Currently, we are using the SubmitFeed API section (FeedType _POST_INVENTORY_AVAILABILITY_DATA_) but because of the large number of SKUs (over 200k) we sometimes have problems to update our stock on time. I wrote a sync job that determines inventory changes constantly and then, every 30 minutes, creates a new inventory feed, but is still not enough.
Do you know any alternative API Sections for SubmitFeed (_POST_INVENTORY_AVAILABILITY_DATA_) or do you have an optimized solution for this without getting into throttling?
The smallest and, thus, quickest feed to send is
_POST_FLAT_FILE_PRICEANDQUANTITYONLY_UPDATE_DATA_
It's basically a CSV file with sku, new stock and new price. Amazon handles it in a reasonable short while. We handle about 120k SKUs and send a full hourly update with no issues.
Related
Suppose I am a subscription service and I have a table with each row representing customer data.
I want to build a system that consumes a daily snapshot of customer data. This daily snapshot contains data of all currently existing customers (i.e., there will be rows for new customers and customers that unsubscribed will not appear in this data). I also need to keep track of the duration that each customer has subscribed using start and end times. If a customer re-subscribes, another entry of this start and stop time is updated to that customer. A sample record/schema is shown below.
{
"CustomerId": "12345",
"CustomerName": "Bob",
"MagazineName": "DatabaseBoys",
"Gender": "Male",
"Address": "{streetName: \"Sesame Street\", ...}",
"SubscriptionTimeRanges": [{start:12345678, end: 23456789}, {start:34567890, end: 45678901},...]
}
I will be processing >250,000 rows of data once a day, every day
I need to know whether any record in the snapshot doesn't currently exist in the database
The total size of the table will be >250,000
There are longer-term benefits that would come from having a relational database (e.g., joining to another table that contains Magazine information)
I would like to get records by either CustomerId or MagazineName
Writes should not block reads
To achieve this, I anticipate needing to scan the entire table, iterating over every record, and individually updating the SubscriptionTimeRanges array/JSON blob of each record
Latency for writes is not a hard requirement, but at the same time, I shouldn't be expecting to take over an hour to update all of these records (could this be done in a single transaction if it's an update...?)
Reads should also be quick
Concurrent processing is always nice, but that may introduce locking for ACID compliant dbs?
I know that DynamoDB would be quick at handling this kind of use case, and the record schema is right up the NoSQL alley. I can use global secondary indexes / local secondary indexes to resolve some of my issues. I have some experience in PostgreSQL when using Redshift, but I mostly dealt with bulk inserts with no need for data modification. Now I need the data modification aspect. I'm thinking RDS Postgres would be nice for this, but would love to hear your thoughts or opinions.
P.S. don't take the "subscription" system design too seriously, it's the best parallel example I could think of when setting an example for similar requirements.. :)
This is a subjective question, but objectively speaking, DynamoDB is not designed for scans. It can do them, but it requires making repeated requests in a loop, starting each request where the last one left off. This isn't quick for large data sets, so there's also parallel scan but you have to juggle the threads and you consume a lot of table throughput with this.
On the flip side, it is easy and inexpensive to prototype and test against DynamoDB using the SDKs.
But with the daily need to scan the data, and potential need for joins, I would be strongly inclined to go with a relational database.
250,000 rows of data processed daily probably does not justify use of Amazon Redshift. It has a sweetspot of millions to billions of rows and is typically used when you want to do queries throughout the day.
If an RDS database suits your needs, then go for it! If you wish to save cost, you could accumulate the records in Amazon S3 throughout the day and then just load and process the data once per day, turning off the database when it isn't required. (Or even terminate it and launch a new one the next day, since it seems that you don't need to access historical data.)
Amazon Athena might even suit your needs, reading the daily data from S3 and not even needing a persistent database.
TL;DR
I have a table with about 2 million WRITEs over the month and 0 READs. Every 1st day of a month, I need to read all the rows written on the previous month and generate CSVs + statistics.
How to work with DynamoDB in this scenario? How to choose the READ throughput capacity?
Long description
I have an application that logs client requests. It has about 200 clients. The clients need to receive on every 1st day of a month a CSV with all the requests they've made. They also need to be billed, and for that we need to calculate some stats with the requests they've made, grouping by type of request.
So in the end of the month, a client receives a report like:
I've already come to two solutions, but I'm not still convinced on any of them.
1st solution: ok, every last day of the month I increase the READ throughput capacity and then I run a map reduce job. When the job is done, I decrease the capacity back to the original value.
Cons: not fully automated, risk of the DynamoDB capacity not being available when the job starts.
