I'm developing an Iphone App where the user types in any string into a searchbar and presses the search button. After that a result list should appear.
In my SQLite I have four columns a, b, c, d. Let's say they have the following Values:
Dataset 1:
a: code1
b: report1
c: description1_1
d: description1_2
Dataset 2:
a: code2
b: report2
c: description2_1
d: description2_2
So if the user enters a value of: "1_1" then the first dataset will be selected because of clumn c.
If the user enters a value of: "report" then the first and second dataset will be selected.
As I'm using a database with nearly 60.000 Datasets searching for a part-string is really killing the performance.
Setting an index at all 4 columns will make the size of the SQLite database much too huge.
So I didn't use an index at all.
My Select Statement looks like this:
NSString *sql = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"SELECT * FROM scode WHERE a LIKE '%#%#%#' OR c LIKE '%#%#%#' OR d LIKE '%#%#%#'", wildcard, searchBar.text, wildcard, wildcard, searchBar.text, wildcard, wildcard, searchBar.text, wildcard, wildcard, searchBar.text, wildcard];
Is there any good way to enhance the performance of searching for a part-string in all columns?
Thank you and kind regards,
Daniel
You're after Full Text Searching, which SQLite doesn't natively support. I don't have any experience with 3rd party support, but based on results there are a few options.
You answered your own question: Do the index on all four columns. And measure the size difference. Considering the storage capacity of the iPhone, you're probably out of balance trying to reduce storage.
The rule of thumb with SQLite performance is not to doa query that isn't indexed.
You can see what SQLite is actually doing by creating your database on the Mac using the same schema and EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN. (There's also EXPLAIN, which is more detailed but less obvious.)
You can create a separate table, with two columns: a pattern string and a key value (which is used to refer to your data tables). Lets call this table "search_index".
Then, on any change to your data table entries, you update the "search_index" table:
remove rows with keys of changed data table rows
for each column in data table, use the first X characters of the data, and add them to search_index with the key
You can work out the details yourself, but in this way, you just build your own (partial) search index.
When querying, you can use up to X characters to search in the search_index table alone. If the user types more than X characters you at least have a limited set of data table rows to search in. So you can search those 60k rows easily.
Find a good value for X to balance storage requirements and usability and performance.
EDIT: Looks like you do not want to search only the beginning of the words? Well, then you should not just use the "first X characters", but you should split the data into single words, and use the full words in search_index. Though in practice you will still have around a fourth of the index storage requirements compared to giving all columns an index. So, its still a good thing to build your own "search_index".
Related
I have a massive list of strings in a text file, the file is about 100gb uncompressed.
Each line of the text file is a single word (rougly 50 characters long), no spaces or punctuation.
The table will be created and populated from this text file once, further updates to the table will not be necessary and if it helps the table can become read only.
The use-case is a function which would look something like this:
/**
* Search the table and return true if the word exists, false if not.
* /
wordExists(wordToCheck: string): boolean {}
I'm looking for advice here on what would be the best way to store the data to ensure that lookups are as fast and efficient as possible.
I'm not sure if breaking the word up into parts to try and assist in indexing it would help or not, I'm also not sure if it will help to partition this list.
Anyone have any advice for me?
100GB is fairly long, and assuming each word averages 50 characters in length, this means that roughly a single column would have 2 billion words/records in it. This is not so large that it is beyond the capability of Postgres.
I suggest creating and populating your table, and then adding a hash index:
CREATE INDEX idx ON yourTable USING HASH (text_col);
Now any query against this table should be able to use the index for very rapid lookup. For example, to see if a word exists, use:
SELECT EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM yourTable WHERE text_col = 'meatballs');
If you run the explain plan, you should see the hash index being used with a fast lookup time.
I have two tables in which I have data coming from two different sources. One of the field of each table contains the title of a movie, but for some reason out of my control, the titles are not always exactly the same.
So I use the ts_vector to get rid of all the minor differences (stop words, plurals and so on).
See an example here: http://sqlfiddle.com/#!17/5ccbc/3
My problem is how to compare the two ts_vector without taking into account the numberic values, but just the text content. If I compare directly the two fields, I only get the exact match between values, including position of each word. The only solution I have found is using the strip() function, that remove positions and weights from tsvector, leaving only the text content.
I was wondering if there is a fastest way to compare ts_vectors.
You could create in index on the stripped vector:
create index on tbl1 (strip(ts_title));
create index on tbl2 (strip(ts_title));
But given that your query has to fetch every row of each table, it is unlikely this would serve much of a point. Doing a merge join between the precomputed stripped vectors could be faster, but probably not once you include the overhead of building and maintaining the indexes. If the real WHERE clause is more restrictive (selecting only a few rows from one or the other of the tables) then please share the real query.
I have a table in postgresql with the following information:
rawData (fileID integer references otherTable, lineNum integer, data1 double, ...)
When I am searching this table, I do so with the following query:
SELECT lineNum, data1, ...other data FROM rawData WHERE
fileID = ? AND data1 < ? ORDER BY lineNum;
In general, the data in this table is a number of entries for each fileID, and each fileID has lineNum from 0 to x, with lineNum never repeating for each fileID (but it does repeat for different fileID's). Then data1 is effectively a random number that may or may not overlap.
In order to speed up the reading of this data, I am trying to create an index on it, but am having trouble figuring out the best way to index it. Currently I am looking at one of the following two index methods, and am wondering which would be better for my search, or if there is another option that I haven't thought of that would be better than either of them.
index idea 1:
CREATE INDEX searchIndex ON rawData (fileID, data1, lineNum);
index idea 2:
CREATE INDEX searchIndex ON rawData (fileID, lineNum, data1);
Note that at this time, this and a search not constrained by data1 are the only searches that I run on this table, so I'm not too concerned about this index slowing down other searches.
