MongoDB Aggregation as slow as MapReduce? - mongodb

I'm just starting out with mongo db and trying to make some simple things. I filled up my database with a collections of data containing the "item" property. I wanted to try to count how much time every item is in the collection
example of a document:
{ "_id" : ObjectId("50dadc38bbd7591082d920f0"), "item" : "Pons", "lines" : 37 }
So I designed these two functions for doing MapReduce (written in python using pymongo)
all_map = Code("function () {"
" emit(this.item, 1);"
"}")
all_reduce = Code("function (key, values) {"
" var sum = 0;"
" values.forEach(function(value){"
" sum += value;"
" });"
" return sum;"
"}")
This worked like a charm, so I began filling the collection. At around 30.000 documents, the mapreduce already lasts longer than a second... Because NoSQL is bragging about speed I thought I must have been doing something wrong!
A Question here at Stack Overflow made me check out the Aggregation feature of mongodb. So I tried to use the group + sum + sort thingies. Came up with this:
db.wikipedia.aggregate(
{ $group: { _id: "$item", count: { $sum: 1 } } },
{ $sort: {count: 1} }
)
This code works just fine and gives me the same results as the mapreduce set, but it is just as slow. Am I doing something wrong? Do I really need to use other tools like hadoop to get a better performance?

I will place an answer basically summing up my comments. I cannot speak for other techs like Hadoop since I have not yet had the pleasure of finding time to use them but I can speak for MongoDB.
Unfortunately you are using two of the worst operators for any database: computed fields and grouping (or distinct) on a full table scan. The aggregation framework in this case must compute the field, group and then in-memory ( http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/aggregation/#_S_sort ) sort the computed field. This is an extremely inefficient task for MongoDB to perform, in fact most likely any database.
There is no easy way to do this in real-time in line to your own application. Map reduce could be a way out if you didn't need to return the results immediately but since I am guessing you don't really want to wait for this kind of stuff the default method is just to eradicate the group altogether.
You can do this by pre-aggregation. So you can create another collection of grouped_wikipedia and in your application you manage this using an upsert() with atomic operators like $set and $inc (to count the occurrences) to make sure you only get one row per item. This is probably the most sane method of solving this problem.
This does however raise another problem of having to manage this extra collection alongside the detail collection wikipedia but I believe this to be a unavoidable side effect of getting the right performance here. The benefits will be greater than the loss of having to manage the extra collection.

Related

What is the proper index format that should I use in MongoDB for this particular scenario explained below?

I have the following query to be executed on my MongoDB collection order_error. It has over 60 million documents. The main concern is I am having a $in operator within my query. I tried several possibilities of indices but none of them gave a high-performance improvement. The query is as follows
db.getCollection("order_error").find({
"$and":[
{
"type":"order"
},
{
"Origin.SN":{
"$in":[
"4095",
"4100",
"4509",
"4599",
"4510"
]
}
}
]
}).sort({"timestamp.milliseconds" : 1}).skip(1).limit(100).explain("executionStats")
One issue that needs to be noted is I am allowing sort on timestamp.milliseconds in both directions(ASC + DESC). I have limited the entries within the $in. Usually, it is more. SO what kind of index gives the performance improvement. I tried creating the following indices already
type_1_Origin.SN_1_timestamp.milliseconds_-1
type_1_timestamp.milliseconds_-1_Origin.SN
Is there any better way for index creation?

MongoDB - how to get fields fill-rates as quickly as possible?

