Spring Batch difference between pageSize and commit-interval - spring-batch

Whats the relationship/difference between Spring-Batch Reader 'pageSize' property and Writer 'commit-interval'.
I may be wrong but I see a pattern in my application that for every pageSize exceeded I get see one commit being made. Is this true.?
Thanks

The commit-interval defines how many items are processed within a single chunk. That number of items are read, processed, then written within the scope of a single transaction (skip/retry semantics not withstanding).
The page-size attribute on the paging ItemReader implementations (JdbcPagingItemReader for example) defines how many records are fetched per read of the underlying resource. So in the JDBC example, it's how many records are requested with a single hit to the DB.
While there is no direct correlation between the two attributes, it's typically considered a good idea to make them match, however they independently provide two knobs you can turn to modify the performance of your application.
With regards to your direct question, if you have the page-size set to the same as the commit-interval, then yes, I'd expect a single commit for each page.

Commit interval determines how many items will be processed in a Chunk.
Page size determines how many items will be fetched every time it is needed.
Depending on the numbers you set, the behavior may be the one you describe. They are used for optimization.

Related

How to "join" a frequently updating stream with an irregularly updating stream in Apache Beam?

I have a stream of measurements keyed by an ID PCollection<KV<ID,Measurement>> and something like a changelog stream of additional information for that ID PCollection<KV<ID,SomeIDInfo>>. New data is added to the measurement stream quite regularly, say once per second for every ID. The stream with additional information on the other hand is only updated when a user performs manual re-configuration. We can't tell often this happens and, in particular, the update frequency may vary among IDs.
My goal is now to enrich each entry in the measurements stream by the additional information for its ID. That is, the output should be something like PCollection<KV<ID,Pair<Measurement,SomeIDInfo>>>. Or, in other words, I would like to do a left join of the measurements stream with the additional information stream.
I would expect this to be a quite common use case. Coming from Kafka Streams, this can be quite easily implemented with a KStream-KTable-Join. With Beam, however, all my approaches so far seem not to work. I already thought about the following ideas.
Idea 1: CoGroupByKey with fixed time windows
Applying a window to the measurements stream would not be an issue. However, as the additional information stream is updating irregularly and also significantly less frequently than the measurements stream, there is no reasonable common window size such that there is at least one updated information for each ID.
Idea 2: CoGroupByKey with global window and as non-default trigger
Refining the previous idea, I thought about using a processing-time trigger, which fires e.g. every 5 seconds. The issue with this idea is that I need to use accumulatingFiredPanes() for the additional information as there might be no new data for a key between two firings, but I have to use discardingFiredPanes() for the measurements stream as otherwise my panes would quickly become too large. This simply does not work. When I configure my pipeline that way, also the additional information stream discards changes. Setting both trigger to accumulating it works, but, as I said, this is not scalable.
Idea 3: Side inputs
Another idea would be to use side inputs, but also this solution is not really scalable - at least if I don't miss something. With side inputs, I would create a PCollectionView from the additional information stream, which is a map of IDs to the (latest) additional information. The "join" can than be done in a DoFn with a side input of that view. However, the view seems to be shared by all instances that perform the side input. (It's a bit hard to find any information regarding this.) We would like to not make any assumptions regarding the amount of IDs and the size of additional info. Thus, using a side input seems also not to work here.
The side input option you discuss is currently the best option, although you are correct about the scalability concern due to the side input being broadcast to all workers.
Alternatively, you can store the infrequently-updated side in an external key-value store and just do lookups from a DoFn. If you go this route, it's generally useful to do a GroupByKey first on the main input with ID as a key, which lets you cache the lookups with a good cache-hit ratio.

