Does nhibernate generate prepared statements when targeting Postgres via npgsql? - postgresql

If it does, is there a way to query the database to confirm that the prepared statements are being generated, and see how much memory the prepared statements are consuming?

First, you can check whether prepared statements exist on your connection by querying the pg_prepared_statements system view. Any prepared statement should show up as a row there. Take care to query pg_prepared_statements on the same connection you're interested in checking. I'm not aware of any way of knowing how much memory the statements are consuming though.
If NHibernate doesn't prepare statements, you may want to check out Npgsql 3.2's new automatic preparation feature. When activated (it's off by default), Npgsql will track statements and automatically prepare frequently-used ones. See Npgsql's performance docs for more information.

Related

Is there a way to show everything that was changed in a PostgreSQL database during a transaction?

I often have to execute complex sql scripts in a single transaction on a large PostgreSQL database and I would like to verify everything that was changed during the transaction.
Verifying each single entry on each table "by hand" would take ages.
Dumping the database before and after the script to plain sql and using diff on the dumps isn't really an option since each dump would be about 50G of data.
Is there a way to show all the data that was added, deleted or modified during a single transaction?
Dude, What are you looking for is the most searchable thing on the internet when it comes to capturing Database changes. It is a kind of version control we can say.
But as long as I know, sadly there are no in-built approaches are available in PostgreSQL or MySql. But you can overcome it by setting/adding some triggers for your most usable operations.
You can create some backup schemas, and tables to capture your changes that are changed(updated), created, or deleted.
In this way you can achieve what you want. I know this process is fully manual, But really effective.
If you need to analyze the script's behaviour only sporadically, then the easiest approach would be to change server configuration parameter log_min_duration_statement to 0 and then back to any value it had before the analysis. Then all of the script activity will be written to the instance log.
This approach is not suitable if your storage is not prepared to accommodate this amount of data, or for systems in which you don't want sensitive client data to be written to a plain-text log file.

Azure Database, EF, Time out issues

I have taken over an existing MVC website which uses entity framework and hangfire and is hosted on Azure and uses Azure database. Every so often the website times out.
I'm new to Azure portal, entity framework and hangfire.
If I increase the DTU's it clears the timeout issues?
I'm looking for ways of how to diagnose why the website times out. I have added error logging using elmah and checked hangfire but this doesn't give me any further information.
Is there anything in azure portal that can help?
If it "times out" and if "increasing DTU resolves timeouts" and these observations are true (I think it's on you to really convince yourself this is absolutely true, don't make this assumption lightly) then the usual and obvious candidate is "a slow sql query". Entity Framework is often used with linq to create sql queries without writing sql. These queries are often fine for very simple tasks, such as someData.Where(x=>x.Id == 1).First(), however, if linq is used to join tables, or create complex associations, the generated sql can become monstrously bad, from a performance perspective. You can add logging to write out the sql generated by linq, or you can try to trace the database to see what sql is running on it. If tracing is out of the question, there are still meta queries you can use to view things like cached query plans and SQL Server can give you estimated costs and cached execution counts.
You can still hang yourself without using linq. You can still use stored procedures with EF. Way too many developers are naive about SQL performance still; you need to comb over your back end and learn the schema, the stored procedures; inspect the sql contents of everything. Check for any database triggers (easy to miss). Red flags are subqueries, too many joining, too many results from a query, lots of string manipulation in a query, joining tables on strings, or XML/JSON-based SQL work.
Be aware that "slow sql queries" will become slower when load is high. And when slow sql queries build up, they only take more time to resolve. This can also cause debilitating table locking, depending on the nature of the query.
But queries can be performant and still cause locking. ie One table is being written to often and it's blocking other writes or reads from that table. This is a little harder to diagnose, but you can figure it out by carefully inspecting logs of database calls and how long they take to execute. There are also sql queries you can run on the database to diagnose long-running queries, or what tables are locked at a given point in time.
Finally, check for any back end webjobs for your application. If timeouts occur at reoccurring days or times, then somebody's batch SQL could be blocking your production database from being read.
But this is all speculation. I think you need to do more research to determine what is actually causing the site to become unresponsive. If you can log response times for common queries, you can rule out SQL-based latency as being the culprit or not and work from there. There's nothing inherently "amiss" about any of the technologies you specified.
If queries are perfomant but still causing issues, a long term solution is to add something like a message queue and batch your sql work intelligently, or just make the database work asynchronous and not block the UI.
You should correlate any logged timeouts with azure's monitoring. Azure can give you CPU/RAM/page visits and such on the dashboard.
SQL Azure is a bit of a different beast. It doesn't have the on-demand performance of a dedicated DB unless you're prepared to throw serious $$ at it. And even then ...
EF, when written for well can perform quite well. When written poorly it can be a dog, and those problems are compounded on a platform like SQL Azure.
The first thing is to check that your EF contexts are set up to use an execution strategy suited to Azure: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/ef/ef6/fundamentals/connection-resiliency/retry-logic
The next thing would be to see what kinds of SQL tracing you can run on Azure. Tracing is essential to see what EF is doing behind the scenes. I'm not familiar with tools available for Azure, in my case my Azure experience was running SQL Server on VMs because SQL Azure was too immature, not HIPAA compliant at the time, and expensive for the DTU estimates we were able to get. Worst case, can you restore an database backup into an SQL Server instance and point a copy of your application environment temporarily at that to run through common usage scenarios? Using an SQL Trace you can pick up on exactly when and how often EF is executing queries, and what queries it is executing.
Things to look at:
How many queries are running? If you are loading a set of records and expect one query, are there a whole heap of queries getting sent? This would indicate lazy-load calls being triggered.
What queries are being run? Is it selecting a lot more fields than are being displayed? This would be potentially a case where entire entities are being loaded where a .Select() could be used to reduce the amount of data. Perhaps even the case where entire sets of entities are being loaded that aren't relevant to what is displayed/done, such as cases where someone is using .ToList() prior to just doing a .Count() or .Any() or doing a .FirstOrDefault() just to do a != null check.
Is the database properly indexed? Copy some of the heavier queries into SQL Manager and execute them with an execution plan. Are there indexing suggestions?
The common sins of developing with EF and other ORMs boil down to "pulling too much, too often." It's surprising how many clients I've worked with have development teams that have not used a profiler to inspect their ORM use efficiency. (and I'm talking 0% so far.)

