Retry failed writing operations without delaying other steps in Spring Batch application - spring-batch

I am maintaining a legacy application written using Spring Batch and need to tweak it to never lose data.
I have to read from various webservice (one for each step) and then write to a remote database. Things goes bad when connection with the DB drops because all itens read from webservice are discarded (can't read the same item twice), and the data is lost because can not be written.
I need to setup Spring Batch to keep already read data on one step to retry the writing operation next time the step runs. The same step can not read more data until the write operation is successfully concluded.
When not being able to write, the step should keep the read data and pass execution to the next step, after a while, when it's time to the failed step to run again, it should not read another item, retrying the failed writing operation instead.
The batch application should runs in an infinite loop and each step should gather data from one different source. Failed writing operations should be momentarily skipped (keeping the read data) to not delay others steps but should resume from the write operation next time they are called.
I am researching in various web sources aside from official docs, but Spring Batch hasn't the most intuitive docs I have come across.
Can this be achieved? If yes, how?

You can write the data you need to persist in case the job fails to the Batch Step's ExecutionContext. You can restart the job again with this data:
Step executions are represented by objects of the StepExecution class.
Each execution contains a reference to its corresponding step and
JobExecution, and transaction related data such as commit and rollback
count and start and end times. Additionally, each step execution will
contain an ExecutionContext, which contains any data a developer needs
persisted across batch runs, such as statistics or state information
needed to restart
More from: http://static.springsource.org/spring-batch/reference/html/domain.html#domainStepExecution

I do not know if this will be ok with you, but here are my thoughts on your configuration.
Since you have two remote sources that are open to failure, let us partition the overall system with two jobs (not two steps)
JOB A
Step 1: Tasklet
Check a shared folder for files. If files exist, do not proceed to the next step. Will be more understandable when writing about JOB B
Step 2: Webservice to files
Read from your web service and write results to flatfiles in the shared folder. Since you would be using flatfiles for the output, you will solve your "all items read from webservice are discarded and the data is lost because can not be written."
Use Quartz or equivalent for the scheduling of this job.
JOB B
Poll the shared folder for generated files and create a joblauncher with the file (file.getWhere as a jobparameter). Spring integration project may help in this polling.
Step 1:
Read from the file, write them to remote db and move/delete file if writing to db is successful.
No scheduling will be needed since job launching originates from polled in files.
Sample Execution
Time 0: No file in the shared folder
Time 1: Read from web service and write to shared folder
Time 2: Job B file polling occurs, tries to write to db.
If successfull, the system continues to execute.
If not, when Job A tries to execute on its scheduled time, it will skip reading from web service since files still exist in the shared folder. It will skip until Job B consumes the files.
I did not want to go into implementation specifics but Spring Batch can handle all of these situations. Hope that this helps.

Related

Spring batch restart resumes the old execution id but processes all records instead of just the unprocessed records

I am currently using ListItemReader and trying to restart my spring batch. However, the step execution context read count and write count is set to 0. In the database i can see the read, write and commit count to be correctly set for the previous job run that failed. However, on restarting everything is being set to 0. Please help me regarding this.
ListItemReader is not an ItemStream. It does not save any restart data in the execution context. That's why it will always re-read items from the in-memory list on each execution.

Scheduler Processing using Spring batch

we have a requirement to process millions of records using spring batch . We have planned to use a Spring Batch to do this by reading the db using JdbcPagingItemReaderBuilder and process in chunks and write it to Kaafka Queue. The active consumers of the queue will process the chunks of data and update the db
The consumer task is to iterate every item from the chunk and invoke the external api's.
In case the external system is down or not responding with success response , there should be retries of atleast 3 times and considering that each task in the chunk has to do this, what would be the ideal approach?
Another use case to consider, what happens when the job is processing and the system goes down and say that the job has already processed 10000 record and the remaining records are yet to be processed . After the restart how to make sure the execution doesnt restart the entire process from beginning and to resume from the point of failure.
Spring Batch creates the following tables. You can use them to check the status of your job and customize your scheduler to behave in a way you see fit.
I'd use the step execution Id in BATCH_STEP_EXCECUTION to validate the status that's set and then retry based off on that status, Or something similar to that sense.
BATCH_JOB_EXECUTION
BATCH_JOB_EXECUTION_CONTEXT
BATCH_JOB_EXECUTION_PARAMS
BATCH_JOB_INSTANCE
BATCH_STEP_EXECUTION

