Datastore projection query not returning results - google-app-engine

I have a nested field {A: v1, B:v2, C:v3, D:v4, E:v5}, and entries are being created from ndb model class in app engine.
I need to run queries in some other application, where i need to return only certain projection. I created the suggested index, but still query returns 0 results.
Works: select * from Kind where E > v6.
Works: select A,B,D, E from kind.
Does not work: select A, B, D from kind where E > v6

All of the queries in question use different sets of indexes which may have different levels of eventual consistency. See https://cloud.google.com/datastore/docs/articles/balancing-strong-and-eventual-consistency-with-google-cloud-datastore/ for more details about eventual consistency.

Related

Avoiding in Filter in AppEngine Datastore

I have two Entities with me on Google DataStore:
A:
id,
name,
.... a lot of other columns
B:
id,
Key(A, <id_of_A_record>) --> Reference Property A,
URL,
size
... and more columns
I have a bunch of A ids with me and I want to query with those ids.
Now I am able to achieve this using
A_ids = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
B.all().filter('A IN', A_ids).fetch(None)
However, if there are 6 A_ids, there are 6 db calls, therefore beating the purpose of IN. Is they any way in which I can achieve this by avoiding the IN filter (too many DB calls)?
Thank you!
The in filter is actually just a convenience function provided by your ORM. Behind the scenes, it's doing a series of ORs to make it happen.
The filter name in (value1, ..., valueN) is converted into (name = value1) OR ... OR (name = valueN) (also a DisjunctionNode)
https://googleapis.dev/python/python-ndb/latest/query.html#google.cloud.ndb.query.FilterNode
Even ORs aren't supported by datastore itself, it's just emulated by the client library:
The nature of the index query mechanism imposes certain restrictions on what a query can do. Datastore mode queries do not support substring matches, case-insensitive matches, or so-called full-text search. The NOT, OR, and != operators are not natively supported, but some client libraries may add support on top of Datastore mode.
https://cloud.google.com/datastore/docs/concepts/queries#restrictions_on_queries
I think the client library performs ORs by launching separate queries, which is why you are seeing those 6 db calls. I don't think you'll be able to escape it without restructuring your data.

efficient set operations in google app engine datastore

I'm having problems converting a set problem into an efficient google app engine datastore solution. The problem is as follows. I have an entity defining a relationship between two objects, i.e. something like this:
struct Relation
{
Obj1 int
Obj2 int
// other data
}
Now I want to perform the following query in an efficient manner: given a set of objects set = [obj1, obj2, obj3, obj4], I want to find all Relation entities (E) for which E.Obj1 ∈ set ∧ E.Obj2 ∈ set. Note that I do not know the set beforehand, so I cannot precompute all the entries in the set once. Is there any way to represent this problem in the datastore so that I can efficiently retrieve all the relationships that are part of a given set?
The equivalent GQL query is "SELECT * FROM Kind WHERE Obj1 IN :1 AND Obj2 IN :1", passing in the set as the first parameter. Unfortunately, IN queries expand out to one query for each term, so there's a combinatorial explosion of queries here - 16 queries in the case of a 4 element set. There's not really any way to avoid this with a standard query.

In AppEngine (JDO), what is the difference between equality (==) of an item with list and contains() function?

For example, if I have: List A; and a String B;
What is the difference, in JDO (AppEngine), between the following two conditions in a query: B == A; and A.contains(B);?
Also, does the query in Slides 23-25 of http://dl.google.com/io/2009/pres/W_0415_Building_Scalable_Complex_App_Engines.pdf work efficiently in AppEngine (JDO) for more than 30 receivers? How so, especially since I read in AppEngine documentation that each contains() query can have a maximum of 30 items in the list. Do I not use a contains() query to imitate the above slides (written in Python)? If not, then how can I achieve the same results in JDO?
Any suggestions/comments are highly welcome. I'm trying to build a messaging system in AppEngine but having trouble trying to get used to the platform.
Thanks.
There's no difference - in App Engine, equality checks on lists are the same as checking for containment, due to the way things are indexed in the datastore.
By the query on slides 23-25, I presume you mean this one?
indexes = db.GqlQuery(
"SELECT __key__ FROM MessageIndex "
"WHERE receivers = :1", me)
keys = [k.parent() for k in indexes]
messages = db.get(keys)
This works just fine, as it's a list containment check as described above, and results in a single datastore query. The limitation you're thinking about is on the reverse: if you have a list, and you want to find a record that contains any item in that list, a subquery will be created for each element in the list.

