ALL_TAB_MODIFICATIONS, but for columns - database

I have a legacy database and I was able to use ALL_TAB_MODIFICATIONS to easily find candidates for deletion - tables, that are no longer used by the application using that database, and then continuing with more detailed review of these tables and possibly deleting them
(I know it isn't guaranteed, hence I call them just "candidates for deletion").
My question is, is there anything similar I could use to find columns which aren't used?
That means that all newly inserted data has NULL, and it is never UPDATEd to get a not null value.
If there isn't a similar view provided by Oracle, what other approach would you recommend to find them?
This isn't needed because of storage reasons, but because the database is open also for reporting purposes and we have had cases where reports have been created based on old columns and thus providing wrong results.

Why not invest a little and get an exact result?
The idea is to store the contant of the tables say at the begin of the month and repeat this at the end of teh month.
From the difference you can see with table columns were changed by updates or with inserts. You'd probably tolerate changes caused by deletes.
You'll only need twice the space of your DB and invest a bit in the reporting SQLs.
Please note also that a drop of a column - even if not actively used - may invalidate your application in case wenn the column is referenced or select * from is used.

Related

Advice on adding index in db2

Good day,
In my java web application, I have a table, which having 107 columns, and this table also a parent table, and having many child tables. Currently this table is having more than 10 millions row of records in production.
Since last year, the java web application keep hitting slowness issue. After checking and debugging, we found that the slowness is happen during update or select data from this table.
Every time having this issue, I will take the select query or update query to run a db2advis command to check its result, and everytime I am getting result that need >99% improvement to apply the recommended indexes. After add those indexes, will solve the slowness issue.
So until now, there are already 7~8 indexes being apply in this table. Today, I am being reported there is a slowness issue again. After checking, found that its also slowness issue during a select statement from this table and join other table. Same way, I run the db2advis command and result also >99% improvement and few recommended indexes.
However, I am starting to question myself, is all these solution is a good solution? If there is another slowness issue in future, should I apply the same solution again?
And everytime I get the result of db2advis, it will also have a part of unused existing indexes that list of drop index query, those indexes are the index that I insert previously. I believe this is because of those indexes is not related to current query for db2advis? So I can ignore this? Or these existing indexes will affected the performance?
As my understanding, there are disadvantage for index also, specially for insert and update statement.
Additionally, there is a policy for the system owner to keep the data for at least 7 years, thus, the owner is not going to do housekeeping for the database.
Would like to ask for advice, other than add index, and change the query to better query, is there any other way to overcome this issue?
This answer contains general advice about levers that may be available to you.
Your situation happens in many companies that are subject to regulatory requirements for multi-year online data retention.
When the physical data model is not designed to exploit range-partitioning for easy roll out of old data (without delete), performance can degrade over time especially when business changes or legal changes impact data distributions.
Your question is not about programming, but instead it is about performance management, and that is a big topic.
Because of that reason, your question may be more suitable for dba.stackexchange.com. This stackoverflow website is intended for more specific programming questions.
Always focus on the whole workload, not only a single query. A "good solution" for one query may be bad for another aspect of functionality.
Adding one index can speed up one query but negatively impact other insert/update/delete activities, as you mention.
Companies that have a non-production environment that has the same (or higher) volumes of data with matching distributions can exploit such environments for performance-measurement , especially if they have a realistic test workload-generator and instrumentation for profiling.
Separately, keep in mind the importance of designing the statistics collection properly - sometimes column-group-statistics can have a big impact to help index selection even for existing indexes, other times the use of distribution-statistics can greatly help dynamic SQL, and statistical-views can help with many problems. So before adding new indexes always consider if other kinds of techniques can help especially if the join columns are already indexed correctly, and foreign-key indexes are present , but for some reason the Db2-optimiser is ignoring the indexes.
If the Db2 index lastused column (in syscat.indexes) shows that an index is never used or used extremely rarely, then you should investigate why the index was created, and why some queries that might be expected to benefit from that specific index are ignoring the index. Sometimes, it's necessary to reorder the columns in the index to ensure that the highest selectivity columns are at the lowest ordinal position.
There are other levers you can adjust, MQT, MDC, optimisation profiles (hints), registry settings, optimisation-levels, but the start point is a good data model and good measurements.

What type of fact table / loading solution for a reservation system?

