kdb: Efficient way to delete last row from a table? - kdb

For example, creating this 20M row table takes 37ms, but deleting a row takes 38ms! Is there any way to do this more efficiently?
(In place modify is fine as I don't need the original)
q)n:20000000
q)t:([]a:n#1;b:n#2)
q)\t t:([]a:n#1;b:n#2)
37
q)\t t:-1_t
38
/ in place delete doesn't seem to help either
q)\t delete from `t where i=last i
67

No. Various approaches you would hope to work are limited by the fact that a copy of t is being created (inspect the peak value of .Q.w[] before and after either your delete query or using Drop if you need convinced of this). Your lowerbound on execution is going to be limited by the time it takes to construct t.

Related

What kind of index should I use in postgresql for a column with 3 values

I have a table with 100Mil+ records and 237 fields.
One of the fields is a varchar 1 field with three possible values (Y,N,I)
I need to find all of the records with N.
Right now I have a b-tree index built and the query below takes about 20 min to run.
Is there another index I can use to get better performance?
SELECT * FROM tableone WHERE export_value='N';
Assuming your values are roughly equally distributed (say at least 15% of each value) and roughly equally distributed throughout the table (some physically at the beginning, some in the middle, some at the end) then no.
If you think about it you'll see why. You'll have to look up tens of millions of disk blocks in the index and then fetch them from the disk one by one. By the time you have done that, it would have been quicker to just scan the whole table and pick out the values as they match. The planner knows this and would probably not use the index at all.
However - if you only have 17 rows with "N" or they are all very recently added to the table and so physically happen to be close to each other then yes, and index can help.
If you only had a few rows with "N" you would have mentioned it, so we can ignore that one.
If however you mostly insert to this table you might find a BRIN index helpful. That can let the planner see that e.g. the first 80% of your table doesn't have any "N" blocks and so it just needs to look at the last bit.

Attributes internal working in aj for performance benefits in kdb

Considering the trade table 't' and quotes table 'q' in memory:
q)t:([] sym:`GOOG`AMZN`GOOG`AMZN; time:10:01 10:02 10:02 10:03; px:10 20 11 19)
q)q:([] sym:`GOOG`AMZN`AMZN`GOOG`AMZN; time:10:01 10:01 10:02 10:02 10:03; vol:100 200 210 110 220)
In order to get performance benefits applying grouped attribute on 'sym' column of q table and making 'time' column sorted within sym.
Using this, I can clearly see the performance benefits from it:
q)\t:1000000 aj[`sym`time;t;q]
9573
q)\t:1000000 aj[`sym`time;t;q1]
8761
q)\t:100000 aj[`sym`time;t;q]
968
q)\t:100000 aj[`sym`time;t;q1]
893
And in large tables the performance is far better.
Now, I'm trying to understand how it works internally when we are applying grouped attribute to sym column and sort time within sym.
My understanding is internally the aj should happen in below way, can someone please let me know the correct internal working?
* Since, grouped attribute is applied on sym; so it creates a hashtable for table q1, then since we are sorting on time so the internal q1 table might look like.
GOOG|(10:01;10:02)|(100;110)
AMZN|(10:01;10:02:10:03)|(200;210;220)
So in this case of q1, if the interpreter has to join (AMZN;10:02) of t table; it will directly find it in q1's hasttable in less time, but for joining same value(AMZN;10:02) of table 't' in table 'q' the interpreter will have to search linearly through table 'q' hence taking more time.
I believe you're on the right track, though we can't know for sure as we don't have access to the kdb source code to see precisely what it does.
If you look at the definition of aj you'll see that it's based on bin:
q)aj
k){.Q.ft[{d:x_z;$[&/j:-1<i:(x#z)bin x#y;y,'d i;+.[+.Q.ff[y]d;(!+d;j);:;.+d i j:&j]]}[x,();;0!z]]y}
specifically,
(`sym`time#q)bin `sym`time#t
and the bin documentation provides some more details on how bin behaves: https://code.kx.com/q/ref/bin/
I believe in the two-column case it will first match on the sym column and then use bin on the second column. Like you said, the grouped attribute on sym speeds up the matching of syms part and the sorting on time ensures the bin returns the correct results. Note that for on-disk queries it's optimal to put `p# on sym rather than `g# as the parted attribute is optimal for matching/retrieving by sym from disk.