GQL query with "like" operator [duplicate]

Simple one really. In SQL, if I want to search a text field for a couple of characters, I can do:
SELECT blah FROM blah WHERE blah LIKE '%text%'
The documentation for App Engine makes no mention of how to achieve this, but surely it's a common enough problem?
BigTable, which is the database back end for App Engine, will scale to millions of records. Due to this, App Engine will not allow you to do any query that will result in a table scan, as performance would be dreadful for a well populated table.
In other words, every query must use an index. This is why you can only do =, > and < queries. (In fact you can also do != but the API does this using a a combination of > and < queries.) This is also why the development environment monitors all the queries you do and automatically adds any missing indexes to your index.yaml file.
There is no way to index for a LIKE query so it's simply not available.
Have a watch of this Google IO session for a much better and more detailed explanation of this.
i'm facing the same problem, but i found something on google app engine pages:
Tip: Query filters do not have an explicit way to match just part of a string value, but you can fake a prefix match using inequality filters:
db.GqlQuery("SELECT * FROM MyModel WHERE prop >= :1 AND prop < :2",
"abc",
u"abc" + u"\ufffd")
This matches every MyModel entity with a string property prop that begins with the characters abc. The unicode string u"\ufffd" represents the largest possible Unicode character. When the property values are sorted in an index, the values that fall in this range are all of the values that begin with the given prefix.
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastore/queriesandindexes.html
maybe this could do the trick ;)
Altough App Engine does not support LIKE queries, have a look at the properties ListProperty and StringListProperty. When an equality test is done on these properties, the test will actually be applied on all list members, e.g., list_property = value tests if the value appears anywhere in the list.
Sometimes this feature might be used as a workaround to the lack of LIKE queries. For instance, it makes it possible to do simple text search, as described on this post.
You need to use search service to perform full text search queries similar to SQL LIKE.
Gaelyk provides domain specific language to perform more user friendly search queries. For example following snippet will find first ten books sorted from the latest ones with title containing fern
and the genre exactly matching thriller:
def documents = search.search {
select all from books
sort desc by published, SearchApiLimits.MINIMUM_DATE_VALUE
where title =~ 'fern'
and genre = 'thriller'
limit 10
}
Like is written as Groovy's match operator =~.
It supports functions such as distance(geopoint(lat, lon), location) as well.
App engine launched a general-purpose full text search service in version 1.7.0 that supports the datastore.
Details in the announcement.
More information on how to use this: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/training/fts_intro/lesson2
Have a look at Objectify here , it is like a Datastore access API. There is a FAQ with this question specifically, here is the answer
How do I do a like query (LIKE "foo%")
You can do something like a startWith, or endWith if you reverse the order when stored and searched. You do a range query with the starting value you want, and a value just above the one you want.
String start = "foo";
... = ofy.query(MyEntity.class).filter("field >=", start).filter("field <", start + "\uFFFD");
Just follow here:
init.py#354">http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/source/browse/trunk/python/google/appengine/ext/search/init.py#354
It works!
class Article(search.SearchableModel):
text = db.TextProperty()
...
article = Article(text=...)
article.save()
To search the full text index, use the SearchableModel.all() method to get an
instance of SearchableModel.Query, which subclasses db.Query. Use its search()
method to provide a search query, in addition to any other filters or sort
orders, e.g.:
query = article.all().search('a search query').filter(...).order(...)
I tested this with GAE Datastore low-level Java API. Me and works perfectly
Query q = new Query(Directorio.class.getSimpleName());
Filter filterNombreGreater = new FilterPredicate("nombre", FilterOperator.GREATER_THAN_OR_EQUAL, query);
Filter filterNombreLess = new FilterPredicate("nombre", FilterOperator.LESS_THAN, query+"\uFFFD");
Filter filterNombre = CompositeFilterOperator.and(filterNombreGreater, filterNombreLess);
q.setFilter(filter);
In general, even though this is an old post, a way to produce a 'LIKE' or 'ILIKE' is to gather all results from a '>=' query, then loop results in python (or Java) for elements containing what you're looking for.
Let's say you want to filter users given a q='luigi'
users = []
qry = self.user_model.query(ndb.OR(self.user_model.name >= q.lower(),self.user_model.email >= q.lower(),self.user_model.username >= q.lower()))
for _qry in qry:
if q.lower() in _qry.name.lower() or q.lower() in _qry.email.lower() or q.lower() in _qry.username.lower():
users.append(_qry)
It is not possible to do a LIKE search on datastore app engine, how ever creating an Arraylist would do the trick if you need to search a word in a string.
#Index
public ArrayList<String> searchName;
and then to search in the index using objectify.
List<Profiles> list1 = ofy().load().type(Profiles.class).filter("searchName =",search).list();
and this will give you a list with all the items that contain the world you did on the search
If the LIKE '%text%' always compares to a word or a few (think permutations) and your data changes slowly (slowly means that it's not prohibitively expensive - both price-wise and performance-wise - to create and updates indexes) then Relation Index Entity (RIE) may be the answer.
Yes, you will have to build additional datastore entity and populate it appropriately. Yes, there are some constraints that you will have to play around (one is 5000 limit on the length of list property in GAE datastore). But the resulting searches are lightning fast.
For details see my RIE with Java and Ojbectify and RIE with Python posts.
"Like" is often uses as a poor-man's substitute for text search. For text search, it is possible to use Whoosh-AppEngine.

Google App Engine: Is it possible to do a Gql LIKE query?

