materialized view vs procedure in snowflake - snowflake-cloud-data-platform

My source table is being updated in every 5 min what is best option materialized view vs procedure in snowflake
Create materialized view and refresh in every 5 min.
Create procedure and schedule in task that will run in every 5 min.
if something goes wrong while refreshing materialized view then how to track the error? error tracking is easy inside the procedure.
Which one is better (materialized view or procedure/task)?

You have to look at pros and cons of each implementation and of course cost.
Materislised View
great for a source that does not change often
also good for accessing content that may be of a different clustering to the source table
does have a storage cost
does have a serverless compute cost associated with it for maintaining the MV
is limited to a single table source, no joins and has other restrictions in terms of available functions
Stored Proc
unexecuted code
no storage cost
can suite complex joins and functions
will be slower than an MV because it needs to execute code
if needed to run periodically, can be combined with tasks, or better yet, streams and tasks if dealing with deltas.
the same stored proc run twice without any of the underlying data changing could take advantage of Snowflake's caching
running a task is not free, goes into cloud services charges. But as long as the CS charges are less than 10% of the daily compute charge it could be free.
Comprehensive guide: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/views-materialized.html

In Snowflake, Materialized Views are maintained automatically, so it does not need to be refreshed manually, and they will always provide up to date data.
https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/views-materialized.html#advantages-of-materialized-views
As I understand, as an alternative to MV, you are planning to create a stored procedure and task to build a summary table by yourself, and refresh it periodically.
If this is the case, I highly recommend you to use the Materialized View, so you don't need to deal with the maintenance of the procedure/summary table, and you always get up to date data from the MV.

Related

idiomatic way to do many dynamic filtered views of a Flink table?

I would like to create a per-user view of data tables stored in Flink, which is constantly updated as changes happen to the source data, so that I can have a constantly updating UI based on a toChangelogStream() of the user's view of the data. To do that, I was thinking that I could create an ad-hoc SQL query like SELECT * FROM foo WHERE userid=X and convert it to a changelog stream, which would have a bunch of inserts at the beginning of the stream to give me the initial state, followed by live updates after that point. I would leave that query running as long as the user is using the UI, and then delete the table when the user's session ends. I think this is effectively how the Flink SQL client must work, so it seem like this is possible.
However, I anticipate that there may be some large overheads associated with each ad hoc query if I do it this way. When I write a SQL query, based on the answer in Apache Flink Table 1.4: External SQL execution on Table possible?, it sounds like internally this is going to compile a new JAR file and create new pipeline stages, I assume using more JVM metaspace for each user. I can have tens of thousands of users using the UI at once, so I'm not sure that's really feasible.
What's the idiomatic way to do this? The other ways I'm looking at are:
I could maybe use queryable state since I could group the current rows behind the userid as the key, but as far as I can tell it does not provide a way to get a changelog stream, so I would have to constantly re-query the state on a periodic basis, which is not ideal for my use case (the per-user state can be large sometimes but doesn't change quickly).
Another alternative is to output the table to both a changelog stream sink and an external RDBMS sink, but if I do that, what's the best pattern for how to join those together in the client?

Best practices for counting very large and changing datasets

This is not an app-engine question, per-se... though our application runs in Python on App-Engine using NDB against datastore. So the question is about doing work on large datasets in a distributed system.
We have a growing dataset that we need to calculate statistics against (counts, sums, etc). We have systems in place that successfully do this in a differential manner so that they are maintained transactionally as things change... but there are cases when we want to blow away our statistics and recalculate them from scratch... and or run validation routines to check the counts/sums we have been maintaining differentially
The question is, generally, what are some best practices for building statistics against very large dataset that is constantly changing in a distributed system?
Let's say we kicked off a large MapReduce job to sum a particular field on a million entities... and while that job was running several new entities came in, several were deleted, and several other summed properties changed. What are some of the best known/accepted/successful approaches to making sure those additions/deletions/changes make it into the overall sum?
The way I do this is that I don’t query all instances and run my operation over all of them every time. I have a separate entity group which handles these statistics in 1 attribute. Whenever I create/update an instance, I update the value of this attribute accordingly, and when I delete an instance I also update this value accordingly.
The best way to make sure that any updates do update the statistics entity group is to use hooks that will run automatically every time you put or delete the instance.
Hope that helps.
If you're able to meet several conditions:
track each individual MapReduce sub-job
determine the individual MapReduce sub-jobs for which results would be affected by a transactional update
ensure such affected MapReduce sub-jobs don't run simultaneously with the transactional update affecting them (might be ensured by the transaction itself?)
determine in a transactional update, for each interfering MapReduce sub-job, if the sub-job has already completed
Then you could generate and apply differential stats updates for each interfering sub-job which has completed (maybe apply them after completion of the entire large MapReduce job?). The sub-jobs which didn't execute yet don't need such differential stats as the content will be already updated when the sub-job will execute on it.
You might need to treat the interferences for the additions, deletions and plain changes in a transactional update separately.
Alternatively you could store all MapReduce sub-jobs partial results, track which of them are affected by transactional updates (if any) and, at the end of the large Mapreduce job check if any update happened while the job was running. If so just re-run just the affected sub-jobs to get updated partial results for them and re-assemble the partial results into the final result. Repeat until no more updates happen while the most recent partial MapReduce re-run is in progress. More or less rsync style for copying/moving huge live partitions with minimal downtime.
You could even feed relevant impact info from the transactional updates to the mapper (a slightly smarter one), to leave the mapper itself evaluate the impact to the potentially affected maps and propagate the info accordingly to get the affected sub-jobs re-run, as the updates come in :)

Auto sharding postgresql?

