I want to understand if I should close database after running each query or not? What is the implication.
Here is some metacode:
{
if (m_databaseProvider.openDatabase()) {
QSqlQuery query(m_databaseProvider.database());
query.prepare(SQL_SELECT_LOCATIONS);
query.exec();
// iterate the result and return list
while (query.next()) {
.....
}
m_databaseProvider.closeDatabase();
} else {....}
}
Is there any drawbacks to this approach?
What is the recmended best practive for QT Application on Android for example?
Thank you
Closing the database throws away its page cache, and requires that the database structure is re-read when you reopen it for the next query.
In practice, it is unlikely that you notice any difference unless you do many small queries, or are on a small device with a weak CPU or small memory.
Related
What is the fastest database connection check in grails? I need to create an endpoint which will be called again and again by a script so this needs to be efficient. The database goes down fom time to time and this script will call this api that will return a status code. Based on this status code the bot will know the database is down. If it is 200 then everything is ok.
So i need to check if database connection is intact in a very efficient manner. Since the call happens every few seconds what is the fastest way to check for database status. My thought is to use a simple gorm query like Status.read(1). If there is an exception then return a non 200 status code. Is there a more efficient way for a quick database status check?
I appreciate any insights. I am using Grails 2.2.
Why not just avoid using GORM all together and just use a super simple database query like SELECT 1? Putting this into a service it might look like something like this:
package my.example
class MyService {
def dataSource
def someTimeoutValue = 1000
boolean isDatabaseThere() {
try {
dataSource.connection.isValid(someTimeoutValue)
return true // everything is okay
} catch (Exception e) {
return false // everything is not okay
}
}
}
Pardon any typos or anything, that was written on the fly.
I was importing ttl ontologies to dbpedia following the blog post http://michaelbloggs.blogspot.de/2013/05/importing-ttl-turtle-ontologies-in-neo4j.html. The post uses BatchInserters to speed up the task. It mentions
Batch insertion is not transactional. If something goes wrong and you don't shutDown() your database properly, the database becomes inconsistent.
I had to interrupt one of the batch insertion tasks as it was taking time much longer than expected which left my database in an inconsistence state. I get the following message:
db_name store is not cleanly shut down
How can I recover my database from this state? Also, for future purposes is there a way for committing after importing every file so that reverting back to the last state would be trivial. I thought of git, but I am not sure if it would help for a binary file like index.db.
There are some cases where you cannot recover from unclean shutdowns when using the batch inserter api, please note that its package name org.neo4j.unsafe.batchinsert contains the word unsafe for a reason. The intention for batch inserter is to operate as fast as possible.
If you want to guarantee a clean shutdown you should use a try finally:
BatchInserter batch = BatchInserters.inserter(<dir>);
try {
} finally {
batch.shutdown();
}
Another alternative for special cases is registering a JVM shutdown hook. See the following snippet as an example:
BatchInserter batch = BatchInserters.inserter(<dir>);
// do some operations potentially throwing exceptions
Runtime.getRuntime().addShutdownHook(new Thread() {
public void run() {
batch.shutdown();
}
});
We're migrating SQL to Azure. Our DAL is Entity Framework 4.x based. We're wanting to use the Transient Fault Handling Block to add retry logic for SQL Azure.
Overall, we're looking for the best 80/20 rule (or maybe more of a 95/5 but you get the point) - we're not looking to spend weeks refactoring/rewriting code (there's a LOT of it). I'm fine re-implementing our DAL's framework but not all of the code written and generated against it anymore than we have to since this is already here only to address a minority case. Mitigation >>> elimination of this edge case for us.
Looking at the possible options explained here at MSDN, it seems Case #3 there is the "quickest" to implement, but only at first glance. Upon pondering this solution a bit, it struck me that we might have problems with connection management since this circumvent's Entity Framework's built-in processes for managing connections (i.e. always closing them). It seems to me that the "solution" is to make sure 100% of our Contexts that we instantiate use Using blocks, but with our architecture, this would be difficult.