Simple one really. In SQL, if I want to search a text field for a couple of characters, I can do:
SELECT blah FROM blah WHERE blah LIKE '%text%'
The documentation for App Engine makes no mention of how to achieve this, but surely it's a common enough problem?
BigTable, which is the database back end for App Engine, will scale to millions of records. Due to this, App Engine will not allow you to do any query that will result in a table scan, as performance would be dreadful for a well populated table.
In other words, every query must use an index. This is why you can only do =, > and < queries. (In fact you can also do != but the API does this using a a combination of > and < queries.) This is also why the development environment monitors all the queries you do and automatically adds any missing indexes to your index.yaml file.
There is no way to index for a LIKE query so it's simply not available.
Have a watch of this Google IO session for a much better and more detailed explanation of this.
i'm facing the same problem, but i found something on google app engine pages:
Tip: Query filters do not have an explicit way to match just part of a string value, but you can fake a prefix match using inequality filters:
db.GqlQuery("SELECT * FROM MyModel WHERE prop >= :1 AND prop < :2",
"abc",
u"abc" + u"\ufffd")
This matches every MyModel entity with a string property prop that begins with the characters abc. The unicode string u"\ufffd" represents the largest possible Unicode character. When the property values are sorted in an index, the values that fall in this range are all of the values that begin with the given prefix.
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastore/queriesandindexes.html
maybe this could do the trick ;)
Altough App Engine does not support LIKE queries, have a look at the properties ListProperty and StringListProperty. When an equality test is done on these properties, the test will actually be applied on all list members, e.g., list_property = value tests if the value appears anywhere in the list.
Sometimes this feature might be used as a workaround to the lack of LIKE queries. For instance, it makes it possible to do simple text search, as described on this post.
You need to use search service to perform full text search queries similar to SQL LIKE.
Gaelyk provides domain specific language to perform more user friendly search queries. For example following snippet will find first ten books sorted from the latest ones with title containing fern
and the genre exactly matching thriller:
def documents = search.search {
select all from books
sort desc by published, SearchApiLimits.MINIMUM_DATE_VALUE
where title =~ 'fern'
and genre = 'thriller'
limit 10
}
Like is written as Groovy's match operator =~.
It supports functions such as distance(geopoint(lat, lon), location) as well.
App engine launched a general-purpose full text search service in version 1.7.0 that supports the datastore.
Details in the announcement.
More information on how to use this: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/training/fts_intro/lesson2
Have a look at Objectify here , it is like a Datastore access API. There is a FAQ with this question specifically, here is the answer
How do I do a like query (LIKE "foo%")
You can do something like a startWith, or endWith if you reverse the order when stored and searched. You do a range query with the starting value you want, and a value just above the one you want.
String start = "foo";
... = ofy.query(MyEntity.class).filter("field >=", start).filter("field <", start + "\uFFFD");
Just follow here:
init.py#354">http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/source/browse/trunk/python/google/appengine/ext/search/init.py#354
It works!
class Article(search.SearchableModel):
text = db.TextProperty()
...
article = Article(text=...)
article.save()
To search the full text index, use the SearchableModel.all() method to get an
instance of SearchableModel.Query, which subclasses db.Query. Use its search()
method to provide a search query, in addition to any other filters or sort
orders, e.g.:
query = article.all().search('a search query').filter(...).order(...)
I tested this with GAE Datastore low-level Java API. Me and works perfectly
Query q = new Query(Directorio.class.getSimpleName());
Filter filterNombreGreater = new FilterPredicate("nombre", FilterOperator.GREATER_THAN_OR_EQUAL, query);
Filter filterNombreLess = new FilterPredicate("nombre", FilterOperator.LESS_THAN, query+"\uFFFD");
Filter filterNombre = CompositeFilterOperator.and(filterNombreGreater, filterNombreLess);
q.setFilter(filter);
In general, even though this is an old post, a way to produce a 'LIKE' or 'ILIKE' is to gather all results from a '>=' query, then loop results in python (or Java) for elements containing what you're looking for.
Let's say you want to filter users given a q='luigi'
users = []
qry = self.user_model.query(ndb.OR(self.user_model.name >= q.lower(),self.user_model.email >= q.lower(),self.user_model.username >= q.lower()))
for _qry in qry:
if q.lower() in _qry.name.lower() or q.lower() in _qry.email.lower() or q.lower() in _qry.username.lower():
users.append(_qry)
It is not possible to do a LIKE search on datastore app engine, how ever creating an Arraylist would do the trick if you need to search a word in a string.
#Index
public ArrayList<String> searchName;
and then to search in the index using objectify.
List<Profiles> list1 = ofy().load().type(Profiles.class).filter("searchName =",search).list();
and this will give you a list with all the items that contain the world you did on the search
If the LIKE '%text%' always compares to a word or a few (think permutations) and your data changes slowly (slowly means that it's not prohibitively expensive - both price-wise and performance-wise - to create and updates indexes) then Relation Index Entity (RIE) may be the answer.
Yes, you will have to build additional datastore entity and populate it appropriately. Yes, there are some constraints that you will have to play around (one is 5000 limit on the length of list property in GAE datastore). But the resulting searches are lightning fast.
For details see my RIE with Java and Ojbectify and RIE with Python posts.
"Like" is often uses as a poor-man's substitute for text search. For text search, it is possible to use Whoosh-AppEngine.

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