2nd solution: I can break the generation of CSVs + statistics to small jobs in a daily or hourly routine. I could store partial CSVs on S3 and on every 1st day of a month I could join those files and generate a new one. The statistics would be much easier to generate, just some calculations derived from the daily/hourly statistics.
Cons: I feel like I'm turning something simple into something complex.
Do you have a better solution? If not, what solution would you choose? Why?
Having been in a similar place myself before, I used, and now recommend to you, to process the raw data:
as often as you reasonably can (start with daily)
to a format as close as possible to the desired report output
with as much calculation/CPU intensive work done as possible
leaving as little to do at report time as possible.
This approach is entirely scaleable - the incremental frequency can be:
reduced to as small a window as needed
parallelised if required
It also, makes possible re-running past months reports on demand, as the report generation time should be quite small.
In my example, I shipped denormalized, pre-processed (financial calculations) data every hour to a data warehouse, then reporting just involved a very basic (and fast) SQL query.
This had the additional benefit of spreading the load on the production database server to lots of small bites, instead of bringing it to its knees once a week at invoice time (30000 invoiced produced every week).
I would use the service kinesis to produce a daily and almost real time billing.
for this purpose I would create a special DynamoDB table just for the calculated data.
(other option is to run it on flat files)
then I would add a process which will send events to kinesis service just after you update the regular DynamoDB table.
thus when you reach the end of the month you can just execute whatever post billing calculations you have and create your CSV files from the already calculated table.
I hope that helps.
Take a look at Dynamic DynamoDB. It will increase/decrease the throughput when you need it without any manual intervention. The good news is you will not need to change the way the export job is done.
I would like to use Hadoop to process input files which are generated every n minute. How should I approach this problem? For example I have temperature measurements of cities in USA received every 10 minute and I want to compute average temperatures per day per week and month.
PS: So far I have considered Apache Flume to get the readings. Which will get data from multiple servers and write the data periodically to HDFS. From where I can read and process them.
But how can I avoid working on same files again and again?
You should consider a Big Data stream processing platform like Storm (which I'm very familiar with, there are others, though) which might be better suited for the kinds of aggregations and metrics you mention.
Either way, however, you're going to implement something which has the entire set of processed data in a form that makes it very easy to apply the delta of just-gathered data to give you your latest metrics. Another output of this merge is a new set of data to which you'll apply the next hour's data. And so on.
I'm thinking about building a web-based data logging and visualization service. The basic idea is that at some timed interval something (e.g. a sensor) reports a value (e.g. temperature) to the server. The server records this value into a database. There would be a web-based UI that allows me to view this data on a time-based graph. Ideally this graph would have various resolutions (last 30 seconds, last week, last year, etc). In a super ideal world, I would be able to zoom into the data for any point in time.
The problem is that the sensors are going to generate enormous amounts of data. For example, a sensor that reports a value every 5 seconds will generate about 18k values a day. I'm imagining a system that has thousands of sensors. Over time, this becomes lots of data.
The naive solution is to throw this data into a relational database and retrieve it in the various ways I want, but that won't scale.
The simple solution is to reduce the amount of data by performing periodic roll-ups of the data. New data might go into a table that has data points every 5 seconds. Every hour, some system pumps this data into another table that has data points every minute and the original data is deleted. This repeats for a few levels. The downside to this is that the further back in time you go, the less detailed the data is. That's probably fine. I would imagine that I would need enormous amounts of hardware to support full resolution of data over all time as compared to a system with this sort of rollup.
Is there a better way to do this? Is there an existing solution? I have to imagine this is a fairly common problem.
You probably want a fixed sized database like RRDTool: http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/
Also Graphite is built on top of a similar datastore implementation: http://graphite.wikidot.com/
I am working with google app engine and using the low leval java api to access Big Table. I'm building a SAAS application with 4 layers:
Client web browser
RESTful resources layer
Business layer
Data access layer
I'm building an application to help manage my mobile auto detailing company (and others like it). I have to represent these four separate concepts, but am unsure if my current plan is a good one:
Appointments
Line Items
Invoices
Payments
Appointment: An "Appointment" is a place and time where employees are expected to be in order to deliver a service.
Line Item: A "Line Item" is a service, fee or discount and its associated information. An example of line items that might go into an appointment:
Name: Price: Commission: Time estimate
Full Detail, Regular Size: 160 75 3.5 hours
$10 Off Full Detail Coupon: -10 0 0 hours
Premium Detail: 220 110 4.5 hours
Derived totals(not a line item): $370 $185 8.0 hours
Invoice: An "Invoice" is a record of one or more line items that a customer has committed to pay for.
