I am using the h2 database to store data.
Each record has to be unique in the database (unique in the sense that the combination of timestamp, name, message,.. doesn't appear twice in the table). Therefore one column in the table is the hash of the data in the record. To speed up searching if the record already exists I created an index on the hash column. Indeed searching for a record with given hash is very fast.
But here is the problem: While in the beginning insertion of 10k records is fast enough (takes about a second), it gets awefully slow when having already one million records in the database (takes a minute). This probably because the new hashes need to be integrated into the existing index b-tree.
Is there any way to speed this up or is there a better way to ensure uniqueness of data records in the table?
Edit: To be more concrete:
Let's say my records are transactions which have the following fields:
time stamp, type, sender recipient, amount, message
A transaction should only appear once in the table so before inserting a new transaction I have to check if the transaction is already in the table. Since the sha 256 hash of all fields is unique my idea was to add a column 'hash' to the table where the hash of the fields is put in. Before inserting a new record I calculate the hash of the fields and query the table for the hash.
Index has its own over head. If you have a table where you will be having lots of insertions, I would suggest to avoid indexing on it as it has over-head of hash.
May I know what do you mean by --> one column in the table is the hash of the data in the record??
You can create a unique key constraint (here it will be the composite key of all those 3 mentioned columns), Let me know the requirements, may be we can give you a better solution of doing it in a simpler way :)
Danyal
Man, this is probably not a good way to query all the records, check them for duplicates and then insert the new row :). As soon as you move ahead, the overhead will increase as the number of the records increase.
Create a unique key constraint (check http://www.h2database.com/html/grammar.html ) on the combination of these field, you don't need to compute the hash, database will handle the hash thing. Just try to add the duplicate record, you will get the exception, catch the exception and show the error message as duplicate insertion..
Once you create the unique index, it won't allow you to insert any duplicate records. It is pretty secure and safe.
Indexing randomly distributed data is bad for performance. Once there are more entries in the index than fit in the cache, then updating the index will get very slow, specially when using a hard disk. This is because seeks on a hard disk are very slow. This, in combination with the random distribution of the data, will lead to very bad performance. With solid state disks it's a bit better, because random access reads are faster there.
Related
I am needing to partially index a column when a single condition is met for a column (ex. some_column = 'some_value'). I am worried about the customer impact of triggering this new partial index and locking the table and am wondering how long that will take. In the databases where I am worried about the impact, there will be no records that meet the condition. Does this mean the overhead and time the table is locked would be drastically less than if there were records to index at the time of the index creation? The column in the where condition is indexed.
It will not use the index on the column in the WHERE to speed up creation of the empty partial index. It will still scan the full table, at however long it takes to do that. Not needing to sort any tuples or generate any index leaf blocks will speed it up, but probably not 'drastically'.
If you are afraid it will hold the lock too long, you can create the index CONCURRENTLY. This will take longer to do, but will hold a weaker lock while it does it. It will still need a strong lock at the beginning and at the end, but it will only be held momentarily.
I do have multiple tables (MySQL) and I want to have a single index for them.
Each table has the primary key of int autoincrement type.
The structure of collected data is the same for each table (so no conflict), but as the IDs collide so it seems that I have to query each index separately (unless you can give me a hint of how to avoid ID collision)
Question is: If I query each index separately does it means that the weight of returned results are comparable between indexes?
unless you can give me a hint of how to avoid ID collision
See for example
http://sphinxsearch.com/forum/view.html?id=13078
You can just arrange for the ids to be offset differently. The 'sphinx document id' doesnt have to match the real primary key, but having a simple mapping makes the application simpler.
You have a choice between one-index, one-source (using a single sql query to union all the tables together. one-index, many-source. (a source per table, all making one index) or many-indexes (one index per table, each with own source). Which ever way will give the same query results.
If I query each index separately does it means that the weight of returned results are comparable between indexes?
Pretty much. The difference should be negiblibe that doesnt matter whic way round you do it.
I have a table with 100+ values corresponding to each row, so I'm exploring different ways to store them.
Without any indexes, would I lose anything if I store these 100 values in an integer[] column in postgresql? As compared to storing them in separate columns.
Plus, since we can add indexes to array elemnets,
CREATE INDEX test_index on test ((foo[1]));
Would there be a performance difference queries using such an index as compared to regular index on a column?
As far as I've read, this performance difference would come into picture in arrays with variable length elements; but I'm not sure about fixed length ones.
Don't go for the lazy way.
If you need to store 100 and more values as array, it is ok, if it has sense has array for your application, your data.
If you need to query for a specific element of the array, then this design is not good, regardless of performances, and you must use columns. This will help you in the moment you must delete a "column" in the middle or redesign it.
Anyway, as wrote by Frank in comments, if values are all same type, consider to model them to another table (if also the meaning is the same).
I have a big collection of data I want to use for user search later.
Currently I have 200 millions resources (~50GB). For each, I have latitude+longitude. The goal is to create spatial index to be able to do spatial queries on it.
So for that, the plan is to use PostgreSQL + PostGIS.