We have a very big MongoDB collection of documents with some pre-defined fields that can either have a value or not.
We need to gather fill-rates of those fields, we wrote a script that goes over all documents and counts fill-rates for each, problem is it takes a long time to process all documents.
Is there a way to use db.collection.aggregate or db.collection.mapReduce to run such a script server-side?
Should it have significant performance improvements?
Will it slow down other usages of that collection (e.g. holding a major lock)?
Answering my own question, I was able to migrate my script using a cursor to scan the whole collection, to a map-reduce query, and running on a sample of the collection it seems it's at least twice as fast using the map-reduce.
Here's how the old script worked (in node.js):
var cursor = collection.find(query, projection).sort({_id: 1}).limit(limit);
var next = function() {
cursor.nextObject(function(err, doc) {
processDoc(doc, next);
});
};
next();
and this is the new script:
collection.mapReduce(
function () {
var processDoc = function(doc) {
...
};
processDoc(this);
},
function (key, values) {
return Array.sum(values)
},
{
query : query,
out: {inline: 1}
},
function (error, results) {
// print results
}
);
processDoc stayed basically the same, but instead of incrementing a counter on a global stats object, I do:
emit(field_name, 1);
running old and new on a sample of 100k, old took 20 seconds, new took 8.
some notes:
map-reduce's limit option doesn't work on sharded collections, I had to query for _id : { $gte, $lte} to create the sample size needed.
map-reduce's performance boost option: jsMode : true doesn't work on sharded collections as well (might have improve performance even more), it might work to run it manually on each shard to gain that feature.
As I understood what you want to achieve is compute something on your documents, after that you have a new "document" that can be queried. You don't need to store the "new values" computed.
If you don't need to write your "new values" inside that documents, you can use Aggregation Framework.
Aggregations operations process data records and return computed results. Aggregation operations group values from multiple documents together, and can perform a variety of operations on the grouped data to return a single result.
https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/aggregation/
Since Aggregation Framework has a lot of features i can't give you more informations about how to resolve your issue.

