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.
Related
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.
I want to load many rows from a CSV file.
The files contain data like these "article_name,article_time,start_time,end_time"
There is a contraint on the table: for the same article name, i don't insert a new row if the new article_time falls in an existing range [start_time,end_time] for the same article.
ie: don't insert row y if exists [start_time_x,end_time_x] for which time_article_y inside range [start_time_x,end_time_x] , with article_name_y = article_name_x
I tried with psycopg by selecting the existing article names ad checking manually if there is an overlap --> too long
I tried again with psycopg, this time by setting a condition 'exclude using...' and tryig to insert with specifying "on conflict do nothing" (so that it does not fail) but still too long
I tried the same thing but this time trying to insert many values at each call of execute (psycopg): it got a little better (1M rows processed in almost 10minutes), but still not as fast as it needs to be for the amount of data I have (500M+)
I tried to parallelize by calling the same script many time, on different files but the timing didn't get any better, I guess because of the locks on the table each time we want to write something
Is there any way to create a lock only on rows containing the same article_name? (and not a lock on the whole table?)
Could you please help with any idea to make this parallellizable and/or more time efficient?
Lots of thanks folks
Your idea with the exclusion constraint and INSERT ... ON CONFLICT is good.
You could improve the speed as follows:
Do it all in a single transaction.
Like Vao Tsun suggested, maybe COPY the data into a staging table first and do it all with a single SQL statement.
Remove all indexes except the exclusion constraint from the table where you modify data and re-create them when you are done.
Speed up insertion by disabling autovacuum and raising max_wal_size (or checkpoint_segments on older PostgreSQL versions) while you load the data.
Redshift documentation identifies time-series tables as a best practice:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/c_best-practices-time-series-tables.html
However, it doesn't address any of the following issues:
how many tables within a union-all view is reasonable - hundreds? (unanswered)
any method of writing to the union-all view and having redshift direct those inserts to the correct underlying tables? (Answer: no)
most effective method of loading underlying tables? Perhaps using firehose to insert into a staging table then periodically inserting those rows into appropriate table within union-all view? (unanswered)
any way to enable redshift to eliminate some underlying partitions (tables) when querying the union-all view if their date range is outside of a query's criteria? (Answer: No)
can redshift support dropping old tables, adding new tables and rebuilding union-all view within a transaction? (unanswered)
My situation:
100 million rows added daily, which will grow to 500 million in 3 years
12 month retention desired
Estimated 99% of all queries will hit the most recent 1-7 days
Data is written to existing table via kinesis firehose to s3 which then triggers a copy to redshift table.
My proposed solution:
Create a year of daily tables with a union all view, along with a dist_key of sensor_id (100,000+ uniq values) and a sort_key of (timestamp, sensor_id).
Have firehose load into staging table
Create separate process that once an hour queries staging table to discover dates of data within table, then performs an insert into 'appropriate table' select * from where timestamp = table's timestamp.
This hourly writer can probably wrap a table rename, multiple insert-selects, and table recreate in a transaction to be invisible to firehose.
Once a month drop old tables, create next month of tables, and rebuild view.
This union-all view maintenance can probably be wrapped in a transaction to avoid impacts to users.
Once a night run the vacuum analyzer.
EDITS: added notes identifying which issues have been answered, and added some detail to the proposed solution.
Your proposed process sounds quite good! While I can't answer all your questions, here is some information:
Any method of writing to the union-all view and having redshift direct those inserts to the correct underlying tables?
Views are read-only. It is not possible to write to a view, nor is it possible to insert data while expecting Redshift to send it to an appropriate table (eg a specific table for the given day).
Any way to enable redshift to eliminate some underlying partitions (tables) when querying the union-all view if their date range is outside of a query's criteria?
Redshift will not exclude specific tables from the query, but it will avoid reading particular disk blocks through the use of Zone Maps. Each block of data written to disk is associated with a specific table and column. The block has a Zone Map, which indicates the minimum and maximum values of that field stored within the block.
If a query includes a WHERE clause, Redshift can skip blocks that do not contain relevant data. This is particularly powerful when used on the SORTKEY column, since similar ranges of data are grouped together.
Given that you are using a date as the SORTKEY, Redshift will read very few disk blocks if the query includes a WHERE clause based on that column. This is very similar to the idea of skipping tables, but it actually skips reading disk blocks.
Docs for Redshift say:
ALTER TABLE locks the table for reads and writes until the operation completes.
My question is:
Say I have a table with 500 million rows and I want to add a column. This sounds like a heavy operation that could lock the table for a long time - yes? Or is it actually a quick operation since Redshift is a columnar db? Or it depends if column is nullable / has default value?
I find that adding (and dropping) columns is a very fast operation even on tables with many billions of rows, regardless of whether there is a default value or it's just NULL.
As you suggest, I believe this is a feature of the it being a columnar database so the rest of the table is undisturbed. It simply creates empty (or nearly empty) column blocks for the new column on each node.
I added an integer column with a default to a table of around 65M rows in Redshift recently and it took about a second to process. This was on a dw2.large (SSD type) single node cluster.
Just remember you can only add a column to the end (right) of the table, you have to use temporary tables etc if you want to insert a column somewhere in the middle.
Personally I have seen rebuilding the table works best.
I do it in following ways
Create a new table N_OLD_TABLE table
Define the datatype/compression encoding in the new table
Insert data into N_OLD(old_columns) select(old_columns) from old_table Rename OLD_Table to OLD_TABLE_BKP
Rename N_OLD_TABLE to OLD_TABLE
This is a much faster process. Doesn't block any table and you always have a backup of old table incase anything goes wrong
My current query looks something like this:
SELECT SUBSTR(name,1,1), COUNT(*) FROM files GROUP BY SUBSTR(name,1,1)
But it's taking a pretty long time just to do counts on a table that's already indexed by the name column. I saw from this question that some engines might not use indexes correctly for the SUBSTR function, and in fact, sqlite will not use indexes for SUBSTR(string,1,1).
Is there any other approach that would utilize the index and net me some faster queries?
One strategy that is consistent with your access pattern is to add a new indexed column "first_letter" to your table. Use a trigger on to set the value on insert and update. Then your query is a simple group by first_letter.
Another strategy is to create a shadow table which contains an aggregation of the mother table. This isn't easy because it is your job as developer to keep the shadow table consistent with the mother table. Every delete, update or insert in table files needs to be accompanied by a change in the shadow table.
Databases like Oracle have support for materialized views to achieve this automatically but sqlite doesn't.