Lastly, would I have to change my search query to use the index, or would it automatically use that index when I search the table?
You should look at using this instead:
CREATE INDEX searchIndex ON rawData (fileID, lineNum);
A few things:
In particular, as per docs, Indexes with more than three columns are unlikely to be helpful unless the usage of the table is extremely stylized.
Since your second search query requires filtering without the data1 column, keeping the second column lineNum should be sufficient (since you mention it would be quasi-random), and in the rare occurrence that there are repeats, table fetches should ensure correctness. But what this would mean is that the Index would be 1/3rd smaller in size, which is a big win (Think index small-enough to be in memory / index-only-scans etc.)
Either index can be used. Which is faster will depend on many things, like how many rows are in the table, how many lineNum there are per fileID, how selective the data1 < ? clause is, what your hardware is, what our config settings are, which version of PostreSQL you are using, what physical order the table rows lie in, etc.
The only way to know for sure is to try it with your own data on your own system and see.
I'd just build an index on (fileID, lineNum, data1), or even just (fileID, lineNum), because that seems more natural, and then forget about it. Most likely it will be fast enough. Once there is a demonstrable performance problem, than you will have the test case at hand which is needed to come to a real conclusion.
I am trying to figure out what would be the best way to go ahead and locate duplicates in a 5 column csv data. The real data has more than million rows in it.
Following is the content of mentioned 6 columns.
Name, address, city, post-code, phone number, machine number
Data does not have fixed length, data might in certain columns might be missing in certain instances.
I am thinking of using perl to first normalize all the short forms used in names, city and address. Fellow perl enthusiasts from stackoverflow have helped me a lot.
But there would still be a lot of data which would be difficult to match.
So I am wondering is it possible to match content based on "LIKELINESS / SIMILARITY" (eg. google similar to gugl) the likeliness would be required to overcome errors that creeped in while collecting data.
I have 2 tasks in hand w.r.t. the data.
Flag duplicate rows with certain identifier
Mention the percentage match between similar rows.
I would really appreciate if I could get suggestions as to what all possible methods could be employed and which would propbably be best because of their certain merits.
You could write a Perl program to do this, but it will be easier and faster to put it into a SQL database and use that.
Most SQL databases have a way to import CSV. For this answer, I suggest PostgreSQL because it has very powerful string functions which you will need to find your fuzzy duplicates. Create your table with an auto incremented ID column if your CSV data doesn't already have unique IDs.
Once the import is done, add indexes on the columns you want to check for duplicates.
CREATE INDEX name ON whatever (name);
You can do a self-join to look for duplicates in whatever way you like. Here's an example that finds duplicate names.
SELECT id
FROM whatever t1
JOIN whatever t2 ON t1.id < t2.id
WHERE t1.name = t2.name
PostgreSQL has powerful string functions including regexes to do the comparisons.
Indexes will have a hard time working on things like lower(t1.name). Depending on the sorts of duplicates you want to work with, you can add indexes for these transforms (this is a feature of PostgreSQL). For example, if you wanted to search case insensitively you can add an index on the lower-case name. (Thanks #asjo for pointing that out)
CREATE INDEX ON whatever ((lower(name)));
// This will be muuuuuch faster
SELECT id
FROM whatever t1
JOIN whatever t2 ON t1.id < t2.id
WHERE lower(t1.name) = lower(t2.name)
A "likeness" match can be achieved in several ways, a simple one would be to use the fuzzystrmatch functions like metaphone(). Same trick as before, add a column with the transformed row and index it.
Other simple things like data normalization are better done on the data itself before adding indexes and looking for duplicates. For example, trim out and squish extra whitespace.
UPDATE whatever SET name = trim(both from name);
UPDATE whatever SET name = regexp_replace(name, '[[:space:]]+', ' ');
Finally, you can use the Postgres Trigram module to add fuzzy indexing to your table (thanks again to #asjo).
I have a database of filenames in which I'm trying to search using PGs full text search facility. I'm running the search query on a table of filenames, the problem is that the ranking functions are not ranking the results as I'd like them to do. For the sake of argument, let's assume the schema looks like this:
create table files (
id serial primary key,
filename text,
filename_ft tsvector
);
The query that I run looks something like this:
select filename, ts_rank(filename_ft, query)
from files, to_tsquery('simple', 'a|b|c') as query
where query ## name_ft
order by rank desc limit 5;
This will return the 5 results with the highest rank. However, those search queries are coming from another process, and in most cases the queries have some 'garbage' in them. For instance, a query for 'a xxxx' might be executed, where xxxxx is just a bunch of other terms. In most cases this still returns the correct results, because the suffix is simply not in the database.
However, sometimes a query contains some extraneous information that screws with the ranking function. For instance, a query for 'a b c' will return a filename containing the tokens 'b c' as first result, and an exact match on 'a' as second result, my guess this is due to the fact the the first result contains a larger percentage of the actual search tokens.
In most cases (if not all) the most important token appears as the first token in the query, so my question is, is there a way to give the tokens in the query a weight?
is there a way to give the tokens in the query a weight?
Yes, there is. See the documentation; search for "weight".
Whether assigning weights is the right choice is another matter. It sounds to me like you really want to exclude some of the data from the inputs to to_tsvector in index creation and searching, so you just don't include that garbage in the index.