Iterating over distinct items in one field in MongoDB

I have a very large collection (~7M items) in MongoDB, primarily consisting of documents with three fields.
I'd like to be able to iterate over all the unique values for one of the fields, in an expedient manner.
Currently, I'm querying for just that field, and then processing the returned results by iterating on the cursor for uniqueness. This works, but it's rather slow, and I suspect there must be a better way.
I know mongo has the db.collection.distinct() function, but this is limited by the maximum BSON size (16 MB), which my dataset exceeds.
Is there any way to iterate over something similar to the db.collection.distinct(), but using a cursor or some other method, so the record-size limit isn't as much of an issue?
I think maybe something like the map/reduce functionality would possibly be suited for this kind of thing, but I don't really understand the map-reduce paradigm in the first place, so I have no idea what I'm doing. The project I'm working on is partially to learn about working with different database tools, so I'm rather inexperienced.
I'm using PyMongo if it's relevant (I don't think it is). This should be mostly dependent on MongoDB alone.
Example:
For this dataset:
{"basePath" : "foo", "internalPath" : "Neque", "itemhash": "49f4c6804be2523e2a5e74b1ffbf7e05"}
{"basePath" : "foo", "internalPath" : "porro", "itemhash": "ffc8fd5ef8a4515a0b743d5f52b444bf"}
{"basePath" : "bar", "internalPath" : "quisquam", "itemhash": "cf34a8047defea9a51b4a75e9c28f9e7"}
{"basePath" : "baz", "internalPath" : "est", "itemhash": "c07bc6f51234205efcdeedb7153fdb04"}
{"basePath" : "foo", "internalPath" : "qui", "itemhash": "5aa8cfe2f0fe08ee8b796e70662bfb42"}
What I'd like to do is iterate over just the basePath field. For the above dataset, this means I'd iterate over foo, bar, and baz just once each.
I'm not sure if it's relevant, but the DB I have is structured so that while each field is not unique, the aggregate of all three is unique (this is enforced with an index).
The query and filter operation I'm currently using (note: I'm restricting the query to a subset of the items to reduce processing time):
self.log.info("Running path query")
itemCursor = self.dbInt.coll.find({"basePath": pathRE}, fields={'_id': False, 'internalPath': False, 'itemhash': False}, exhaust=True)
self.log.info("Query complete. Processing")
self.log.info("Query returned %d items", itemCursor.count())
self.log.info("Filtering returned items to require uniqueness.")
items = set()
for item in itemCursor:
# print item
items.add(item["basePath"])
self.log.info("total unique items = %s", len(items))
Running the same query with self.dbInt.coll.distinct("basePath") results in OperationFailure: command SON([('distinct', u'deduper_collection'), ('key', 'basePath')]) failed: exception: distinct too big, 16mb cap
Ok, here is the solution I wound up using. I'd add it as an answer, but I don't want to detract from the actual answers that got me here.
reStr = "^%s" % fqPathBase
pathRE = re.compile(reStr)
self.log.info("Running path query")
pipeline = [
{ "$match" :
{
"basePath" : pathRE
}
},
# Group the keys
{"$group":
{
"_id": "$basePath"
}
},
# Output to a collection "tmp_unique_coll"
{"$out": "tmp_unique_coll"}
]
itemCursor = self.dbInt.coll.aggregate(pipeline, allowDiskUse=True)
itemCursor = self.dbInt.db.tmp_unique_coll.find(exhaust=True)
self.log.info("Query complete. Processing")
self.log.info("Query returned %d items", itemCursor.count())
self.log.info("Filtering returned items to require uniqueness.")
items = set()
retItems = 0
for item in itemCursor:
retItems += 1
items.add(item["_id"])
self.log.info("Recieved items = %d", retItems)
self.log.info("total unique items = %s", len(items))
General performance compared to my previous solution is about 2X in terms of wall-clock time. On a query that returns 834273 items, with 11467 uniques:
Original method(retreive, stuff into a python set to enforce uniqueness):
real 0m22.538s
user 0m17.136s
sys 0m0.324s
Aggregate pipeline method :
real 0m9.881s
user 0m0.548s
sys 0m0.096s
So while the overall execution time is only ~2X better, the aggregation pipeline is massively more performant in terms of actual CPU time.
Update:
I revisited this project recently, and rewrote the DB layer to use a SQL database, and everything was much easier. A complex processing pipeline is now a simple SELECT DISTINCT(colName) WHERE xxx operation.
Realistically, MongoDB and NoSQL databases in general are vary much the wrong database type for what I'm trying to do here.
From the discussion points so far I'm going to take a stab at this. And I'm also noting that as of writing, the 2.6 release for MongoDB should be just around the corner, good weather permitting, so I am going to make some references there.
Oh and the FYI that didn't come up in chat, .distinct() is an entirely different animal that pre-dates the methods used in the responses here, and as such is subject to many limitations.
And this soltion is finally a solution for 2.6 up, or any current dev release over 2.5.3
The alternative for now is use mapReduce because the only restriction is the output size
Without going into the inner workings of distinct, I'm going to go on the presumption that aggregate is doing this more efficiently [and even more so in upcoming release].
db.collection.aggregate([
// Group the key and increment the count per match
{$group: { _id: "$basePath", count: {$sum: 1} }},
// Hey you can even sort it without breaking things
{$sort: { count: 1 }},
// Output to a collection "output"
{$out: "output"}
])
So we are using the $out pipeline stage to get the final result that is over 16MB into a collection of it's own. There you can do what you want with it.
As 2.6 is "just around the corner" there is one more tweak that can be added.
Use allowDiskUse from the runCommand form, where each stage can use disk and not be subject to memory restrictions.
The main point here, is that this is nearly live for production. And the performance will be better than the same operation in mapReduce. So go ahead and play. Install 2.5.5 for you own use now.
A MapReduce, in the current version of Mongo would avoid the problems of the results exceeding 16MB.
map = function() {
if(this['basePath']) {
emit(this['basePath'], 1);
}
// if basePath always exists you can just call the emit:
// emit(this.basePath);
};
reduce = function(key, values) {
return Array.sum(values);
};
For each document the basePath is emitted with a single value representing the count of that value. The reduce simply creates the sum of all the values. The resulting collection would have all unique values for basePath along with the total number of occurrences.
And, as you'll need to store the results to prevent an error using the out option which specifies a destination collection.
db.yourCollectionName.mapReduce(
map,
reduce,
{ out: "distinctMR" }
)
#Neil Lunn 's answer could be simplified:
field = 'basePath' # Field I want
db.collection.aggregate( [{'$project': {field: 1, '_id': 0}}])
$project filters fields for you. In particular, '_id': 0 filters out the _id field.
Result still too large? Batch it with $limit and $skip:
field = 'basePath' # Field I want
db.collection.aggregate( [{'$project': {field: 1, '_id': 0}}, {'$limit': X}, {'$skip': Y}])
I think the most scalable solution is to perform a query for each unique value. The queries must be executed one after the other, and each query will give you the "next" unique value based on the previous query result. The idea is that the query will return you one single document, that will contain the unique value that you are looking for. If you use the proper projection, mongo will just use the index loaded into memory without having to read from disk.
You can define this strategy using $gt operator in mongo, but you must take into account values like null or empty strings, and potentially discard them using the $ne or $nin operator. You can also extend this strategy using multiple keys, using operators like $gte for one key and $gt for the other.
This strategy should give you the distinct values of a string field in alphabetical order, or distinct numerical values sorted ascendingly.