Keeping duplicated DynamoDB records synchronized

I am currently trying to model the data for our application. The data consists of identities and groups. One group can have multiple identities and one identity can be in multiple groups. (a typical many-to-many relationship).
So I have used the Adjacency List Design Pattern to structure my data as recommended by AWS:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/bp-adjacency-graphs.html
I keep all the info about identities duplicated inside the groups and reading the data works just fine - a normal query for the details and a query against the index to get the relations of my objects.
How can I ensure that all duplicated records have the same value?
Every time the group changes, I am updating all the duplicated group records in the database.
I am okay with updating multiple records at once as changes will happen rarely but I want to avoid inconsistent data.
All the tutorials and guides always just talk about reading and accessing data not about updating the data.
I know that there is a TransactWriteItem-Reuquest but it is limited to 25 items maximum. So is there another way/pattern to guarantee that all my identity records are updated when e.g. the name changes.
You have to decide for yourself how consistent is consistent enough in your application.
The CAP theorem is alive and well and it says that to get availability and partition tolerance we have to sacrifice consistency.
Since updates happen infrequently, how does your application fail if it sees inconsistent records? If you can't use the transactional API because of the 25 item limit, maybe you could roll your own "lock-out" using an attribute you would set on items that must all be updated together:
first, you identify all items that need to be updated and set the "lock_out" attribute on them (this can be a timestamp indicating when the lock_out expires)
in your application, you can add business logic to treat items with the "lock_out" in a way that makes sense (maybe show them as being updated, or not show them at all etc.)
update the items
after the update is complete, clear the "lock-out" attribute

Kafka Topics--should I have more or fewer of them?

We are new to Kafka, so I am looking for some high level guidance. We have data for a single entity (we can call it an "Order") that is essentially a number of different entities (we can call one a "Widget" and one a "Gizmo," but there are about 20 different entity types).
Obviously, there is benefit to thinking of Orders as a single topic because all the parts are related to one order. But design wise, does it make more sense for these to be separate topics (Orders, Widgets, Gizmos, etc.)?
There is no direct correlation between the Widgets and Gizmos--the benefit of keeping them together would be things like order of processing, etc. And suggestions or good resources to read would be very helpful. Thanks!
I would recommend initially recording the event as a single atomic message, and not splitting it up into several messages in several topics. It’s best to record events exactly as you receive them, in a form that is as raw as possible. You can always split up the compound event later, using a stream processor—but it’s much harder to reconstruct the original event if you split it up prematurely. Even better, you can give the initial event a unique ID (e.g. a UUID); that way later on when you split the original event into one event for each entity involved, you can carry that ID forward, making the provenance of each event traceable.

How to prevent lost updates on the views in a distributed CQRS/ES system?

I have a CQRS/ES application where some of the views are populated by events from multiple aggregate roots.
I have a CashRegisterActivated event on the CashRegister aggregate root and a SaleCompleted event on the Sale aggregate root. Both events are used to populate the CashRegisterView. The CashRegisterActivated event creates the CashRegisterView or sets it active in case it already exists. The SaleCompleted event sets the last sale sequence number and updates the cash in the drawer.
When two of these events arrive within milliseconds, the first update is overwritten by the last one. So that's a lost update.
I already have a few possible solutions in mind, but they all have their drawbacks:
Marshal all event processing for a view or for one record of a view on the same thread. This works fine on a single node, but once you scale out, things start to get complex. You need to ensure all events for a view are delivered to the same node. And you need to migrate to another node when it goes down. This requires some smart load balancer which is aware of the events and the views.
Lock the record before updating to make sure no other threads or nodes modify it in the meantime. This will probably work fine, but it means giving up on a lock-free system. Threads will set there, waiting for a lock to be freed. Locking also means increased latency when I scale out the data store (if I'm not mistaken).
For the record: I'm using Java with Apache Camel, RabbitMQ to deliver the events and MariaDB for the view data store.
I have a CQRS/ES application where some of the views in the read model are populated by events from multiple aggregate roots.
That may be a mistake.
Driving a process off of an isolated event. But composing a view normally requires a history, rather than a single event.
A more likely implementation would be to use the arrival of the events to mark the current view stale, and to use a single writer to update the view from the history of events produced by the aggregate(s) concerned.
And that requires a smart messaging solution. I thought "Smart endpoints and dumb pipes" would be a good practice for CQRS/ES systems.
It is. The endpoints just need to be smart enough to understand when they need histories, or when events are sufficient.
A view, after all, is just a snapshot. You take inputs (X.history, Y.history), produce a snapshot, write the snapshot into your view store (possibly with meta data describing the positions in the histories that were used), and you are done.
The events are just used to indicate to the writer that a previous snapshot is stale. You don't use the event to extend the history, you use the event to tell the writer that a history has changed.
You don't lose updates with multiple events, because the event itself, with all of its state, is captured in the history. It's the history that is used to build the event-sourced view.
Konrad Garus wrote
... handling events coming from a single source is easier, but more importantly because a DB-backed event store trivially guarantees ordering and has no issues with lost or duplicate messages.
A solution could be to detect the when this situation happens, and do a retry.
To do this:
Add to each table the aggregate version number which is kept up to date
On each update statement add the following the the where clause "aggr_version=n-1" (where n is the version of the event being processed)
When the result of the update statement is that no records where modified, it probably means that the event was processed out of order and a retry strategy can be performed
The problem is that this adds complexity and is hard to test. The performance bottleneck is very likely in the database, so a single process with a failover solution will probably be the easiest solution.
Although I see you ask how to handle these things at scale - I've seen people recommend using a single threaded approach - until such times as it actually becomes a problem - and then address it.
I would have a process manager per view model, draw the events you need from the store and write them single threaded.
I combined the answers of VoiceOfUnreason and StefRave into something I think might work. Populating a view from multiple aggregate roots feels wrong indeed. We have out of order detection with a retry queue. So an event on an aggregate root will only be processed when the last completely processed event is version n-1.
So when I create new aggregate roots for the views that would be populated by multiple aggregate roots (say aggregate views), all updates for the view will be synchronised without row locking or thread synchronisation. We have conflict detection with a retry mechanism on the aggregate roots as well, that will take care of concurrency on the command side. So if I just construct these aggregate roots from the events I'm currently using to populate the aggregate views, I will have solved the lost update problem.
Thoughts on this solution?