My data are on CSV file. I tried to use custom function to not insert duplicates, but after days of processing I gave up. I found a way to load it fast in the database: with COPY it takes less than 2 hours.
Then, I need to convert latitude+longitude on Geometry format. For that I just need to do:
ST_SetSRID(ST_MakePoint(longi::double precision,lat::double precision),4326))
After some checking, I saw that for 200 millions, I have 50 millions points. So, I think the best way is to have a table "TABLE_POINTS" that will store all the points, and a table "TABLE_RESOURCES" that will store resources with point_key.
So I need to fill "TABLE_POINTS" and "TABLE_RESOURCES" from temporary table "TABLE_TEMP" and not keeping duplicates.
For "POINTS" I did:
INSERT INTO TABLE_POINTS (point)
SELECT DISTINCT ST_SetSRID(ST_MakePoint(longi::double precision,lat::double precision),4326))
FROM TABLE_RESOURCES
I don't remember how much time it took, but I think it was matter of hours.
Then, to fill "RESOURCES", I tried:
INSERT INTO TABLE_RESOURCES (...,point_key)
SELECT DISTINCT ...,point_key
FROM TABLE_TEMP, TABLE_POINTS
WHERE ST_SetSRID(ST_MakePoint(longi::double precision,lat::double precision),4326) = point;
but again take days, and there is no way to see how far the query is ...
Also something important, the number of resources will continue to grow up, currently should be like 100K added by day, so storage should be optimized to keep fast access to data.
So if you have any idea for the loading or the optimization of the storage you are welcome.
Look into optimizing postgres first (ie google postgres unlogged, wal and fsync options), second do you really need points to be unique? Maybe just have one table with resources and points combined and not worry about duplicate points as it seems your duplicate lookup maybe whats slow.
For DISTINCT to work efficiently, you'll need a database index on those columns for which you want to eliminate duplicates (e.g. on the latitude/longitude columns, or even on the set of all columns).
So first insert all data into your temp table, then CREATE INDEX (this is usually faster that creating the index beforehand, as maintaining it during insertion is costly), and only afterwards do the INSERT INTO ... SELECT DISTINCT.
An EXPLAIN <your query> can tell you whether the SELECT DISTINCT now uses the index.
So I have a large table that I query (select only) quite frequently. The table is around 12,000 rows long. Since the advent of iOS, the time that it is taking to run these select queries has gone up 4-5x.
I was told that I need to add an index to my table. The query that I am using looks like this:
SELECT * FROM book_content WHERE book_id = ? AND chapter = ? ORDER BY verse ASC
How can I create an index for this table? Is it a command I just run once? What exactly is the index going to do? I didn't learn about these in school so they still seem like some sort of magic to me at this point, so I was hoping to get a little instruction.
Thanks!
You want an index on book_id and chapter. Without an index, a server would do a table scan and essentially load the entire table into memory to do its search. Do a quick search on the CREATE INDEX command for the RDBMS that you are using. You create the index once and every time you do an INSERT or DELETE or UPDATE, the server will update the index automatically. An index can be UNIQUE and it can be on multiple fields (in your case, book_id and chapter). If you make it UNIQUE, the database will not allow you to insert a second row with the same key (in this case, book_id and chapter). On most servers, having one index on two fields is different from having two individual indexes on single fields each.
A Mysql example would be:
CREATE INDEX id_chapter_idx ON book_content (book_id,chapter);
If you want only one record for each book_id, chapter combination, use this command:
CREATE UNIQUE INDEX id_chapter_idx ON book_content (book_id,chapter);
A PRIMARY INDEX is a special index that is UNIQUE and NOT NULL. Each table can only have one primary index. In fact, each table should have one primary index to ensure table integrity, especially during joins.
You don't have to think of indexes as "magic".
An index on an SQL table is much like the index in a printed book - it lets you find what you're looking for without reading the entire book cover-to-cover.
For example, say you have a cookbook, and you're looking for recipes that involve chicken. The index in the back of the book might say something like:
chicken: 30,34,72,84
letting you know that you will find chicken recipes on those 4 pages. It's much faster to find this information in the index than by reading through the whole book, because the index is shorter, and (more importantly) it's in alphabetical order, so you can quickly find the right place in the index.
So, in general you want to create indexes on columns that you will regularly need to query (book_id and chapter, in your example).
When you declare a column as primary key automatically generates an index on that column. In your case for using more often select an index is ideal, because they improve time of selection queries and degrade the time of insertion. So you can create the indexes you think you need without worrying about the performance
Indexes are a very sensitive subject. If you consider using them, you need to be very careful how many you make. The primary key, or id, of each table should have a clustered index. All the rest, it depends on how you plan to use them. I'm very fuzzy in the subject of indexes, and have actually never worked with them, but from a seminar I just watched actually yesterday, you don't want too many indexes - because they can actually slow things down when you don't need to use them.
Let's say you put an index on 5 out of 8 fields on a table. Each index is designated for a particular query somewhere in your software. Well, when 1 query is run, it uses that 1 index, and doesn't need the other 4. So that's unneeded weight on this 1 query. If you need an index, be sure that this is an index which could be useful in many places, not just 1 place.