Background
I am designing a Data Warehouse with SQL Server 2012 and SSIS. The source system handles hotel reservations. The reservations are split between two tables, header and header line item. The Fact table would be at the line item level with some data from the header.
The issue
The challenge I have is that the reservation (and its line items) can change over time.
An example would be:
The booking is created.
A room is added to the booking (as a header line item).
The customer arrives and adds food/drinks to their reservation (more line items).
A payment is added to the reservation (as a line item).
A room could be subsequently cancelled and removed from the booking (a line item is deleted).
The number of people in a room can change, affecting that line item.
The booking status changes from "Provisional" to "Confirmed" at a point in its life cycle.
Those last three points are key, I'm not sure how I would keep that line updated without looking up the record and updating it. The business would like to keep track of the updates and deletions.
I'm resisting updating because:
From what I've read about Fact tables, its not good practice to revisit rows once they've been written into the table.
I could do this with a look-up component but with upward of 45 million rows, is that the best approach?
The questions
What type of Fact table or loading solution should I go for?
Should I be updating the records, if so how can I best do that?
I'm open to any suggestions!
Additional Questions (following answer from ElectricLlama):
The fact does have a 1:1 relationship with the source. You talk about possible constraints on future development. Would you be able to elaborate on the type of constraints I would face?
Each line item will have a modified (and created date). Are you saying that I should delete all records from the fact table which have been modified since the last import and add them again (sounds logical)?
If the answer to 2 is "yes" then for auditing purposes would I write the current fact records to a separate table before deleting them?
In point one, you mention deleting/inserting the last x days bookings based on reservation date. I can understand inserting new bookings. I'm just trying to understand why I would delete?
If you effectively have a 1:1 between the source line and the fact, and you store a source system booking code in the fact (no dimensional modelling rules against that) then I suggest you have a two step load process.
delete/insert the last x days bookings based on reservation date (or whatever you consider to be the primary fact date),
delete/insert based on all source booking codes that have changed (you will of course have to know this beforehand)
You just need to consider what constraints this puts on future development, i.e. when you get additional source systems to add, you'll need to maintain the 1:1 fact to source line relationship to keep your load process consistent.
I've never updated a fact record in a dataload process, but always delete/insert a certain data domain (i.e. that domain might be trailing 20 days or source system booking code). This is effectively the same as an update but also takes cares of deletes.
With regards to auditing changes in the source, I suggest you write that to a different table altogether, not the main fact, as it's purpose will be audit, not analysis.
The requirement to identify changed records in the source (for data loads and auditing) implies you will need to create triggers and log tables in the source or enable native SQL Server CDC if possible.
At all costs avoid using the SSIS lookup component as it is totally ineffective and would certainly be unable to operate on 45 million rows.
Stick with the 'insert/delete a data portion' approach as it lends itself to SSIS ability to insert/delete (and its inability to efficiently update or lookup)
In answer to the follow up questions:
1:1 relationship in fact
What I'm getting at is you have no visibility on any future systems that need to be integrated, or any visibility on what future upgrades to your existing source system might do. This 1:1 mapping introduces a design constraint (its not really a constraint, more a framework). Thinking about it, any new system does not need to follow this particular load design, as long as it's data arrive in the fact consistently. I think implementing this 1:1 design is a good idea, just trying to consider any downside.
If your source has a reliable modified date then you're in luck as you can do a differential load - only load changed records. I suggest you:
Load all recently modified records (last 5 days?) into a staging table
Do a DELETE/INSERT based on the record key. Do the delete inside SSIS in an execute SQL task, don't mess about with feeding data flows into row-by-row delete statements.
Audit table:
The simplest and most accurate way to do this is simply implement triggers and logs in the source system and keep it totally separate to your star schema.
If you do want this captured as part of your load process, I suggest you do a comparison between your staging table and the existing audit table and only write new audit rows, i.e. reservation X last modified date in the audit table is 2 Apr, but reservation X last modified date in the staging table is 4 Apr, so write this change as a new record to the audit table. Note that if you do a daily load, any changes in between won't be recorded, that's why I suggest triggers and logs in the source.
DELETE/INSERT records in Fact
This is more about ensuring you have an overlapping window in your load process, so that if the process fails for a couple of days (as they always do), you have some contingency there, and it will seamlessly pick the process back up once it's working again. This is not so important in your case as you have a modified date to identify differential changes, but normally for example I would pick a transaction date and delete, say 7 trailing days. This means that my load process can be borken for 6 days, and if I fix it by the seventh day everything will reload properly without needing extra intervention to load the intermediate days.
I would suggest having a deleted flag and update that instead of deleting. Your performance will also be better.
This will enable you to perform an analysis on how the reservations are changing over a period of time. You will need to ensure that this flag is used in all the analysis to ensure that there is no confusion.

How can I store temporary, self-destroying data into a t-sql table?