Payment: A "Payment" is a record of what payments have come in.
In a previous implementation of this application, life was simpler and I treated all four of these concepts as one table in a SQL database: "Appointment." One "Appointment" could have multiple line items, multiple payments, and one invoice. The invoice was just an e-mail or print out that was produced from the line items and customer record.
9 out of 10 times, this worked fine. When one customer made one appointment for one or a few vehicles and paid for it themselves, all was grand. But this system didn't work under a lot of conditions. For example:
When one customer made one appointment, but the appointment got rained out halfway through resulting in the detailer had to come back the next day, I needed two appointments, but only one line item, one invoice and one payment.
When a group of customers at an office all decided to have their cars done the same day in order to get a discount, I needed one appointment, but multiple invoices and multiple payments.
When one customer paid for two appointments with one check, I needed two appointments, but only one invoice and one payment.
I was able to handle all of these outliers by fudging things a little. For example, if a detailer had to come back the next day, i'd just make another appointment on the second day with a line item that said "Finish Up" and the cost would be $0. Or if I had one customer pay for two appointments with one check, I'd put split payment records in each appointment. The problem with this is that it creates a huge opportunity for data in-congruency. Data in-congruency can be a serious problem especially for cases involving financial information such as the third exmaple where the customer paid for two appointments with one check. Payments must be matched up directly with goods and services rendered in order to properly keep track of accounts receivable.
Proposed structure:
Below, is a normalized structure for organizing and storing this data. Perhaps because of my inexperience, I place a lot of emphasis on data normalization because it seems like a great way to avoid data incongruity errors. With this structure, changes to the data can be done with one operation without having to worry about updating other tables. Reads, however, can require multiple reads coupled with in-memory organization of data. I figure later on, if there are performance issues, I can add some denormalized fields to "Appointment" for faster querying while keeping the "safe" normalized structure intact. Denormalization could potentially slow down writes, but I was thinking that I might be able to make asynchronous calls to other resources or add to the task que so that the client does not have to wait for the extra writes that update the denormalized portions of the data.
Tables:
Appointment
start_time
etc...
Invoice
due_date
etc...
Payment
invoice_Key_List
amount_paid
etc...
Line_Item
appointment_Key_List
invoice_Key
name
price
etc...
The following is the series of queries and operations required to tie all four entities (tables) together for a given list of appointments. This would include information on what services were scheduled for each appointment, the total cost of each appointment and weather or not payment as been received for each appointment. This would be a common query when loading the calendar for appointment scheduling or for a manager to get an overall view of operations.
QUERY for the list of "Appointments" who's "start_time" field lies between the given range.
Add each key from the returned appointments into a List.
QUERY for all "Line_Items" who's appointment_key_List field includes any of the returns appointments
Add each invoice_key from all of the line items into a Set collection.
QUERY for all "Invoices" in the invoice ket set (this can be done in one asynchronous operation using app engine)
Add each key from the returned invoices into a List
QUERY for all "Payments" who's invoice_key_list field contains a key matching any of the returned invoices
Reorganize in memory so that each appointment reflects the line_items that are scheduled for it, the total price, total estimated time, and weather or not it has been paid for.
...As you can see, this operation requires 4 datastore queries as well as some in-memory organization (hopefully the in-memory will be pretty fast)
Can anyone comment on this design? This is the best I could come up with, but I suspect there might be better options or completely different designs that I'm not thinking of that might work better in general or specifically under GAE's (google app engine) strengths, weaknesses, and capabilities.
Thanks!
Usage clarification
Most applications are more read-intensive, some are more write intensive. Below, I describe a typical use-case and break down operations that the user would want to perform:
Manager gets a call from a customer:
Read - Manager loads the calendar and looks for a time that is available
Write - Manager queries customer for their information, I pictured this to be a succession of asynchronous reads as the manager enters each piece of information such as phone number, name, e-mail, address, etc... Or if necessary, perhaps one write at the end after the client application has gathered all of the information and it is then submitted.
Write - Manager takes down customer's credit card info and adds it to their record as a separate operation
Write - Manager charges credit card and verifies that the payment went through
Manager makes an outgoing phone call:
Read Manager loads the calendar
Read Manager loads the appointment for the customer he wants to call
Write Manager clicks "Call" button, a call is initiated and a new CallReacord entity is written
Read Call server responds to call request and reads CallRecord to find out how to handle the call
Write Call server writes updated information to the CallRecord
Write when call is closed, call server makes another request to the server to update the CallRecord resource (note: this request is not time-critical)
Accepted answer::
Both of the top two answers were very thoughtful and appreciated. I accepted the one with few votes in order to imperfectly equalize their exposure as much as possible.
