client-side processing and never noticed a delay.
USE SERVER PAGINATION!
Sure, you could probably get away with sending down a JSON array of 3000 elements and using JavaScript to page/sort on the client. But a good web programmer should know how to page and sort records on the server. (They should really know a couple ways). So, think of it as good practice :)
If you want a slick user interface, consider using a JavaScript grid component that uses AJAX to fetch data. Typically, these components pass back the following parameters (or some variant of them):
Start Record Index
Number of Records to Return
Sort Column
Sort Direction
Columns to Fetch (sometimes)
It is up to the developer to implement a handler or interface that returns a result set based on these input parameters.
I have a customer with a very small set of data and records that I'd normally just serialize to a data file and be done but they want to run extra reports and have expandability down the road to do things their own way. The MySQL database came up and so I'm adapting their Java POS (point of sale) system to work with it.
I've done this before and here was my approach in a nutshell for one of the tables, say Customers:
I setup a loop to store the primary key into an arraylist then setup a form to go from one record to the next running SQL queries based on the PK. The query would pull down the fname, lname, address, etc. and fill in the fields on the screen.
I thought it might be a little clunky running a SQL query each time they click Next. So I'm looking for another approach to this problem. Any help is appreciated! I don't need exact code or anything, just some concepts will do fine
Thanks!
I would say the solution you suggest yourself is not very good not only because you run SQL query every time a button is pressed, but also because you are iterating over primary keys, which probably are not sorted in any meaningful order...
What you want is to retrieve a certain number of records which are sorted sensibly (by first/last name or something) and keep them as a kind of cache in your ArrayList or something similar... This can be done quite easily with SQL. When the user starts iterating over the results by pressing "Next", you can in the background start loading more records.
The key to keep usability is to load some records before the user actually request them to keep latency small, but keeping in mind that you also don't want to load the whole database at once....
Take a look at indexing your database. http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=377652
Use JPA with the built in Hibernate provider. If you are not familiar with one or both, then download NetBeans - it includes a very easy to follow tutorial you can use to get up to speed. Managing lists of objects is trivial with the new JPA and you won't find yourself reinventing the wheel.
the key concept here is pagination.
Let's say you set your page size to 10. This means you select 10 records from the database, in a certain order, so your query should have an order by clause and a limit clause at the end. You use this resultset to display the form while the users navigates with Previous/Next buttons.
When the user navigates out of the page then you fetch an other page.
https://www.google.com/search?q=java+sql+pagination
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...
I work on an application that is deployed on the web. Part of the app is search functions where the result is presented in a sorted list. The application targets users in several countries using different locales (= sorting rules). I need to find a solution for sorting correctly for all users.
I currently sort with ORDER BY in my SQL query, so the sorting is done according to the locale (or LC_LOCATE) set for the database. These rules are incorrect for those users with a locale different than the one set for the database.
Also, to further complicate the issue, I use pagination in the application, so when I query the database I ask for rows 1 - 15, 16 - 30, etc. depending on the page I need. However, since the sorting is wrong, each page contains entries that are incorrectly sorted. In a worst case scenario, the entire result set for a given page could be out of order, depending on the locale/sorting rules of the current user.
If I were to sort in (server side) code, I need to retrieve all rows from the database and then sort. This results in a tremendous performance hit given the amount of data. Thus I would like to avoid this.
Does anyone have a strategy (or even technical solution) for attacking this problem that will result in correctly sorted lists without having to take the performance hit of loading all data?
Tech details: The database is PostgreSQL 8.3, the application an EJB3 app using EJB QL for data query, running on JBoss 4.5.
Are you willing to develop a small Postgres custom function module in C? (Probably only a few days for an experienced C coder.)
strxfrm() is the function that transforms the language-dependent text string based on the current LC_COLLATE setting (more or less the current language) into a transformed string that results in proper collation order in that language if sorted as a binary byte sequence (e.g. strcmp()).
If you implement this for Postgres, say it takes a string and a collation order, then you will be able to order by strxfrm(textfield, collation_order). I think you can then even create multiple functional indexes on your text column (say one per language) using that function to store the results of the strxfrm() so that the optimizer will use the index.
Alternatively, you could join the Postgres developers in implementing this in mainstream Postgres. Here are the wiki pages about this issues: Collation, ICU (which is also used by Java as far as I know).
Alternatively, as a less sophisticated solution if data input is only through Java, you could compute these strxfrm() values in Java (Java will probably have a different name for this concept) when you add the data to the database, and then let Postgres index and order by these precomputed values.
How tied are you to PostgreSQL? The documentation isn't promising:
The nature of some locale categories is that their value has to be fixed for the lifetime of a database cluster. That is, once initdb has run, you cannot change them anymore. LC_COLLATE and LC_CTYPE are those categories. They affect the sort order of indexes, so they must be kept fixed, or indexes on text columns will become corrupt. PostgreSQL enforces this by recording the values of LC_COLLATE and LC_CTYPE that are seen by initdb. The server automatically adopts those two values when it is started.
(Collation rules define how text is sorted.)
Google throws up patch under discussion:
PostgreSQL currently only supports one collation at a time, as fixed by the LC_COLLATE variable at the time the database cluster is initialised.
I'm not sure I'd want to manage this outside the database, though I'd be interested in reading about how it can be done. (Anyone wanting a good technical overview of the issues should check out Sorting Your Linguistic Data inside the Oracle Database on the Oracle globalization site.)
I don't know any way to switch the database order by order. Therefore, one has to consider other solutions.
If the number of results is really big (hundred thousands ?), I have no solutions, except showing only the number of results, and asking the user to make a more precise request. Otherwise, the server-side could do, depending on the precise conditions....
Especially, using a cache could improve things tremendously. The first request to the database (unlimited) would not be so much slower than for a query limited in number of results. And the subsequent requests would be much faster. Often, paging and re-sorting makes for several requests, so the cache would work well (even with a few minutes duration).
I use EhCache as a technical solution.
Sorting and paging go together, sorting then paging.
The raw results could be memorized in the cache.
To reduce the performance hit, some hints:
you can run the query once for result set size, and warn the user if there are too many results (ask either for confirming a slow query, or add some selection fields)
only request the columns you need, let go all other columns (usually some data is not shown immediately for all results, but displayed on mouse move for example ; this data can be requested lazyly, only as needed, therefore reducing the columns requested for all results)
if you have computed values, cache the smaller between the database columns and the computed values
if you have repeated values in multiple results, you can request that data/columns separately (so you retrieve from the database once, and cache them only once), retrieve only a key (typically, and id) in the main request.
You might want to checkout this packge: http://www.fi.muni.cz/~adelton/l10n/postgresql-nls-string/. It hasn't been updated in a long time, and may not work anymore, but it seems like a reasonable startingpoint if you want to build a function that can do this for you.
This module is broken for Postgres 8.4.3. I fixed it - you can download fixed version from http://www.itreport.eu/__cw_files/.01/.17/.ee7844ba6716aa36b19abbd582a31701/nls_string.c and you'll have to compile and install it by hands (as described at related README and INSTALL from original module) but anyway sorting is working incorrectly. I tried it on FreeBSD 8.0, LC_COLLATE is cs_CZ.UTF-8