Suppose I have a table which contains relevant information. However, the data is only relevant for, let's say, 30 minutes.
After that it's just database junk, so I need to get rid of it asap.
If I wanted, I could clean this table periodically, setting an expiration date time for each record individually and deleting expired records through a job or something. This is my #1 option, and it's what will be done unless someone convince me otherwise.
But I think this solution may be problematic. What if someone stops the job from running and no one notices? I'm looking for something like a built-in way to insert temporary data into a table. Or a table that has "volatile" data itself, in a way that it automagically removes data after x amount of time after its insertion.
And last but not least, if there's no built-in way to do that, could I be able to implement this functionality in SQL server 2008 (or 2012, we will be migrating soon) myself? If so, could someone give me directions as to what to look for to implement something like it?
(Sorry if the formatting ends up bad, first time using a smartphone to post on SO)
As another answer indicated, TRUNCATE TABLE is a fast way to remove the contents of a table, but it's aggressive; it will completely empty the table. Also, there are restrictions on its use; among others, it can't be used on tables which "are referenced by a FOREIGN KEY constraint".
Any more targeted removal of rows will require a DELETE statement with a WHERE clause. Having an index on relevant criteria fields (such as the insertion date) will improve performance of the deletion and might be a good idea (depending on its effect on INSERT and UPDATE statements).
You will need something to "trigger" the DELETE statement (or TRUNCATE statement). As you've suggested, a SQL Server Agent job is an obvious choice, but you are worried about the job being disabled or removed. Any solution will be vulnerable to someone removing your work, but there are more obscure ways to trigger an activity than a job. You could embed the deletion into the insertion process-- either in whatever stored procedure or application code you have, or as an actual table trigger. Both of those methods increase the time required for an INSERT and, because they are not handled out of band by the SQL Server Agent, will require your users to wait slightly longer. If you have the right indexes and the table is reasonably-sized, that might be an acceptable trade-off.
There isn't any other capability that I'm aware of for SQL Server to just start deleting data. There isn't automatic data retention policy enforcement.
See #Yuriy comment, that's relevant.
If you really need to implement it DB side....
Truncate table is fast way to get rid of records.
If all you need is ONE table and you just need to fill it with data, use it and dispose it asap you can consider truncating a (permanent) "CACHE_TEMP" table.
The scenario can become more complicated you are running concurrent threads/jobs and each is handling it's own data.
If that data is just existing for a single "job"/context you can consider using #TEMP tables. They are a bit volatile and maybe can be what you are looking for.
Also you maybe can use table variables, they are a bit more volatile than temporary tables but it depends on things you don't posted, so I cannot say what's really better.

Trying to design a column that should sum values from another table

sorry if the title is not very clear. I will try to explain now:
I have two tables: table A and table B. The relation between them is one (for A table) to many (for B table). So, it's something like master-detail situation.
I have a column 'Amount' in table B that is obviously decimal and a column 'TotalAmount' in table A.
I'm trying ti figure out how to keep the value in table A up to date. My suggestion is to make a view based on table A with aggregate query counting the Amounts from table B. Of course with the proper indexes ...
But, my team-mate suggest to update the value in table A every time we change something in table B from our application.
I wonder, what will be the best solution here? May be a third variant?
Some clarification ... We expected this tables to be the fastest growing tables in our database. And The table B will grow much much faster than table A. The most frequent operation in table B will be insert ... and almost nothing else. The most frequent operation in table A will be select ... but not only.
I see a number of options:
Use an insert trigger on table B and do the updates table A as your friend suggests. This will keep table B as up to date as possible.
Have a scheduled job that updates table A every x minutes (x = whatever makes sense for your application).
When updating table B, do an update on table A in your application logic. This may not work out if you update table B in many places.
If you have a single place in your app where you insert new rows to table B, then the most simple solution is to send an UPDATE A set TotalAmount=TotalAmount + ? where ID = ? and pass the values you just used to insert into B. Make sure you wrap both queries (the insert and the update) in a transaction so either both happen or none.
If that's not simple, then your next option is a database trigger. Read the docs for your database how to create them. Basically a trigger is a small piece of code that gets executed when something happens in the DB (in your case, when someone inserts data in table B).
The view is another option but it may cause performance problems during selects which you'll find hard to resolve. Try a "materialized view" or a "computed column" instead (but these can cause performance problems when you insert/remove columns).
If this value is going to change a lot, you're better off using a view: It is definitely the safer implementation. But even better would be using triggers (if your database supports them.)
I would guess your mate suggests updating the value on each insert because he thinks that you will need the value quite often and it might lead to a slow-down recalculating the value each time. If that is the case:
Your database should take care of the caching, so this probably won't be an issue.
If it is, nonetheless, you can add that feature at a later stage - this way you can make sure your application works otherwise and will have a much easier time debugging that cache column.
I would definitely recommend using a trigger over using application logic, as that ensures that the database keeps the value up-to-date, rather than relying on all callers. However, from a design point of view, I would be wary of storing generated data in the same table as non-generated data -- I believe it's important to maintain a clear separation, so people don't get confused between what data they should be maintaining and what will be maintained for them.
However, in general, prefer views to triggers -- that way you don't have to worry about maintaining the value at all. Profile to determine whether performance is an issue. In Postgres, I believe you could even create an index on the computed values, so the database wouldn't have to look at the detail table.
The third way, recalculating periodically, will be much slower than triggers and probably slower than a view. That it's not appropriate for your use anyway is the icing on the cake :).