JdbcPagingItemReader with SELECT FOR UDATE and SKIP LOCKED

I have a multi instance application and each instance is multi threaded.
To make each thread only process rows not already fetched by another thread, I'm thinking of using pessimistic locks combined with skip locked.
My database is PostgreSQL11 and I use Spring batch.
For the spring batch part I use a classic chunk step (reader, processor, writer). The reader is a jdbcPagingItemReader.
However, I don't see how to use the pessimist lock (SELECT FOR UPDATE) and SKIP LOCKED with the jdbcPaginItemReader. And I can't find a tutorial on the net explaining simply how this is done.
Any help would be welcome.
Thank you
I have approached similar problem with a different pattern.
Please refer to
https://docs.spring.io/spring-batch/docs/current/reference/html/scalability.html#remoteChunking
Here you need to break job in two parts:
Master
Master picks records to be processed from DB and sent a chunk as message to queue task-queue. Then wait for acknowledgement on separate queue ack-queue once it get all acknowledgements it move to next step.
Slave
Slave receives the message and process it.
send acknowledgement to ack-queue.

can spring batch be used as job framework for non batch jobs (regular job)

Is it possible to use spring batch as a regular job framework?
I want to create a device service (microservice) that has the responsibility
to get events and trigger jobs on devices. The devices are remote so it will take time for the job to be complete, but it is not a batch job (not periodically running or partitioning large data set).
I am wondering whether spring batch can still be used a job framework, or if it is only for batch processing. If the answer is no, what jobs framework (besides writing your own) are famous?
Job Description:
I need to execute against a specific device a job that will contain several steps. Each step will communicate with a device and wait for a device to confirm it executed the former command given to it.
I need retry, recovery and scheduling features (thought of combining spring batch with quartz)
Regarding read-process-write, I am basically getting a command request regarding a device, I do a little DB reads and then start long waiting periods that all need to pass in order for the job/task to be successful.
Also, I can choose (justify) relevant IMDG/DB. Concurrency is outside the scope (will be outside the job mechanism). An alternative that came to mind was akka actors. (job for a device will create children actors as steps)
As far as I know - not periodically running or partitioning large data set are not primary requirements for usage of Spring Batch.
Spring Batch is basically a read - process - write framework where reading & processing happens item by item and writing happens in chunks ( for chunk oriented processing ) .
So you can use Spring Batch if your job logic fits into - read - process - write paradigm and rest of the things seem secondary to me.
Also, with Spring Batch , you should also evaluate the part about Job Repository . Spring Batch needs a database ( either in memory or on disk ) to store job meta data and its not optional.
I think, you should put more explanation as why you need a Job Framework and what kind of logic you are running that you are calling it a Job so I will revise my answer accordingly.

How to design spring batch to avoid long queue of request and restart failed job

I am writing a project that will be generating reports. It would read all requests from a database by making a rest call, based on the type of request it will make a rest call to an endpoint, after getting the response it will save the response in an object and save it back to the database by making a call to an endpoint.
I am using spring-batch to handle the batch work. So far what I came up with is a single job (reader, processor, writer) that will do the whole things. I am not sure if this is the correct design considering
I do not want to queue up requests if some request is taking a long time to get a response back. [not sure yet]
I do not want to hold up saving response until all the responses are received. [using commit-internal will help]
If the job crashes for some reason, how can I restart the job [maybe using batch-admin will help but what are my other options]
By using chunk oriented processing Reader, Processor and Writer get executed in order until Reader has nothing to return.
If you can read one item at a time, process it and send it back to the endpoint that handles the persistence this approach is handy.
If you must read ALL the information at once the reader will get a big collection with all items and pass it to processor. The processor will process all the items and send the result to the writer. You cannot send just a few to the writer so you would have to do the persistence directly from processor and that would be against the design.
So, as I understand this, you have two options:
Design a reader that can read one item at a time. Use the chunk oriented processing that you already started to read one item, process it and send it back for persistence. Have a look at how other readers are implemented (like JdbcCursorItemReader).
You create a tasklet that reads the whole collection of items process it and sends them back for processing. You can break this in different tasklets.
commit-interval only controls after how many items transaction is commited. So it will not help you as all the processing and persistence is done by calling rest services.
I have figured out a design and I think it will work fine.
As for the questions that I asked, following are the answers:
Using asynchronous processors will help avoiding any queue.
http://docs.spring.io/spring-batch/trunk/reference/html/springBatchIntegration.html#asynchronous-processors
using commit-internal will solve it
This thread has the answer - Spring batch :Restart a job and then start next job automatically