How to fetch the continuous list with PostgreSQL in web

I am making an API over HTTP that fetches many rows from PostgreSQL with pagination. In ordinary cases, I usually implement such pagination through naive OFFET/LIMIT clause. However, there are some special requirements in this case:
A lot of rows there are so that I believe users cannot reach the end (imagine Twitter timeline).
Pages does not have to be randomly accessible but only sequentially.
API would return a URL which contains a cursor token that directs to the page of continuous chunks.
Cursor tokens have not to exist permanently but for some time.
Its ordering has frequent fluctuating (like Reddit rankings), however continuous cursors should keep their consistent ordering.
How can I achieve the mission? I am ready to change my whole database schema for it!
Assuming it's only the ordering of the results that fluctuates and not the data in the rows, Fredrik's answer makes sense. However, I'd suggest the following additions:
store the id list in a postgresql table using the array type rather than in memory. Doing it in memory, unless you carefully use something like redis with auto expiry and memory limits, is setting yourself up for a DOS memory consumption attack. I imagine it would look something like this:
create table foo_paging_cursor (
cursor_token ..., -- probably a uuid is best or timestamp (see below)
result_ids integer[], -- or text[] if you have non-integer ids
expiry_time TIMESTAMP
);
You need to decide if the cursor_token and result_ids can be shared between users to reduce your storage needs and the time needed to run the initial query per user. If they can be shared, chose a cache window, say 1 or 5 minute(s), and then upon a new request create the cache_token for that time period and then check to see if the results ids have already been calculated for that token. If not, add a new row for that token. You should probably add a lock around the check/insert code to handle concurrent requests for a new token.
Have a scheduled background job that purges old tokens/results and make sure your client code can handle any errors related to expired/invalid tokens.
Don't even consider using real db cursors for this.
Keeping the result ids in Redis lists is another way to handle this (see the LRANGE command), but be careful with expiry and memory usage if you go down that path. Your Redis key would be the cursor_token and the ids would be the members of the list.
I know absolutely nothing about PostgreSQL, but I'm a pretty decent SQL Server developer, so I'd like to take a shot at this anyway :)
How many rows/pages do you expect a user would maximally browse through per session? For instance, if you expect a user to page through a maximum of 10 pages for each session [each page containing 50 rows], you could make take that max, and setup the webservice so that when the user requests the first page, you cache 10*50 rows (or just the Id:s for the rows, depends on how much memory/simultaneous users you got).
This would certainly help speed up your webservice, in more ways than one. And it's quite easy to implement to. So:
When a user requests data from page #1. Run a query (complete with order by, join checks, etc), store all the id:s into an array (but a maximum of 500 ids). Return datarows that corresponds to id:s in the array at positions 0-9.
When the user requests page #2-10. Return datarows that corresponds to id:s in the array at posisions (page-1)*50 - (page)*50-1.
You could also bump up the numbers, an array of 500 int:s would only occupy 2K of memory, but it also depends on how fast you want your initial query/response.
I've used a similar technique on a live website, and when the user continued past page 10, I just switched to queries. I guess another solution would be to continue to expand/fill the array. (Running the query again, but excluding already included id:s).
Anyway, hope this helps!