Postgres Prepared Transactions vs Prepared Statements

I'm fine tuning a Postgres database and I am about to set the maximun number of with prepared transactions with max_prepared_transactions.
The application uses a lot of prepared statements but not prepared transactions in the sense PREPARE name AS xyz.
My question is:
Is there a difference between prepared statements and prepared
transactions?
Does max_prepared_transactions affect prepared statements?
Yes. PREPARE TRANSACTION is used to initiate a two-phase transaction, which is generally used if you want to commit atomically to two databases at the same time.
Prepared statements relate to requesting the server to plan an SQL statement ahead of time, usually so that you can execute the statement multiple times without the overhead of planning it each time. See PREPARE.
The two are unrelated.
No, max_prepared_transactions does not affect prepared statements.

How to decide when use ADO.NET and when to connect to the database?

I'm learning some ADO.NET. I noticed quite a few Database functionality can also be found in ADO.NET.
I'm kind of confused. Do I use ADO.NET to manage all the interactions or should I make call to the Database?
I don't know what should be done by ADO.NET and what should be done at the database level.
Thanks for helping.
If you mean what should be handled in SQL statements issued from ADO.NET, and what should be done in stored procedures stored at the database level, as much as possible in stored procedures, at least that's what I live by. In addition to eliminating the chance of SQL injection, stored procedures allow you to modify sql calls without having to recompile and deploy your code as well as they enable execution plan re-use by the query optimizer.

Database last updated?

I'm working with SQL 2000 and I need to determine which of these databases are actually being used.
Is there a SQL script I can used to tell me the last time a database was updated? Read? Etc?
I Googled it, but came up empty.
Edit: the following targets issue of finding, post-facto, the last access date. With regards to figuring out who is using which databases, this can definitively monitored with the right filters in the SQL profiler. Beware however that profiler traces can get quite big (and hence slow/hard to analyze) when the filters are not adequate.
Changes to the database schema, i.e. addition of table, columns, triggers and other such objects typically leaves "dated" tracks in the system tables/views (can provide more detail about that if need be).
However, and unless the data itself includes timestamps of sorts, there are typically very few sure-fire ways of knowing when data was changed, unless the recovery model involves keeping all such changes to the Log. In that case you need some tools to "decompile" the log data...
With regards to detecting "read" activity... A tough one. There may be some computer-forensic like tricks, but again, no easy solution I'm afraid (beyond the ability to see in server activity the very last query for all still active connections; obviously a very transient thing ;-) )
I typically run the profiler if I suspect the database is actually used. If there is no activity, then simply set it to read-only or offline.
You can use a transaction log reader to check when data in a database was last modified.
With SQL 2000, I do not know of a way to know when the data was read.
What you can do is to put a trigger on the login to the database and track when the login is successful and track associated variables to find out who / what application is using the DB.
If your database is fully logged, create a new transaction log backup, and check it's size. The log backup will have a fixed small lengh, when there were no changes made to the database since the previous transaction log backup has been made, and it will be larger in case there were changes.
This is not a very exact method, but it can be easily checked, and might work for you.