So my question: Going with Case #3 from that link, are hanging connections a problem or is there some magic somewhere that's going on that I don't know about?
I've done some experimenting and it turns out that this brings us back to the old "managing connections" situation we're used to from the past, only this time the connections are abstracted away from us a bit and we must now "manage Contexts" similarly.
Let's say we have the following OnContextCreated implementation:
private void OnContextCreated()
{
const int maxRetries = 4;
const int initialDelayInMilliseconds = 100;
const int maxDelayInMilliseconds = 5000;
const int deltaBackoffInMilliseconds = initialDelayInMilliseconds;
var policy = new RetryPolicy<SqlAzureTransientErrorDetectionStrategy>(maxRetries,
TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(initialDelayInMilliseconds),
TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(maxDelayInMilliseconds),
TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(deltaBackoffInMilliseconds));
policy.ExecuteAction(() =>
{
try
{
Connection.Open();
var storeConnection = (SqlConnection) ((EntityConnection) Connection).StoreConnection;
new SqlCommand("declare #i int", storeConnection).ExecuteNonQuery();
//Connection.Close();
// throw new ApplicationException("Test only");
}
catch (Exception e)
{
Connection.Close();
Trace.TraceWarning("Attempted to open connection but failed: " + e.Message);
throw;
}
}
);
}
In this scenario, we forcibly open the Connection (which was the goal here). Because of this, the Context keeps it open across many calls. Because of that, we must tell the Context when to close the connection. Our primary mechanism for doing that is calling the Dispose method on the Context. So if we just allow garbage collection to clean up our contexts, then we allow connections to remain hanging open.
I tested this by toggling the comments on the Connection.Close() in the try block and running a bunch of unit tests against our database. Without calling Close, we jumped up to ~275-300 active connections (from SQL Server's perspective). By calling Close, that number hovered at ~12. I then reproduced with a small number of unit tests both with and without a using block for the Context and reproduced the same result (different numbers - I forget what they were).
I was using the following query to count my connections:
SELECT s.session_id, s.login_name, e.connection_id,
s.last_request_end_time, s.cpu_time,
e.connect_time
FROM sys.dm_exec_sessions AS s
INNER JOIN sys.dm_exec_connections AS e
ON s.session_id = e.session_id
WHERE login_name='myuser'
ORDER BY s.login_name
Conclusion: If you call Connection.Open() with this work-around to enable the Transient Fault Handling Block, then you MUST use using blocks for all contexts you work with, otherwise you will have problems (that with SQL Azure, will cause your database to be "throttled" and ultimately taken offline for hours!).
The problem with this approach is it only takes care of connection retries and not command retries.
If you use Entity Framework 6 (currently in alpha) then there is some new in-built support for transient retries with Azure SQL Database (with a little bit of configuration): http://entityframework.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Connection%20Resiliency%20Spec
I've created a library which allows you to configure Entity Framework to retry using the Fault Handling block without needing to change every database call - generally you will only need to change your config file and possibly one or two lines of code.
This allows you to use it for Entity Framework or Linq To Sql.
https://github.com/robdmoore/ReliableDbProvider
Here is some background about my app:
I am developing an Android app that will display a random quote or verse to the user. For this I am using an SQLite database. The size of the DB would be approximately 5K to 10K records, possibly increasing to upto 1M in later versions as new quotes and verses are added. Thus the user would need to update the DB as and when newer versions are of the app or DB are released.
After reading through some forums online, there seem to be two feasible ways I could provide the DB:
1. Bundle it along with the .APK file of the app, or
2. Upload it to my app's website from where users will have to download it
I want to know which method would be better (if there is yet another approach other than these, please do let me know).
After pondering this problem for some time, I have these thoughts regarding the above approaches:
Approach 1:
Users will obtain the DB along with the app, and won't have to download it separately. