Merging different granularity time series in influxdb - database

I want to store trades as well as best ask/bid data, where the latter updates much more rapidly than the former, in InfluxDB.
I want to, if possible, use a schema that allows me to query: "for each trade on market X, find the best ask/bid on market Y whose timestamp is <= the timestamp of the trade".
(I'll use any version of Influx.)
For example, trades might look like this:
Time Price Volume Direction Market
00:01.000 100 5 1 foo-bar
00:03.000 99 50 0 bar-baz
00:03.050 99 25 0 foo-bar
00:04.000 101 15 1 bar-baz
And tick data might look more like this:
Time Ask Bid Market
00:00.763 100 99 bar-baz
00:01.010 101 99 foo-bar
00:01.012 101 98 bar-baz
00:01.012 101 99 foo-bar
00:01:238 100 99 bar-baz
...
00:03:021 101 98 bar-baz
I would want to be able to somehow join each trade for some market, e.g. foo-bar, with only the most recent ask/bid data point on some other market, e.g. bar-baz, and get a result like:
Time Trade Price Ask Bid
00:01.000 100 100 99
00:03.050 99 101 98
Such that I could compute the difference between the trade price on market foo-bar and the most recently quoted ask or bid on market bar-baz.
Right now, I store trades in one time series and ask/bid data points in another and merge them on the client side, with logic along the lines of:
function merge(trades, quotes, data_points)
next_trade, more_trades = first(trades), rest(trades)
quotes = drop-while (quote.timestamp < next_trade.timestamp) quotes
data_point = join(next_trade, first(quotes))
if more_trades
return merge(more_trades, quotes, data_points + data_point)
return data_points + data_point
The problem is that the client has to discard tons of ask/bid data points because they update so frequently, and only the most recent update before the trade is relevant.
There are tens of markets whose most recent ask/bid I might want to compare a trade with, otherwise I'd simply store the most recent ask/bid in the same series as the trades.
Is it possible to do what I want to do with Influx, or with another time series database? An alternative solution that produces lower quality results is to group the ask/bid data by some time interval, say 250ms, and take the last from each interval, to at least impose an upper bound on the amount of quotes the client has to drop before finding the one that's closest to the next trade.

NB. Just a clarification on InfluxDB terminology. You're probably storing trade and tick data in different measurements(analogous to a table). Series is a subdivision withing a measurement based on tag values. e.g
Time Ask Bid Market
00:00.763 100 99 bar-baz
is one series
Time Ask Bid Market
00:01.010 101 99 foo-bar
is another series(assuming you are storing Market name/id as a tag and not a field)
Answer
InfluxQL https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v1.7/query_language/spec/ - I can't think of a way to achieve what you need with InfluxQL (Influx Query Language) as it does not support joins.
Perhaps what you could do on the client side is instead of requesting all tick data for a period and discarding most of it, make a request per trade and market to get exactly the (the most recent with respect to the trade) ask/bid datapoint that you need. Something like:
function merge(trades, market)
points = <empty list>
for next_trade in trades
quote = db.query("select last(ask), last(bid) from tick_data where time<=next_trade.timestamp and Market=market and time>next_trade.timestamp - 1m")
// or to get a list per market with one query
// quote_per_market = db.query("select last(ask), last(bid) from tick_data where time<=next_trade.timestamp group by Market")
points = points + join(next_trade, quote)
return points
Of course you'd have the overhead of querying the database more frequently but depending on the number of trades and your resource constraints it may be more efficient. NB. A potential pitfall here is that ask and bid retrieved this way are not retrieved as a pair but independently and while they are returned as a pair it could happen that they have different timestamps. If for some timestamp for some reason you only have an ask or a bid price you might run into this problem. However, as long as you write them in pairs and have no missing data it should be ok.
Flux https://www.influxdata.com/products/flux/ - Flux is a more sophisticated query language that is part of Influxdb 1.7 and 2 that allows you to do joins and operations across different measurements. I can't give you any examples yet but it's worth having a look at.
Other (relational) Times Series DBs that you could have a look at that would also allow you to do joins are CrateDB https://crate.io/ or Postgres + TimescaleDB https://www.timescale.com/products