You specified two specific "views" your website needs to provide:
Scheduling an appointment. Your current scheme should work just fine for this - you'll just need to do the first query you mentioned.
Overall view of operations. I'm not really sure what this entails, but if you need to do the string of four queries you mentioned above to get this, then your design could use some improvement. Details below.
Four datastore queries in and of itself isn't necessarily overboard. The problem in your case is that two of the queries are expensive and probably even impossible. I'll go through each query:
Getting a list of appointments - no problem. This query will be able to scan an index to efficiently retrieve the appointments in the date range you specify.
Get all line items for each of appointment from #1 - this is a problem. This query requires that you do an IN query. IN queries are transformed into N sub-queries behind the scenes - so you'll end up with one query per appointment key from #1! These will be executed in parallel so that isn't so bad. The main problem is that IN queries are limited to only a small list of values (up to just 30 values). If you have more than 30 appointment keys returned by #1 then this query will fail to execute!
Get all invoices referenced by line items - no problem. You are correct that this query is cheap because you can simply fetch all of the relevant invoices directly by key. (Note: this query is still synchronous - I don't think asynchronous was the word you were looking for).
Get all payments for all invoices returned by #3 - this is a problem. Like #2, this query will be an IN query and will fail if #3 returns even a moderate number of invoices which you need to fetch payments for.
If the number of items returned by #1 and #3 are small enough, then GAE will almost certainly be able to do this within the allowed limits. And that should be good enough for your personal needs - it sounds like you mostly need it to work, and don't need to it to scale to huge numbers of users (it won't).
Suggestions for improvement:
Denormalization! Try storing the keys for Line_Item, Invoice, and Payment entities relevant to a given appointment in lists on the appointment itself. Then you can eliminate your IN queries. Make sure these new ListProperty are not indexed to avoid problems with exploding indices
Other less specific ideas for improvement:
Depending on what your "overall view of operations" is going to show, you might be able to split up the retrieval of all this information. For example, perhaps you start by showing a list of appointments, and then when the manager wants more information about a particular appointment you go ahead and fetch the information relevant to that appointment. You could even do this via AJAX if you this interaction to take place on a single page.
Memcache is your friend - use it to cache the results of datastore queries (or even higher level results) so that you don't have to recompute it from scratch on every access.
As you've noticed, this design doesn't scale. It requires 4 (!!!) DB queries to render the page. That's 3 too many :)
The prevailing notion of working with the App Engine Datastore is that you want to do as much work as you possibly can when something is written, so that almost nothing needs to be done when something is retrieved and rendered. You presumably write the data very few times, compared to how many times it's rendered.
Normalization is similarly something that you seem to be striving for. The Datastore doesn't place any value in normalization -- it may mean less data incongruity, but it also means reading data is muuuuuch slower (4 reads?!!). Since your data is read much more often than it's written, optimize for reads, even if that means your data will occasionally be duplicated or out of sync for a short amount of time.
Instead of thinking about how the data looks when it's stored, think about how you want the data to look when it's displayed to the user. Store as close to that format as you can, even if that means literally storing pre-rendered HTML in the datastore. Reads will be lightning-fast, and that's a good thing.
So since you should optimize for reads, oftentimes your writes will grow to gigantic proportions. So gigantic that you can't fit it in the 30 second time limit for requests. Well, that's what the task queue is for. Store what you consider the "bare necessities" of your model in the datastore, then fire off a task queue to pull it back out, generate the HTML to be rendered, and put it in there in the background. This might mean your model is immediately ready to display until the task has finished with it, so you'll need a graceful degradation in this case, even if that means rendering it "the slow way" until the data is fully populated. Any further reads will be lightning-quick.
In summary, I don't have any specific advice directly related to your database -- that's dependent on what you want the data to look like when the user sees it.
What I can give you are some links to some super helpful videos about the datastore:
Brett Slatkin's 2008 and 2009 talks on building scalable, complex apps on App Engine, and a great one from this year about data pipelines (which isn't directly applicable I think, but really useful in general)
App Engine Under the Covers: How App Engine does what it does, behind the scenes
AppStats: a great way to see how many datastore reads you're performing, and some tips on reducing that number
Here are a few app-engine specific factors that I think you'll have to contend with:
When querying using an inequality, you can only use an inequality on one property. for example, if you are filtering on an appt date being between July 1st and July 4th, you couldn't also filter by price > 200
Transactions on app engine are a bit tricky compared to the SQL database you are probably used to. You can only do transactions on entities that are in the same "entity group".