mongodb: field sorted by number of occurances

I have a collection with each document representing a virtual auction. I want to find the most common item ID for a given time period. In SQL, I'd SELECT item, COUNT(*) as count with GROUP BY item and the usual sorting and limits. Is there a mongodb equivalent to this?
MongoDB has several options here.
In version 2.1.0+ you can use the new Aggregation Framework. There's a conversion chart right here.
In older versions you can use either a Map / Reduce
For simple versions of aggregation you ca use the special aggregation operators.
Each of these options will have a different syntax and a different speed.
In any of these cases, you will likely find these options relatively slow. Map / Reduce jobs are intended to be run "off-line", generally as a "cron job" or "scheduled task". Note that if you plan to do this a lot, you will likely want to pre-aggregate this data.
Or you can use MapReduce and then sort the output collection or you can use the command group, but you will need to do most of the sorting and limit on the client side.
Example for group command:
db.coll.group(
{key: { a:true, b:true },
cond: { active:1 },
reduce: function(obj,prev) { prev.csum += obj.c; },
initial: { csum: 0 }
});
It's also worth to mention that in the next stable version of mongodb (2.2) they will release a new aggregation framework, which will make this operations much easier.

How to set array length after updating it via $addToSet in mongodb?

Document structure looks like this,
{
blacklists:[] // elements should be unique
blacklistsLength:0 // length of blacklists
}
Adding sets of value to blacklists is easy.
db.posts.update({_id:...}, {$addtoSet:{blacklists:{$each:['peter', 'bob', 'steven']}}});
But How can I update blacklistLength at the same time to reflect the changes?
This is not possible. Either you have
Update the length seperately using a subsequent findAndModify
command or
You can do it per name and rewrite the query using a negation in
your criteria and $push rather than $addToSet (not necessarily
needed but a lot faster with large blacklists since addToSet is
always o(n) regardless of indexes) :
db.posts.update({_id:..., blacklists:{$ne:'peter'}}, {$push:{blacklists:{'peter'}},$inc:{blacklistsLength: 1}});
The latter being perfectly safe since the list and the length are adjusted atomically but obviously has slightly degraded performance. Since it also has the benefit of better overall performance due to the $push versus $addToSet performance issue on large arrays (and blacklists tend to become huge and remember that the $push version of the update uses an index on blacklist in the update criteria while $addToSet will NOT use an index during it's set scan) it is generally the best solution.
Would the following not work?
db.posts.update({_id:...}, {
$addtoSet:{blacklists:{$each:['peter', 'bob', 'steven']}},
$set: {blacklistsLength: ['peter', 'bob', 'steven'].length}
});
I had a similar problem, please see the discussion here: google groups mongo
As you can notice, following to this discussion, a bug was open:
Mongo Jira
As you upsert items into the database, simply query the item to see if it's in your embedded array. That way, you're avoiding pushing duplicate items, and only incrementing the counter as you add new items.
q = {'blacklists': {'$nin': ['blacklist_to_insert'] }}
u = {
'$push' : {'blacklists': { 'blacklist_to_insert' } },
'$inc' : {'total_blacklists': 1 }
}
o = { 'upsert' : true }
db.posts.update(q,u,o)