Related

How to skip rows with the same values

I have the following problem: I have a dataset with over 1million entries (shown below), that includes the variables company (=Name of the company (string)) and reviews (=amount of reviews a company received) and company1 (assigns numeric to specific company name). Now I want to calculate the average amount of reviews a company in the dataset receives. But if I just do sum reviewsthen it will count the amount of reviews of company 3 two times, the amount of reviews of company five 23 times etc. (as often as they are listed in the data). How do I avoid this and only count them once?
Your image is not readable (by me on a laptop). The Stata tag wiki gives detailed advice on how to give data examples and the command dataex bundled with recent versions of Stata is easily used for SE.
The flavour of your request is easier to follow. Here is an analogue. With the Grunfeld data we can calculate a mean investment for each year.
webuse grunfeld, clear
egen mean = mean(invest), by(year)
Now we might want to know how many years had mean invest above 200 (in the units used)?
su mean if mean > 200
or
count if mean > 200
returns the number of observations (not years). If you try it, the result is 30. In the Grunfeld data, there are 10 companies each measured for each year, so dividing by 10 is an easy answer. For more complicated datasets, it would better to tag each year just once, and then look only at tagged observations:
egen tag = tag(year)
count if tag & mean > 200
It would be more common to tag panels, not years, but the principle is the same. See the help for egen.
collapse and contract offer other routes, with or without using frames.

Structure data in app engine ndb and speed up query

I am looking for some help as to the best way to structure data in app engine ndb using python, process it and query it later. I want to store temperature data at hourly intervals for different geographical regions.
I can think of two entity options but there maybe something much better. The first would be to store the hourly temperature in individual properties:
class TempData(ndb.Model):
region = ndb.StringProperty()
date = ndb.DateProperty()
00:00 = ndb.FloatProperty()
01:00 = ndb.FloatProperty()
...
23:00 = ndb.FloatProperty()
Or I could store the data
class TempData(ndb.Model):
region = ndb.StringProperty()
date = ndb.DateProperty()
time = ndb.TimeProperty()
temp = ndb.FloatProperty()
(it might be better to store date and time as one property?)
I want to be able to query the datastore to calculate the Total, Max, Min, and average temperature for any given date range. In the first option I could potentially create 4 more properties to effectively pre-process and store the Total, Max etc for each day so if I wanted to query the total temperature for a year I would only have to sum 365 values as opposed to 8760? I'm not sure how I would do this in the second option?
I am relatively new to app engine and datastore and I think I am still thinking in terms of relationship db's so any help would really be appreciated. Later on it might be necessary to store data in different time zones.
Thanks
Paul
Personally, I'd go with a variant of the first approach:
class TempData(ndb.Model):
region = ndb.StringProperty()
date = ndb.DateProperty()
temp = ndb.FloatProperty(repeated=True)
using the temp list to store temperatures by hour in order as you learn about them. I don't think the preprocessing per-date will add anything much: to compute whatever for a year, you'd still need to fetch 365 entities, and the delay for that will swamp the tiny amount of time required to sum up a few thousand numbers anyway.
In general, preprocessing is useful if you want to handily query by the new fields you create by such processing (e.g rapidly answer the question "which dates in locale X had average temperatures greater than 20 Celsius"). That does not seem to be your use case.
If anything, if it's common for you to have to compute many-month values, preprocessing to aggregate things per-month (into simpler TempDataMonth entities) may be more useful. Or, any other several-days period you find useful, of course (weeks, ten-day-groups, whatever). Those could be computed in a background task periodically checking which such periods have become complete since the last check. But, this is a bit beyond your question, so I'm not getting into fine-grained details.
The general idea is that minimizing the number of entities to fetch tends to be the single most important optimization; other optimizations are of course also possible, but, they tend to play second fiddle to that:-).

How to store sets of objects that have occurred together during events?