Spark window functions: how to implement complex logic with good performance and without looping

I have a data set that lends itself to window functions, 3M+ rows that once ranked can be partitioned into groups of ~20 or less rows. Here is a simplified example:
id date1 date2 type rank
171 20090601 20090601 attempt 1
171 20090701 20100331 trial_fail 2
171 20090901 20091101 attempt 3
171 20091101 20100201 attempt 4
171 20091201 20100401 attempt 5
171 20090601 20090601 fail 6
188 20100701 20100715 trial_fail 1
188 20100716 20100730 trial_success 2
188 20100731 20100814 trial_fail 3
188 20100901 20100901 attempt 4
188 20101001 20101001 success 5
The data is ranked by id and date1, and the window created with:
Window.partitionBy("id").orderBy("rank")
In this example the data has already been ranked by (id, date1). I could also work on the unranked data and rank it within Spark.
I need to implement some logic on these rows, for example, within a window:
1) Identify all rows that end during a failed trial (i.e. a row's date2 is between date1 and date2 of any previous row within the same window of type "trial_fail").
2) Identify all trials after a failed trial (i.e. any row with type "trial_fail" or "trial success" after a row within the same window of type "trial_fail").
3) Identify all attempts before a successful attempt (i.e. any row with type "attempt" with date1 earlier than date1 of another later row of type "success").
The exact logic of these conditions is not important to my question (and there will be other different conditions), what's important is that the logic depends on values in many rows in the window at once. This can't be handled by the simple Spark SQL functions like first, last, lag, lead, etc. and isn't as simple as the typical example of finding the largest/smallest 1 or n rows in the window.
What's also important is that the partitions don't depend on one another so this seems like this a great candidate for Spark to do in parallel, 3 million rows with 150,000 partitions of 20 rows each, in fact I wonder if this is too many partitions.
I can implement this with a loop something like (in pseudocode):
for i in 1..20:
for j in 1..20:
// compare window[j]'s type and dates to window[i]'s etc
// add a Y/N flag to the DF to identify target rows
This would require 400+ iterations (the choice of 20 for the max i and j is an educated guess based on the data set and could actually be larger), which seems needlessly brute force.
However I am at a loss for a better way to implement it. I think this will essentially collect() in the driver, which I suppose might be ok if it is not much data. I thought of trying to implement the logic as sub-queries, or by creating a series of sub-DF's each with a subset or reduction of data.
If anyone is aware of any API's or techniques that I am missing any info would be appreciated.
Edit: This is somewhat related:
Spark SQL window function with complex condition