I have a problem where I need to load alot of data (5+ billion rows) into a database very quickly (ideally less than an 30 min but quicker is better), and I was recently suggested to look into postgresql (I failed with mysql and was looking at hbase/cassandra). My setup is I have a cluster (currently 8 servers) that generates alot of data, and I was thinking of running databases locally on each machine in the cluster it writes quickly locally and then at the end (or throughout the data generating) data is merged together. The data is not in any order so I don't care which specific server its on (as long as its eventually there).
My questions are , is there any good tutorials or places to learn about PostgreSQL auto sharding (I found results of firms like sykpe doing auto sharding but no tutorials, I want to play with this myself)? Is what I'm trying to do possible? Because the data is not in any order I was going to use auto-incrementing ID number, will that cause a conflict if data is merged (this is not a big issue anymore)?
Update: Frank's idea below kind of eliminated the auto-incrementing conflict issue I was asking about. The question is basically now, how can I learn about auto sharding and would it support distributed uploads of data to multiple servers?
First: Do you really need to insert the generated data from your cluster straight into a relational database? You don't mind merging it at the end anyway, so why bother inserting into a database at all? In your position I'd have your cluster nodes write flat files, probably gzip'd CSV data. I'd then bulk import and merge that data using a tool like pg_bulkload.
If you do need to insert directly into a relational database: That's (part of) what PgPool-II and (especeially) PgBouncer are for. Configure PgBouncer to load-balance across different nodes and you should be pretty much sorted.
Note that PostgreSQL is a transactional database with strong data durability guarantees. That also means that if you use it in a simplistic way, doing lots of small writes can be slow. You have to consider what trade-offs you're willing to make between data durability, speed, and cost of hardware.
At one extreme, each INSERT can be its own transaction that's synchronously committed to disk before returning success. This limits the number of transactions per second to the number of fsync()s your disk subsystem can do, which is often only in the tens or hundreds per second (without battery backup RAID controller). This is the default if you do nothing special and if you don't wrap your INSERTs in a BEGIN and COMMIT.
At the other extreme, you say "I really don't care if I lose all this data" and use unlogged tables for your inserts. This basically gives the database permission to throw your data away if it can't guarantee it's OK - say, after an OS crash, database crash, power loss, etc.
The middle ground is where you will probably want to be. This involves some combination of asynchronous commit, group commits (commit_delay and commit_siblings), batching inserts into groups wrapped in explicit BEGIN and END, etc. Instead of INSERT batching you could do COPY loads of a few thousand records at a time. All these things trade data durability off against speed.
For fast bulk inserts you should also consider inserting into tables without any indexes except a primary key. Maybe not even that. Create the indexes once your bulk inserts are done. This will be a hell of a lot faster.
Here are a few things that might help:
The DB on each server should have a small meta data table with that server's unique characteristics. Such as which server it is; servers can be numbered sequentially. Apart from the contents of that table, it's probably wise to try to keep the schema on each server as similar as possible.
With billions of rows you'll want bigint ids (or UUID or the like). With bigints, you could allocate a generous range for each server, and set its sequence up to use it. E.g. server 1 gets 1..1000000000000000, server 2 gets 1000000000000001 to 2000000000000000 etc.
If the data is simple data points (like a temperature reading from exactly 10 instruments every second) you might get efficiency gains by storing it in a table with columns (time timestamp, values double precision[]) rather than the more correct (time timestamp, instrument_id int, value double precision). This is an explicit denormalisation in aid of efficiency. (I blogged about my own experience with this scheme.)
Use citus for PostgreSQL auto sharding. Also this link is helpful.
Sorry I don't have a tutorial at hand, but here's an outline of a possible solution:
Load one eight of your data into a PG instance on each of the servers
For optimum load speed, don't use inserts but the COPY method
When the data is loaded, do not combine the eight databases into one. Instead, use plProxy to launch a single statement to query all databases at once (or the right one to satisfy your query)
As already noted, keys might be an issue. Use non-overlapping sequences or uuids or sequence numbers with a string prefix, shouldn't be too hard to solve.
You should start with a COPY test on one of the servers and see how close to your 30-minute goal you can get. If your data is not important and you have a recent Postgresql version, you can try using unlogged tables which should be a lot faster (but not crash-safe). Sounds like a fun project, good luck.
You could use mySQL - which supports auto-sharding across a cluster.