I'm looking for an efficient way of storing sets of objects that have occurred together during events, in such a way that I can generate aggregate stats on them on a day-by-day basis.
To make up an example, let's imagine a system that keeps track of meetings in an office. For every meeting we record how many minutes long it was and in which room it took place.
I want to get stats broken down both by person as well as by room. I do not need to keep track of the individual meetings (so no meeting_id or anything like that), all I want to know is daily aggregate information. In my real application there are hundreds of thousands of events per day so storing each one individually is not feasible.
I'd like to be able to answer questions like:
In 2012, how many minutes did Bob, Sam, and Julie spend in each conference room (not necessarily together)?
Probably fine to do this with 3 queries:
>>> query(dates=2012, people=[Bob])
{Board-Room: 35, Auditorium: 279}
>>> query(dates=2012, people=[Sam])
{Board-Room: 790, Auditorium: 277, Broom-Closet: 71}
>>> query(dates=2012, people=[Julie])
{Board-Room: 190, Broom-Closet: 55}
In 2012, how many minutes did Sam and Julie spend MEETING TOGETHER in each conference room? What about Bob, Sam, and Julie all together?
>>> query(dates=2012, people=[Sam, Julie])
{Board-Room: 128, Broom-Closet: 55}
>>> query(dates=2012, people=[Bob, Sam, Julie])
{Board-Room: 22}
In 2012, how many minutes did each person spend in the Board-Room?
>>> query(dates=2012, rooms=[Board-Room])
{Bob: 35, Sam: 790, Julie: 190}
In 2012, how many minutes was the Board-Room in use?
This is actually pretty difficult since the naive strategy of summing up the number of minutes each person spent will result in serious over-counting. But we can probably solve this by storing the number separately as the meta-person Anyone:
>>> query(dates=2012, rooms=[Board-Room], people=[Anyone])
865
What are some good data structures or databases that I can use to enable this kind of querying? Since the rest of my application uses MySQL, I'm tempted to define a string column that holds the (sorted) ids of each person in the meeting, but the size of this table will grow pretty quickly:
2012-01-01 | "Bob" | "Board-Room" | 2
2012-01-01 | "Julie" | "Board-Room" | 4
2012-01-01 | "Sam" | "Board-Room" | 6
2012-01-01 | "Bob,Julie" | "Board-Room" | 2
2012-01-01 | "Bob,Sam" | "Board-Room" | 2
2012-01-01 | "Julie,Sam" | "Board-Room" | 3
2012-01-01 | "Bob,Julie,Sam" | "Board-Room" | 2
2012-01-01 | "Anyone" | "Board-Room" | 7
What else can I do?
Your question is a little unclear because you say you don't want to store each individual meeting, but then how are you getting the current meeting stats (dates)? In addition any table given the right indexes can be very fast even with alot of records.
You should be able to use a table like log_meeting. I imagine it could contain something like:
employee_id, room_id, date (as timestamp), time_in_meeting
Where foreign keys to employee id to employee table, and room id key to room table
If you index employee id, room id, and date you should have a pretty quick lookup as mysql multiple-column indexes go left to right such that you gain index on (employee id, employee id + room id, and employee id + room id + timestamp) when do searches. This is explained more in the multi-index part of:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-indexes.html
By refusing to store meetings (and related objects) individually, you are loosing the original source of information.
You will not be able to compensate for this loss of data, unless you memorize on a regular basis the extensive list of all potential daily (or monthly or weekly or ...) aggregates that you might need to question later on!
Believe me, it's going to be a nightmare ...
If the number of people are constant and not very large you can then assign a column to each person for present or not and store the room, date and time in 3 more columns this can remove the string splitting problems.
Also by the nature of your question I feel first of all you need to assign Ids to everything rooms,people, etc. No need for long repetitive string in DB. Also try reducing any string operation and work using individual data in each column for better intersection performance. Also you can store a permutation all the people in a table and assign a id for them then use one of those ids in the actual date and time table. But all techniques will require that something be constant either people or rooms.
I do not understand whether you know all "questions" in design time or it's possible to add new ones during development/production time - this approach would require to keep all data all the time.
Well if you would know all your questions it seems like classic "banking system" which recalculates data on daily basis.
How I think about it.
Seems like you have limited number of rooms, people, days etc.
Gather logging data on daily basis, one table per day. Just one event, one database row, all information (field) what you need.
Start to analyse data using some crone script at "midnight".
Update stats for people, rooms, etc. Just increment number of hours spent by Bob in xyz room etc. All what your requirements need.
As analyzed data are limited and relatively small as you analyzed (compress) them, your system can contain also various queries as indexes would be relatively small etc.
You could be able to use scalable map/reduce algorithm.
You can't avoid storing the atomic facts as follows: (the meeting room, the people, the duration, the day), which is probably only a weak consolidation when the same people meet multiple times in the same room on the same day. Maybe that happens a lot in your office :).
Making groups comparable is an interesting problem, but as long as you always compose the member strings the same, you can probably do it with string comparisons. This is not "normal" however. To normalise you'll need a relation table (many to many) and compose a temporary table out of your query set so it joins quickly, or use an "IN" clause and a count aggregate to ensure everyone is there (you'll see what I mean when you try it).
I think you can derive the minutes the board room was in use as meetings shouldn't overlap, so a sum will work.
For storage efficiency, use integer keys for everything with lookup tables. Dereference the integers during the query parsing, or just use good old joins if you are feeling traditional.
That's how I would do it anyway :).
You'll probably have to store individual meetings to get the data you need anyway.
However you'll have to make sure you aggregate and anonymise it properly before creating your reports. Make sure to separate concerns and access levels to stay within the proper legal limits on data.