Cannot allocate memory for a column of compound floats on a partitioned table

I have a partitioned table in my hdb that includes a column containing large lists of floats (at most 400 floats per element). eg each element looks like
(100.0 1.0 ...)
When trying to select on this column from days where there are particularly high numbers of rows I get an error saying
'./2015.02.07/table/column# Cannot allocate memory
The same error arises from a query like:
select column[;0] from table where date=2015.02.07
even though on days with fewer rows this query returns the first value of each element in the column.
Is there a way to stream this column in a select to decrease the memory requirements of holding the whole column in memory for a large day?
EDIT
.Q.ind on large days fails with the same error.
ie given I can work with 2015.02.01 but not 2015.02.02:
.Q.ind[select from table where date=2015.02.01;enlist 1]
is fine but
.Q.ind[select from table where date=2015.02.02;enlist 1]
fails with
{0!$[#.Q.pm;p3;(?).]#[x;0;p1[;y;z]]}
'./2015.02.10/table/column2#: Cannot allocate memory
#
.[?]
(+`time`sym`column1`column2!`:./2015.02.02/table;();0b;())
I should note I am using the free 32-bit version
I think this is all just a combination of the free-32bit memory limitation, the fact that your row counts are possibly large and the fact that (unavoidably) something must be pulled entirely into memory when retrieving data from a column, whether it is the column itself that gets entirely pulled in (in the non-nested case) or if its the nested-index column that gets entirely pulled in.
Another thing to consider is that kdb uses powers-of-two (buddy) memory allocation. Even if todays table only contains one more row than yesterdays, the memory requirements per column could double. Take a simple example:
In the free 32bit version (windows) you can create this many floats and it only uses ~1.07gb of memory
q)\ts 134217726?1.0
3093 1073741952
However, try to generate one extra float and you hit a memory limit
q)\ts 134217727?1.0
wsfull
So even a small amount of rows in the difference between one day and the next can be very significant if you're near the boundary of allocatable powers of two.
--DISCLAIMER-- the following is hacky and is only intended for debugging!
You can actually manually try to access the data from the nested list, though you may still have memory issues here anyway.
Create a nested table and splay it
q)tab:([] col1:(101 102 103f;104 105f;106 107 108 109 110f;111 112f))
q)tab
col1
--------------------
101 102 103f
104 105f
106 107 108 109 110f
111 112f
q)
q)`:test/ set tab
`:test/
You can try to read in the indices from the nested-index file
q)2_first (enlist "j";enlist 8)1:`:test/col1
3 5 10 12
So the indices for splitting the full list of floats (the col1# file) is index 3, index 5, 10 etc etc
Say I want the first 3 rows
q)myrows:3#2_first (enlist "j";enlist 8)1:`:test/col1
q)myrows
3 5 10
then I know that I need the first 10 floats from the col1# file and need to split them at index 3 and 5. Then I can read the col1# file partially and split it correctly
q)(0,-1_myrows) cut raze (enlist "f";enlist 8)1:(`$":test/col1#";0;8*last myrows)
101 102 103f
104 105f
106 107 108 109 110f
But this is precisely what KDB does under the covers anyway so I suspect that you'll still have trouble even reading in the nested-index file in the first place.
Check this debug/hack and see if you can partially read that way. But obviously it's not a long-term solution!
Nested columns make querying in the usual way difficult, as the # file also needs to be loaded into memory (even with a [;0])
Your best bet is to select map a date partition in, and then select within that chunk by chunk, e.g. a million rows at a time (or whatever is sensible given the size of nested floats).
Perhaps also consider 32bit floats, if some decimal accuracy can be sacrificed.
EDIT
So after comments I guess the best way is to go each partition a number of lines at a time with .Q.ind
Just to give my 2 cents on this, I had a similar error but with a 64-bit instance.
I suspected that the memory needed to be de-fragmented as it was running for almost a year.
Bouncing the instance solved the issue, and released a lot of virtual memory

What is the right way to iterate through a kdb partitioned table in an client application?

I want to process all the rows of a kdb table in an R program (I use qserver.R). One way to do this is to initialize a memory handler and then iterate through all the rows one of the time, as explained here:
t: select from mytable where ts>12:30:00,ts<15:00:00,price,msg="A"
t[0]
t[1]
t[2]
...
I want to limit the number of client/server calls in R to loop as fast as possible.
How can I fetch multiple rows for each call?
NOTE: my answer below assumes that mytable is the partioned database, but that you now have t in memory.
another option using cut (using "chunks" of 1,000,000 as per your earlier post)
(`int$1e6) cut t
now you have a list of table "chunks" of your desired size and you can use accordingly.
I frequently use this for certain functions (particularly in combination with peach).
A pattern I've found useful is:
f:`function that does something useful on chunks`
fa:`function that reaggregates up to final results`
r:fa raze f peach (`int$`size`)cut t
if you're t is really large (both vertical/horizontal) you might want to avoid cut directly on the table for memory reasons, but can instead cut a list of indices for the table into the appropriate size and then feed the indices to your f and have that index to the t and grab what you want.
Below a quick comparison of both approaches (note that f here is pointless, but just to prove the point of the cut on t versus indices)
q)t:flip (`$"c",/:string til 100)!{(`int$1e7)?100} each til 100
q)\ts a:raze {select c1,c99 from x}each 1000 cut t
3827 4108103072j
q)\ts b:raze {select c1,c99 from t[x]}each 1000 cut til count t
3057 217623200j
q)4108103072j%217623200j
18.87714
q)a~b
1b
From your previous questions I assume this is a 1 person system so what benefit are you getting from kdb? Why not work fully in R and just use flat memory mapped files directly there? Avoiding unneeded complexity and overhead. If all you want to do is stream the data through R in order that should be simple.
Rather than "ts>12:30:00,ts<15:00:00" use "ts within (12:30:00;15:00:00)" it's quicker.
The larger the size of chunks you process in the more efficient it is likely to be. 100 seems quite small.
Regards,
Ryan Hamilton
Sorted out, this returns 100 rows each time:
\l /data/mydb
t: select from mytable where ts>12:30:00,ts<15:00:00,price,msg="A"
select [0 100] from t
select [100 100] from t
select [200 100] from t
..