Versioning a dataset in an RDBMS using initials and deltas

I'm working on a system that mirrors remote datasets using initials and deltas. When an initial comes in, it mass deletes anything preexisting and mass inserts the fresh data. When a delta comes in, the system does a bunch of work to translate it into updates, inserts, and deletes. Initials and deltas are processed inside long transactions to maintain data integrity.
Unfortunately the current solution isn't scaling very well. The transactions are so large and long running that our RDBMS bogs down with various contention problems. Also, there isn't a good audit trail for how the deltas are applied, making it difficult to troubleshoot issues causing the local and remote versions of the dataset to get out of sync.
One idea is to not run the initials and deltas in transactions at all, and instead to attach a version number to each record indicating which delta or initial it came from. Once an initial or delta is successfully loaded, the application can be alerted that a new version of the dataset is available.
This just leaves the issue of how exactly to compose a view of a dataset up to a given version from the initial and deltas. (Apple's TimeMachine does something similar, using hard links on the file system to create "view" of a certain point in time.)
Does anyone have experience solving this kind of problem or implementing this particular solution?
Thanks!
have one writer and several reader databases. You send the write to the one database, and have it propagate the exact same changes to all the other databases. The reader databases will be eventually consistent and the time to update is very fast. I have seen this done in environments that get upwards of 1M page views per day. It is very scalable. You can even put a hardware router in front of all the read databases to load balance them.
Thanks to those who tried.
For anyone else who ends up here, I'm benchmarking a solution that adds a "dataset_version_id" and "dataset_version_verb" column to each table in question. A correlated subquery inside a stored procedure is then used to retrieve the current dataset_version_id when retrieving specific records. If the latest version of the record has dataset_version_verb of "delete", it's filtered out of the results by a WHERE clause.
This approach has an average ~ 80% performance hit so far, which may be acceptable for our purposes.

Importing new database table

Where I'm at there is a main system that runs on a big AIX mainframe. To facility reporting and operations there is nightly dump from the mainframe into SQL Server, such that each of our 50-ish clients is in their own database with identical schemas. This dump takes about 7 hours to finish each night, and there's not really anything we can do about it: we're stuck with what the application vendor has provided.
After the dump into sql server we use that to run a number of other daily procedures. One of those procedures is to import data into a kind of management reporting sandbox table, which combines records from a particularly important table from across the different databases into one table that managers who don't know sql so can use to run ad-hoc reports without hosing up the rest of the system. This, again, is a business thing: the managers want it, and they have the power to see that we implement it.
The import process for this table takes a couple hours on it's own. It filters down about 40 million records spread across 50 databases into about 4 million records, and then indexes them on certain columns for searching. Even at a coupld hours it's still less than a third as long as the initial load, but we're running out of time for overnight processing, we don't control the mainframe dump, and we do control this. So I've been tasked with looking for ways to improve one the existing procedure.
Currently, the philosophy is that it's faster to load all the data from each client database and then index it afterwards in one step. Also, in the interest of avoiding bogging down other important systems in case it runs long, a couple of the larger clients are set to always run first (the main index on the table is by a clientid field). One other thing we're starting to do is load data from a few clients at a time in parallel, rather than each client sequentially.
So my question is, what would be the most efficient way to load this table? Are we right in thinking that indexing later is better? Or should we create the indexes before importing data? Should we be loading the table in index order, to avoid massive re-ordering of pages, rather than the big clients first? Could loading in parallel make things worse by causing to much disk access all at once or removing our ability to control the order? Any other ideas?
Update
Well, something is up. I was able to do some benchmarking during the day, and there is no difference at all in the load time whether the indexes are created at the beginning or at the end of the operation, but we save the time building the index itself (it of course builds nearly instantly with no data in the table).
I have worked with loading bulk sets of data in SQL Server quite a bit and did some performance testing on the Index on while inserting and the add it afterwards. I found that BY FAR it was much more efficient to create the index after all data was loaded. In our case it took 1 hour to load with the index added at the end, and 4 hours to add it with the index still on.
I think the key is to get the data moved as quick as possible, I am not sure if loading it in order really helps, do you have any stats on load time vs. index time? If you do, you could start to experiment a bit on that side of things.
Loading with the indexes dropped is better as a live index will generate several I/O's for every row in the database. 4 million rows is small enough that you would not expect to get a significant benefit from table partitioning.
You could get a performance win by using bcp to load the data into the staging area and running several tasks in parallel (SSIS will do this). Write a generic batch file wrapper for bcp that takes the file path (and table name if necessary) and invoke a series of jobs in half a dozen threads with 'Execute Process' tasks in SSIS. For 50 jobs it's probably not worth trying to write a data-driven load controller process. Wrap these tasks up in a sequence container so you don't have to maintain all of the dependencies explicitly.
You should definitely drop and re-create the indexes as this will greatly reduce the amount of I/O during the process.
If the 50 sources are being treated identically, try loading them into a common table or building a partitioned view over the staging tables.
Index at the end, yes. Also consider setting the log level setting to BULK LOGGED to minimize writes to the transaction log. Just remember to set it back to FULL after you've finished.
To the best of my knowledge, you are correct - it's much better to add the records all at once and then index once at the end.

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