Am i right to sacrifice database design fundamentals in this case for the sake of speed?

I work in a company that uses single table Access database for its outbound cms, which I moved to a SQL server based system. There's a data list table (not normalized) and a calls table. This has about one update per second currently. All call outcomes along with date, time, and agent id are stored in the calls table. Agents have a predefined set of records that they will call each day (this comprises records from various data lists sorted to give an even spread throughout their set). Note a data list record is called once per day.
In order to ensure speed, live updates to this system are stored in a duplicate of the calls table fields in the data list table. These are then copied to the calls table in a batch process at the end of the day.
The reason for this is not obviously the speed at which a new record could be added to the calls table live, but when the user app is closed/opened and loads the user's data set again I need to check which records have not been called today - I would need to run a stored proc on the server that picked the last most call from the calls table and check if its calldate didn't match today's date. I believe a more expensive query than checking if a field in the data list table is NULL.
With this setup I only run the expensive query at the end of each day.
There are many pitfalls in this design, the main limitation is my inexperience. This is my first SQL server system. It's pretty critical, and I had to ensure it would work and I could easily dump data back to access db during a live failure. It has worked for 11 months now (and no live failure, less downtime than the old system).
I have created pretty well normalized databases for other things (with far fewer users), but I'm hesitant to implement this for the calling database.
Specifically, I would like to know your thoughts on whether the duplication of the calls fields in the data list table is necessary in my current setup or whether I should be able to use the calls table. Please try and answer this from my perspective. I know you DBAs may be cringing!
Redesigning an already working Database may become the major flaw here. Rather try to optimize what you have got running currently instead if starting from scratch. Think of indices, referential integrity, key assigning methods, proper usage of joins and the like.
In fact, have a look here:
Database development mistakes made by application developers
This outlines some very useful pointers.
The thing the "Normalisation Nazis" out there forget is that database design typically has two stages, the "Logical Design" and the "Physical Design". The logical design is for normalisation, and the physical design is for "now lets get the thing working", considering among other things the benefits of normalisation vs. the benefits of breaking nomalisation.
The classic example is an Order table and an Order-Detail table and the Order header table has "total price" where that value was derived from the Order-Detail and related tables. Having total price on Order in this case still make sense, but it breaks normalisation.
A normalised database is meant to give your database high maintainability and flexibility. But optimising for performance is one of the considerations that physical design considers. Look at reporting databases for example. And don't get me started about storing time-series data.
Ask yourself, has my maintainability or flexibility been significantly hindered by this decision? Does it cause me lots of code changes or data redesign when I change something? If not, and you're happy that your design is working as required, then I wouldn't worry.
I think whether to normalize it depends on how much you can do, and what may be needed.
For example, as Ian mentioned, it has been working for so long, is there some features they want to add that will impact the database schema?
If not, then just leave it as it is, but, if you need to add new features that change the database, you may want to see about normalizing it at that point.
You wouldn't need to call a stored procedure, you should be able to use a select statement to get the max(id) by the user id, or the max(id) in the table, depending on what you need to do.
Before deciding to normalize, or to make any major architectural changes, first look at why you are doing it. If you are doing it just because you think it needs to be done, then stop, and see if there is anything else you can do, perhaps add unit tests, so you can get some times for how long operations take. Numbers are good before making major changes, to see if there is any real benefit.
I would ask you to be a little more clear about the specific dilemma you face. If your system has worked so well for 11 months, what makes you think it needs any change?
I'm not sure you are aware of the fact that "Database design fundamentals" might relate to "logical database design fundamentals" as well as "physical database design fundamentals", nor whether you are aware of the difference.
Logical database design fundamentals should not (and actually cannot) be "sacrificed" for speed precisely because speed is only determined by physical design choices, the prime desision factor in which is precisely speed and performance.

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