What does a cluster size mean? - database

When someone says "I have a cluster size of 6TB", what do they mean?
In terms of database size? Or in terms of the amount of data being processed at any given time? I don't know what this means.

That may depends of context.
If someone mentioned 6TB they probably are talking about storage.
Strictly cluster should be related to data chunks to be stored where related data should be stored in same cluster.
To understand database cluster you should understand first understand file system cluster which may be 4-8-16-32-64 ... KB for exemple where your data is stored in one or many clusters. For example, if your file system is planified to store big files then your cluster size should be bigger, performance is improved. If you want to store small files then your cluster should be smaller in order to optimize space usage.
In database your goal should be to be able to store related data to same cluster, in this case performance is optimized.
Anyway, 6TB is not anything which could make sense, so, this is probably related to storage space (or many storage sum).
you may want to check following doc to get idea :
https://docs.oracle.com/database/121/ADMIN/clustrs.htm#ADMIN018

Related

Need a highly compressed datastore for Crawl data and log data

I have to store a lot of crawl and log data in a Datastore with an efficient compression ratio.
So far I tried and installed Cassandra, Couchbase, Mysql and an FlatFile format and read the architectual overview of Google Big Table, Hypertable and the LevelDB File Layout.
Cassandra and Couchbase are about 1/5 in disk size of the uncompressed Mysql Database, but I want better results.
So I need a Simple Data Store with high compression features as in vertica, teradata, oracle and sqlserver products. (Page level compression)
The actual flatFile dataSet looks like
/oil_type/gas_station/2014-03/2014-03-05-23.csv
/oil_type/gas_station/2014-03/2014-03-06-00.csv
/oil_type/gas_station/2014-03/2014-03-06-01.csv
Per File are about 400 high redundant entries each about 5kb
A File can be compressed from 1722 KB to 39 KB so an compression ratio of 44:1 up to 100:1 depending on the compression chunk size should be possible.
Defining the use case:
I have to poll all relevant gas_station webpages/apis every 30 seconds to get up to the minute pricing information, because it is not possible to write a parser for every gas station, a generic solution is required for index creation. With a database holding all craweld gas station pages a generic parser can easily be developed and backtestet. With this raw data model data loss through broken specific converters should be avoided.
With keys like "oil_type-gas_station-timestamp-content", its easy and efficient to compare two gas_station pricings over time. For reading a Time Serie that is smaller then the compression chunk size only 2 to 4 chunks should be decompressed.
So the following features are optimal:
SSTables
Configurable Compression Options (Level,Compression Engine,Chunk Size (from 64kb to 10 MB))
Range Scans
Java Bindings
column datasore for better compression
Nice to have:
Replication
Multi Master
write quorum of 1
Forward and backward iteration over the data. (to compare two time series)
configurable replica distribution
few dependencies
Question:
Wich free Database is able to hold archived data of high redundant crawl data (only a few bytes change) , compresses good and does not use too much time to query a random record.
(In opposit to the mysql archive format, that has to decompress the whole table until the requested row)
Maybe there is a log database, that is able to index a lot of log lines and compresses them internaly? (scope of logstash, fluentd, flume)
If someone would know some benchmarks, numbers on this topic it would help a lot, to evaluate the right technology.
I am glad for your help!
Assuming you are in a multithreaded environment, possible multi-process, LevelDB is NOT a good idea.
Cassandra is written in Java, therefore you'll see excessive memory consumption when handling a big load of big files, at least without tweaking the JVM. Also, since it's written in Java, it probably won't be fast enough for really good compression.
I use HyperTable on my Linux-box to store photos and movies.
You can use HyperTable from any language with Thrift-support.
Additionally, if you need it, you can use the C++ drivers, for extra-speed.
One thing that is nice about HyperTable is that it doesn't add a dependency on Java, since it's written in C++, which also means it's blazing fast and not garbage-collected (no memory overhead).
Hypertable does have a Java client however, out of the box.
I use my own C# Thrift-client, which I ported from Java.
See >here< for the code.
Since HyperTable operates on Byte-Arrays, you can simply put your file in the thrift-client as byte-array, and HyperTable will compress it for you automagically, if you have told it to do so in the column definition.
You could also try MongoDb, if you absolutely want to.
Mongo actually derives from humongous, by the way.
However, I must say I have never "really" used it.