Cassandra data model for time series

I am working on a Cassandra data model for storing time series (I'm a Cassandra newbie).
I have two applications: intraday stock data and sensor data.
The stock data will be saved with a time resolution of one minute.
Seven datafields build one timeframe:
Symbol, Datetime, Open, High, Low, Close, Volume
I will query the data mostly by Symbol and Date. e.g. give me all data for AAPL between 2013-01-01 and 2013-01-31 ordered by Datetime.
The recommendation for cassandra queries is to query whole columns. So you could create five rows with the keys Open, High, Low, Close, Volume. And for each Symbol and Minute an own column. E.g. "AAPL:2013-01-04T130400Z".
This would result in a table of five rows and n*NT columns where n = number of symbols, nT = number of minutes.
Most of the time I will query date ranges. I.e. all minutes of a day. So I could rearrange the data to have columns named "AAPL:2013-01-04" and rows: OpenT130400Z, HighT130400Z, LowT130400Z, CloseT130400Z, VolumeT130400Z.
This would result in a table with n*nD columns (n: number of Symbols, nD: number of Days) and 5*nM rows (nM: number of minutes/entries per day).
To sum up: I have columns, which hold the information for a whole day for one symbol.
I have found a description how to deal with time series data in cassandra here http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/advanced-time-series-with-cassandra
But I don't really get, if they use the hour (1332960000) as a column name or as a row key!?
I understood they use the hour as row key and have the small timesteps as columns. So they would have a fixed column number. But that would have disadvantages in reading because I would have to do a range query on keys! Am I right?
Second question:
If I have sensor data, which is much more fine grained than 1 minute stock data (let's say I have to save timesteps with a resolution of microseconds) how would I deal with this?
If I use columns for saving a composite of sensor channel and hours, and rows for microseconds since the last hour this would result in 3,600,000,000 rows and n*nH columns (n: number of sensors, nH: number of Hours).
I could not use the microseconds since last hour for columns because I have 3,6 billion points which is higher than the allowed number of 2 billion columns.
Did I get it?
What do you think about this problem? How to solve it?
Thank you!
Best,
Malte
So I have a suggestion for your first question about the stock data. A naive implementation might look like this:
RowKey:
Column Format:
Name: The current datetime granular to a minute
Value: a composite column of Open,High,Low,Close,Volume
So you would have something like
AAPL = [2013-05-02-15:38:00 | 441.78:448.59:440.63:15066146:445.52] ... [2013-05-02-15:39:00 | 441.78:448.59:440.63:15066146:445.52] ... [2013-05-02-15:40:00 | 441.78:448.59:440.63:15066146:445.52]
That would give you roughly half a million columns in one year so it might be ok for maybe 4 years. I wouldn't go and attempt to hit the 2 billion limit. What you could do is define a splitting factor on the row key. It all depends on your usage pattern, but a simple one might be on the year so the column family entry might look like this with a composite row key and that would guarantee that you always have less than a million columns per row.
AAPL:2013 = [05-02-15:38:00 | 441.78:448.59:440.63:15066146:445.52] ... [05-02-15:39:00 | 441.78:448.59:440.63:15066146:445.52] ... [05-02-15:40:00 | 441.78:448.59:440.63:15066146:445.52]

How to keep track changing items in a stock portfolio?

I have a system where people can pick some stocks and it values their portfolios but I'm having trouble doing this in a efficient way on a daily basis because I'm creating entries for days that don't have any changes(think of it like I'm measuring the values and having version control so I can track changes to the way the portfolio is designed).
Here's a example(each day's portfolio with stock name and weight):
Day1:
ibm = 10%
microsoft = 50%
google = 40%
day5:
ibm = 20%
microsoft = 20%
google = 40%
cisco = 20%
I can measure the value of the portfolio on day1 and understand I need to measure it again on day5(when it changed) but how do I measure day2-4 without recreating day1's entry in the database?
My approach right now(which I don't like) is to create a temp entry in my database for when someone changes the portfolio and then at the end of the day when I calculate the values if there is a temp entry I use that otherwise I create a new entry(for day2-4) using the last days data. The issue is as data often doesn't change I'm creating entries that are basically duplicates. The catch is: my stock data is all daily. I also thought of taking the portfolio and if it hasn't been updated in 3 days to find the returns of the last 3 days for each stock but I wasn't sure if there was a better solution.
Any ideas? I think this is a straight forward problem but I just can't see a efficient way of doing it.
note: in finance terms, its called creating a NAV and most firms do it the inefficient way I'm doing it but its because the process was created like 50 years ago and hasn't changed. I think this problem is very similar to version control but I can't seem to make a solution.
In storage terms is makes most sense to just store:
UserId - StockId1 - 23% - 2012-06-25
UserId - StockId2 - 11% - 2012-06-26
UserId - StockId1 - 20% - 2012-06-30
So you see that stock 1 went down at 30th. Now if you want to know the StockId1 percentage at the 28th you just select:
SELECT *
FROM stocks
WHERE datecolumn<=DATE(2012-06-28)
ORDER BY datecolumn DESC LIMIT 0,1
If it gives nothing back you did not have it, otherwise you get the last position back.
BTW. if you need for example a graph of stock 1 you could left join against a table full of dates. Then you can fill in the gaps easily.
Found this post here for example:
UPDATE mytable
SET number = (#n := COALESCE(number, #n))
ORDER BY date;
SQL QUERY replace NULL value in a row with a value from the previous known value

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