PostgreSQL: What is faster delete by unindexed column or other table? - postgresql

In our PostgreSQL database, we have a table with around 1TB of data. The table consists of an id, name, value and a timestamp. The data isn't sorted, and we don't have an index over the timestamp. However, we want to delete everything WHERE timestamp < '2018-09-01 00:00'.
We also have a second table with an exact copy of the data we want to delete. The copy process took us around 300 Minutes.
So I wonder which one would be faster. Deleting using the WHERE-clause or using the ids of the other table? If the second one would be more quickly how to write the query?

Related

How to backup whole table into a single field item?

I have few very small tables (a total of ~1000 rows) that I want to backup regularly into the same DB, to a single table. I know it sounds weird but hear me out.
Let's say that the tables I want to backup are named linux_commands, and windows_commands. These two tables have roughly: id (pkey), name, definition, config (jsonb), commands.
I want to back these up everyday into a table called commands_backup and I want this new table to have a date field, a field for windows_commands, and another one for linux_commands, so three columns in total. Each day, a script would run and write current date to date field, and then fetch whole linux_commands table and write it to related field in a single row, then do the same for windows_commands.
How would you setup something like this? Also, what is the best data type for storing whole data set in a single item?
In the target table, windows_commands and linux_commands should be type jsonb.
Then you can use:
INSERT INTO commands_backup VALUES (
current_date,
(SELECT jsonb_agg(to_jsonb(linux_commands)) FROM linux_commands),
(SELECT jsonb_agg(to_jsonb(windows_commands)) FROM windows_commands)
);

Updates in a Postgres Timescale DB

I have a Postgres Timescale database with a table that contains about 2.5 million records.
The Primary Key is on two columns, device and time, there is a subsequent index on these columns also, and another on the time column only.
The problems I'm experiencing are:
I need to do a one off update of a new column to populate it via a
calculation from existing columns, but tests so far indicate this
will be a very slow process.
Performing an update on a single record identified by the device and
time columns can be instant, or very slow, even if the record is
only an hour or so old.
Tom

Best performance method for getting records by large collection of IDs

I am writing a query with code to select all records from a table where a column value is contained in a CSV. I found a suggestion that the best way to do this was using ARRAY functionality in PostgresQL.
I have a table price_mapping and it has a primary key of id and a column customer_id of type bigint.
I want to return all records that have a customer ID in the array I will generate from csv.
I tried this:
select * from price_mapping
where ARRAY[customer_id] <# ARRAY[5,7,10]::bigint[]
(the 5,7,10 part would actually be a csv inserted by my app)
But I am not sure that is right. In application the array could contain 10's of thousands of IDs so want to make sure I am doing right with best performance method.
Is this the right way in PostgreSQL to retrieve large collection of records by pre-defined column value?
Thanks
Generally this is done with the SQL standard in operator.
select *
from price_mapping
where customer_id in (5,7,10)
I don't see any reason using ARRAY would be faster. It might be slower given it has to build arrays, though it might have been optimized.
In the past this was more optimal:
select *
from price_mapping
where customer_id = ANY(VALUES (5), (7), (10)
But new-ish versions of Postgres should optimize this for you.
Passing in tens of thousands of IDs might run up against a query size limit either in Postgres or your database driver, so you may wish to batch this a few thousand at a time.
As for the best performance, the answer is to not search for tens of thousands of IDs. Find something which relates them together, index that column, and search by that.
If your data is big enough, try this:
Read your CSV using a FDW (foreign data wrapper)
If you need this connection often, you might build a materialized view from it, holding only needed columns. Refresh this when new CSV is created.
Join your table against this foreign table or materialized viev.

Redshift query a daily-generated table

I am looking for a way to create a Redshift query that will retrieve data from a table that is generated daily. Tables in our cluster are of the form:
event_table_2016_06_14
event_table_2016_06_13
.. and so on.
I have tried writing a query that appends the current date to the table name, but this does not seem to work correctly (invalid operation):
SELECT * FROM concat('event_table_', to_char(getdate(),'YYYY_MM_DD'))
Any suggestions on how this can be performed are greatly appreciated!
I have tried writing a query that appends the current date to the
table name, but this does not seem to work correctly (invalid
operation):
Redshift does not support that. But you most likely won't need it.
Try the following (expanding on the answer from #ketan):
Create your main table with appropriate (for joins) DIST key, and COMPOUND or simple SORT KEY on timestamp column, and proper compression on columns.
Daily, create a temp table (use CREATE TABLE ... LIKE - this will preserve DIST/SORT keys), load it with daily data, VACUUM SORT.
Copy sorted temp table into main table using ALTER TABLE APPEND - this will copy the data sorted, and will reduce VACUUM on the main table. You may still need VACUUM SORT after that.
After that query your main table normally, probably giving it a range on timestamp. Redshift is optimised for these scenarios, and 99% of times you don't need to optimise table scans yourself - even on tables with billion of rows scans take milliseconds to few seconds. You may need to optimise elsewhere, but that's the second step.
To get insight in the performance of scans, use STL_QUERY system table to find your query ID, and then use STL_SCAN (or SVL_QUERY_SUMMARY) table to see how fast the scan was.
Your example is actually the main use case for ALTER TABLE APPEND.
I am assuming that you are creating a new table everyday.
What you can do is:
Create a view on top of event_table_* tables. Query your data using this view.
Whenever you create or drop a table, update the view.
If you want, you can avoid #2: Instead of creating a new table everyday, create empty tables for next 1-2 years. So, no need to update the view every day. However, do remember that there is an upper limit of 9,900 tables in Redshift.
Edit: If you always need to query today's table (instead of all tables, as I assumed originally), I don't think you can do that without updating your view.
However, you can modify your design to have just one table, with date as sort-key. So, whenever your table is queried with some date, all disk blocks that don't have that date will be skipped. That'll be as efficient as having time-series tables.

Redshift select * vs select single column

I'm having the following Redshift performance issue:
I have a table with ~ 2 billion rows, which has ~100 varchar columns and one int8 column (intCol). The table is relatively sparse, although there are columns which have values in each row.
The following query:
select colA from tableA where intCol = ‘111111’;
returns approximately 30 rows and runs relatively quickly (~2 mins)
However, the query:
select * from tableA where intCol = ‘111111’;
takes an undetermined amount of time (gave up after 60 mins).
I know pruning the columns in the projection is usually better but this application needs the full row.
Questions:
Is this just a fundamentally bad thing to do in Redshift?
If not, why is this particular query taking so long? Is it related to the structure of the table somehow? Is there some Redshift knob to tweak to make it faster? I haven't yet messed with the distkey and sortkey on the table, but it's not clear that those should matter in this case.
The main reason why the first query is faster is because Redshift is a columnar database. A columnar database
stores table data per column, writing a same column data into a same block on the storage. This behavior is different from a row-based database like MySQL or PostgreSQL. Based on this, since the first query selects only colA column, Redshift does not need to access other columns at all, while the second query accesses all columns causing a huge disk access.
To improve the performance of the second query, you may need to set "sortkey" to colA column. By setting sortkey to a column, that column data will be stored in sorted order on the storage. It reduces the cost of disk access when fetching records with a condition including that column.