Which NoSQL Database for Mostly Writing

I'm working on a system that will generate and store large amounts of data to disk. A previously developed system at the company used ordinary files to store its data but for several reasons it became very hard to manage.
I believe NoSQL databases are good solutions for us. What we are going to store is generally documents (usually around 100K but occasionally can be much larger or smaller) annotated with some metadata. Query performance is not top priority. The priority is writing in a way that I/O becomes as small a hassle as possible. The rate of data generation is about 1Gbps, but we might be moving on 10Gbps (or even more) in the future.
My other requirement is the availability of a (preferably well documented) C API. I'm currently testing MongoDB. Is this a good choice? If not, what other database system can I use?
The rate of data generation is about 1Gbps,... I'm currently testing MongoDB. Is this a good choice?
OK, so just to clarify, your data rate is ~1 gigaBYTE per 10 seconds. So you are filling a 1TB hard drive every 20 minutes or so?
MongoDB has pretty solid write rates, but it is ideally used in situations with a reasonably low RAM to Data ratio. You want to keep at least primary indexes in memory along with some data.
In my experience, you want about 1GB of RAM for every 5-10GB of Data. Beyond that number, read performance drops off dramatically. Once you get to 1GB of RAM for 100GB of data, even adding new data can be slow as the index stops fitting in RAM.
The big key here is:
What queries are you planning to run and how does MongoDB make running these queries easier?
Your data is very quickly going to occupy enough space that basically every query will just be going to disk. Unless you have a very specific indexing and sharding strategy, you end up just doing disk scans.
Additionally, MongoDB does not support compression. So you will be using lots of disk space.
If not, what other database system can I use?
Have you considered compressed flat files? Or possibly a big data Map/Reduce system like Hadoop (I know Hadoop is written in Java)
If C is key requirement, maybe you want to look at Tokyo/Kyoto Cabinet?
EDIT: more details
MongoDB does not support full-text search. You will have to look to other tools (Sphinx/Solr) for such things.
Larges indices defeat the purpose of using an index.
According to your numbers, you are writing 10M documents / 20 mins or about 30M / hour. Each document needs about 16+ bytes for an index entry. 12 bytes for ObjectID + 4 bytes for pointer into the 2GB file + 1 byte for pointer to file + some amount of padding.
Let's say that every index entry needs about 20 bytes, then your index is growing at 600MB / hour or 14.4GB / day. And that's just the default _id index.
After 4 days, your main index will no longer fit into RAM and your performance will start to drop off dramatically. (this is well-documented under MongoDB)
So it's going to be really important to figure out which queries you want to run.
Have a look at Cassandra. It executes writes are much faster than reads. Probably, that's what you're looking for.

Is Redis good for what I need

I have a website where users can submit text messages, dead simple data structure...
Name <-- Less than 20 characters
Message <-- Max 150 characters
Timestamp
IP
Hidden <-- Bool (True or False)
On the previous version of the website they are stored in MySQL database which is very big, lots of tables, and am wanting to simplify the database. So I heard Redis is good for simple data structures and non relational information...
Would Redis be a good option for this kind of data and how would it perform, with memory usage and read times when talking about 100,000+ records a year...
redis is really only good for in-memory problem sets. It DOES have a page-to-disk capability - but then you're at the mercy of the OS swapper - namely you're RAM will be in competition with system-caches. Also, I think the keys always have to fit in RAM. So you're NOT going to want to store 1G+ log records - mysql-archive-table is MUCH better for that.
redis has a master-slave functionality, similar to mysql. So you can perform various tricks such as sorting on a slave to keep the master responsive. While I haven't used it, I'd speculate that for in-memory databases, mysql-cluster is probably far more advanced - but with corresponding extra complexity / resource-costs.
If you have large values for your key-value set, you can perform client-side compression/decompression. There isn't much the server can do to search on the values of those 'blobs' anyway.
One common way to get around the RAM limitation is to perform client-side sharding (partitioning). Namely, if you KNOW your upper bounds, and you don't have enough RAM to throw at the problem for some reason (say you already have 64GB of RAM), then you could 'shard' based on the primary key.. If it's a sequence counter, you could take the bottom 3 bits (or some hashing function + partition function), and distribute amongst 4,8,16, etc server nodes. That scales linearly, though if you need to re-partition, that could be painful. You COULD take advantage of the 'slots' in redis to start off with fewer machines.. Say 1 machine with 16 slots.. Then later, dump slots 7-15 and restore on a different machine and remap all the clients to point to the two machines (with the same slot numbers). And so forth to 16-way sharding. At which point, you'd need to remap ALL your data to go to 32-way.
Obviously first evaluate the command-set of redis to see if ALL your data-storage and reporting needs can be met. There are equivalents to "select * from foo for update", but they're not obvious. Not all RDBMS queries can be reproduced efficiently with key-value stores. But for simple natural-primary-key record-structures it should do fine.
Additionally, it should be easy to extend the redis command-set to perform custom operations.. Just keep in mind, it's designed around no-pause single-threaded execution (avoids locking /context-switching overhead).
But things I really like are the FIFOs, pub/sub, data-time-outs, atomic-mutations (inc/dec), lazy-sorting (e.g. on client with read-only nodes), maps of maps. It's simple enough that instead of using name-spaces, you just launch separate redis processes on different ports / UNIX-sockets (my preference if possible).
It's meant to replace memcached more than anything else, but has a very nice background persistent framework.

