Cloud storage rewrite not resetting the componentsCount property - google-cloud-storage

I'm composing several files into one and then i do perform a "rewrite" operation to reset componentsCount, so they won't block further compositions (to avoid 1024 components problem, actually). But, the resulting rewritten object's componentCount property increases as if it was just a "rename" request.
It is stated in documentation (https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/json_api/v1/objects/rewrite):
When you rewrite a composite object where the source and destination
are different locations and/or storage classes, the result will be a
composite object containing a single component (and, as always with
composite objects, it will have only a crc32c checksum, not an MD5).
It is not clear to me what do they mean by "different locations" -- different object names and/or different buckets?
Is there a way to reset this count w/o downloading and uploading resulting composite?

Locations refers to geographically where the source and destination bucket are (us-east1, asia, etc.) -- see https://cloud.google.com/about/locations
If your rewrite request is between buckets in different locations and/or storage classes, the operation does byte copying and (in the case of composite objects) will result in a new object with component count 1. Otherwise the operation will complete without byte copying and in that case (in the case of composite objects) will not change the component count.

It's no longer necessary to reset the component count using rewrite or download/upload because there's no longer a restriction on the component count. Composing > 1024 parts is allowed.
https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/composite-objects

Related

index fragmentation in posgresql

I can't figure out what exactly represent fragmentation for a postgres index. in the source code of pgstattuple I found this comment but it's not particularly clear for me.
/*
* If the next leaf is on an earlier block, it means a
* fragmentation.
*/
Btree leaf pages form a logical chain (a doubly linked list) and if you follow that chain in the forward direction you encounter the key values in sorted order. They also have a "physical" order, their block number within the file. That extension considers it fragmentation if the next page following the linked list is to a "physically" earlier page in the file.
You could quibble with this for any number of reasons, but this is the definition that that extension adopted. For example if the logically next page by the linked list is 100 pages forward, that is just as much fragmented as if it is one page backwards. But if it does skip forward a bunch then someone else must be pointing backwards to pick them up (unless they are unused) so would get counted when that "someone else" is encountered. Also, the "physical" order of pages in the file is really just the "logical" order of another layer of abstraction (the file system) and different file systems handle it differently.

Upload data to Google Cloud Storage with any offset

I want to upload data to Google Cloud Storage object with any random offset (not chunk by chunk). Desirable to have unknow size for target object.
Is any way to do it with JSON API ?
You can't do this directly. Uploads to a single object must be done chunk by chunk.
However, multiple objects may be composed into a single, final object. In other words, you could upload all of your pieces as separate objects and then call "compose" on them to produce the correct final object. There are some limits to this approach, though. There's a maximum number of original elements that can be composed together (it's 1024). You'll also need to take care of deleting the original pieces once you're done composing, or you'll be storing twice the data.

How do I model a queue on top of a key-value store efficiently?

Supposed I have a key-value database, and I need to build a queue on top of it. How could I achieve this without getting a bad performance?
One idea might be to store the queue inside an array, and simply store the array using a fixed key. This is a quite simple implementation, but is very slow, as for every read or write access the complete array must be loaded / saved.
I could also implement a linked list, with random keys, and there is one fixed key which acts as starting point to element 1. Depending on if I prefer a fast read or a fast write access, I could let point the fixed element to the first or the last entry in the queue (so I have to travel it forward / backward).
Or, to proceed with that - I could also have two fixed pointers: One for the first, on for the last item.
Any other suggestions on how to do this effectively?
Initially, key-value structure is extremely similar to the original memory storage where the physical address in computer memory plays as the key. So any type of data structure could be modeled upon key-value storage surely, including linked list.
Originally, a linked list is a list of nodes including the index information of previous node or following node. Then the node it self should also be viewed as a sub key-value structure. With additional prefix to the key, the information in the node could be separately stored in a flat table of key-value pairs.
To proceed with that, special suffix to the key could also make it possible to get rid of redundant pointer information. This pretend list might look something like this:
pilot-last-index: 5
pilot-0: Rei Ayanami
pilot-1: Shinji Ikari
pilot-2: Soryu Asuka Langley
pilot-3: Touji Suzuhara
pilot-5: Makinami Mari
The corresponding algrithm is also imaginable, I think. If you could have a daemon thread for manipulation these keys, pilot-5 could be renamed as pilot-4 in the above example. Even though, it is not allowed to have additional thread in some special situation, the result of the queue it self is not affected. Just some overhead would exist for the break point in sequence.
However which of the two above should be applied is the problem of balance between the cost of storage space or the overhead of CPU time.
The thread safe is exactly a problem however an ancient problem. Just like the class implementing the interface of ConcurrentMap in JDK, Atomic operation on key-value data is also provided perfectly. There are similar methods featured in some key-value middleware, like memcached, as well, which could make you update key or value separately and thread safely. However these implementation is the algrithm problem rather than the key-value structure it self.
I think it depends on the kind of queue you want to implement, and no solution will be perfect because a key-value store is not the right data structure for this kind of task. There will be always some kind of hack involved.
For a simple first in first out queue you could use a few kev-value stores like the folliwing:
{
oldestIndex:5,
newestIndex:10
}
In this example there would be 6 items in the Queue (5,6,7,8,9,10). Item 0 to 4 are already done whereas there is no Item 11 or so for now. The producer worker would increment newestIndex and save his item under the key 11. The consumer takes the item under the key 5 and increments oldestIndex.
Note that this approach can lead to problems if you have multiple consumer/producers and if the queue is never empty so you cant reset the index.
But the multithreading problem is also true for linked lists etc.

How should I store my large MATLAB data files during analysis?