How to instantly query a 64Go database

Ok everyone, I have an excellent challenge for you. Here is the format of my data :
ID-1 COL-11 COL-12 ... COL-1P
...
ID-N COL-N1 COL-N2 ... COL-NP
ID is my primary key and index. I just use ID to query my database. The datamodel is very simple.
My problem is as follow:
I have 64Go+ of data as defined above and in a real-time application, I need to query my database and retrieve the data instantly. I was thinking about 2 solutions but impossible to set up.
First use sqlite or mysql. One table is needed with one index on ID column. The problem is that the database will be too large to have good performance, especially for sqlite.
Second is to store everything in memory into a huge hashtable. RAM is the limit.
Do you have another suggestion? How about to serialize everything on the filesystem and then, at each query, store queried data into a cache system?
When I say real-time, I mean about 100-200 query/second.
A thorough answer would take into account data access patterns. Since we don't have these, we just have to assume equal probably distribution that a row will be accessed next.
I would first try using a real RDBMS, either embedded or local server, and measure the performance. If this this gives 100-200 queries/sec then you're done.
Otherwise, if the format is simple, then you could create a memory mapped file and handle the reading yourself using a binary search on the sorted ID column. The OS will manage pulling pages from disk into memory, and so you get free use of caching for frequently accessed pages.
Cache use can be optimized more by creating a separate index, and grouping the rows by access pattern, such that rows that are often read are grouped together (e.g. placed first), and rows that are often read in succession are placed close to each other (e.g. in succession.) This will ensure that you get the most back for a cache miss.
Given the way the data is used, you should do the following:
Create a record structure (fixed size) that is large enough to contain one full row of data
Export the original data to a flat file that follows the format defined in step 1, ordering the data by ID (incremental)
Do a direct access on the file and leave caching to the OS. To get record number N (0-based), you multiply N by the size of a record (in byte) and read the record directly from that offset in the file.
Since you're in read-only mode and assuming you're storing your file in a random access media, this scales very well and it doesn't dependent on the size of the data: each fetch is a single read in the file. You could try some fancy caching system but I doubt this would gain you much in terms of performance unless you have a lot of requests for the same data row (and the OS you're using is doing poor caching). make sure you open the file in read-only mode, though, as this should help the OS figure out the optimal caching mechanism.

How do databases deal with data tables that cannot fit in memory?

Suppose you have a really large table, say a few billion unordered rows, and now you want to index it for fast lookups. Or maybe you are going to bulk load it and order it on the disk with a clustered index. Obviously, when you get to a quantity of data this size you have to stop assuming that you can do things like sorting in memory (well, not without going to virtual memory and taking a massive performance hit).
Can anyone give me some clues about how databases handle large quantities of data like this under the hood? I'm guessing there are algorithms that use some form of smart disk caching to handle all the data but I don't know where to start. References would be especially welcome. Maybe an advanced databases textbook?
Multiway Merge Sort is a keyword for sorting huge amounts of memory
As far as I know most indexes use some form of B-trees, which do not need to have stuff in memory. You can simply put nodes of the tree in a file, and then jump to varios position in the file. This can also be used for sorting.
Are you building a database engine?
Edit: I built a disc based database system back in the mid '90's.
Fixed size records are the easiest to work with because your file offset for locating a record can be easily calculated as a multiple of the record size. I also had some with variable record sizes.
My system needed to be optimized for reading. The data was actually stored on CD-ROM, so it was read-only. I created binary search tree files for each column I wanted to search on. I took an open source in-memory binary search tree implementation and converted it to do random access of a disc file. Sorted reads from each index file were easy and then reading each data record from the main data file according to the indexed order was also easy. I didn't need to do any in-memory sorting and the system was way faster than any of the available RDBMS systems that would run on a client machine at the time.
For fixed record size data, the index can just keep track of the record number. For variable length data records, the index just needs to store the offset within the file where the record starts and each record needs to begin with a structure that specifies it's length.
You would have to partition your data set in some way. Spread out each partition on a separate server's RAM. If I had a billion 32-bit int's - thats 32 GB of RAM right there. And thats only your index.
For low cardinality data, such as Gender (has only 2 bits - Male, Female) - you can represent each index-entry in less than a byte. Oracle uses a bit-map index in such cases.
Hmm... Interesting question.
I think that most used database management systems using operating system mechanism for memory management, and when physical memory ends up, memory tables goes to swap.

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