I am having issues with 'data overload' while processing point cloud data in MATLAB. This is what I am currently doing:
I begin with my raw data files, each in the order of ~30Mb each.
I then do initial processing on them to extract n individual objects and remove outlying points, which are all combined into a 1 x n structure, testset, saved into testset.mat (~100Mb).
So far so good. Now things become complicated:
For each point in each object in testset, I will compute one of a number of features, which ends up being a matrix of some size (for each point). The size of the matrix, and some other properties of the computation, are parameters of the calculations. I save these computed features in a 1 x n cell array, each cell of which contains an array of the matrices for each point.
I then save this cell array in a .mat file, where the name specified the parameters, the name of the test data used and the types of features extracted. For example:
testset_feature_type_A_5x5_0.2x0.2_alpha_3_beta_4.mat
Now for each of these files, I then do some further processing (using a classification algorithm). Again there are more parameters to set.
So now I am in a tricky situation, where each final piece of the initial data has come through some path, but the path taken (and the parameters set along that path) are not intrinsically held with the data itself.
So my question is:
Is there a better way to do this? Can anyone who has experience in working with large datasets in MATLAB suggest a way to store the data and the parameter settings more efficiently, and more integrally?
Ideally, I would be able to look up a certain piece of data without having to use regex on the file strings—but there is also an incentive to keep individually processed files separate to save system memory when loading them in (and to help prevent corruption).
The time taken for each calculation (some ~2 hours) prohibits computing data 'on the fly'.
For a similar problem, I have created a class structure that does the following:
Each object is linked to a raw data file
For each processing step, there is a property
The set method of the properties saves the data to file (in a directory with the same name as
the raw data file), stores the file name, and updates a "status" property to indicate that this step is done.
The get method of the properties loads the data if the file name has been stored and the status indicates "done".
Finally, the objects can be saved/loaded, so that I can do some processing now, save the object, later load it and I immediately know how far along the particular data set is in the processing pipeline.
Thus, the only data in memory is the data that is currently being worked on, and you can easily know which data set is at which processing stage. Furthermore, if you set up your methods to accept arrays of objects, you can do very convenient batch processing.
I'm not completely sure if this is what you need, but the save command allows you to store multiple variables inside a single .mat file. If your parameter settings are, for example, stored in an array, then you can save this together with the data set in a single .mat file. Upon loading the file, both the dataset and the array with parameters are restored.
Or do you want to be able to load the parameters without loading the file? Then I would personally opt for the cheap solution of having a second set of files with just the parameters (but similar filenames).

How a class that wraps and provides access to a single file should be designed?

MyClass is all about providing access to a single file. It must CheckHeader(), ReadSomeData(), UpdateHeader(WithInfo), etc.
But since the file that this class represents is very complex, it requires special design considerations.
That file contains a potentially huge folder-like tree structure with various node types and is block/cell based to handle fragmentation better. Size is usually smaller than 20 MB. It is not of my design.
How would you design such a class?
Read a ~20MB stream into memory?
Put a copy on temp dir and keep its path as property?
Keep a copy of big things on memory and expose them as read-only properties?
GetThings() from the file with exception-throwing code?
This class(es) will be used only by me at first, but if it ends good enough I might open-source it.
(This is a question on design, but platform is .NET and class is about offline registry access for XP)
It depends what you need to do with this data. If you only need to process it linearly one time, then it might be faster to just take the performance hit of a large file in memory.
If however you need to do various things with the file beyond a single, linear parsing, I would parse the data into a lightweight database such as SQLite and then operate on that. This way all of your file's structure is preserved and all subsequent operations on the file will be faster.
Registry access is quite complex. You are basically reading a large binary tree. The class design should rely heavily on the stored data structures. Only then you can choose an appropriate class design. To stay flexible you should model the primitives such as REG_SZ, REG_EXPAND_SZ, DWORD, SubKey, .... Don Syme has in his book Expert F# a nice section about binary parsing with binary combinators. The basic idea is that your objects know by themself how to deserialize from a binary representation. When you have a stream of bytes which is structured like this
<Header>
<Node1/>
<Node2>
<Directory1>
</Node2>
</Header>
you start with a BinaryReader to read the binary objects byte by byte. Since you know that the first thing must be the header you can pass it to the Header object
public class Header
{
static Header Deserialize(BinaryReader reader)
{
Header header = new Header();
int magic = reader.ReadByte();
if( magic == 0xf4 ) // we have a node entry
header.Insert(Node.Read( reader );
else if( magic == 0xf3 ) // directory entry
header.Insert(DirectoryEntry.Read(reader))
else
throw NotSupportedException("Invalid data");
return header;
}
}
To stay performant you can e.g. delay parsing the data up to a later time when specific properties of this or that instance are actually accessed.
Since the registry in Windows can get quite big it is not possible to read it completely into memory at once. You will need to chunk it. One solution that Windows applies is that the whole file is allocated in paged pool memory which can span several gigabytes but only the actually accessed parts are swapped out from disk into memory. That allows Windows to deal with a very large registry file in an efficient manner. You will need something similar for your reader as well. Lazy parsing is one aspect and the ability to jump around in the file without the need to read the data in between is cruical to stay performant.
More infos about paged pool and the registry can be found there:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2009/03/26/3211216.aspx
Your Api design will depend on how you read the data to stay efficient (e.g. use a memory mapped file and read from different mapped regions). With .NET 4 a Memory Mapped file implementation has arrived that is quite good now but wrappers around the OS APIs exist as well.
Yours,
Alois Kraus
To support delayed loading from a memory mapped file it would make sense not to read the byte array into the object and parse it later but go one step furhter and store only the offset and length of the memory chunk from the memory mapped file. Later when the object is actually accessed you can read and deserialize the data. This way you can traverse the whole file and build a tree of objects which contain only the offsets and the reference to the memory mapped file. That should save huge amounts of memory.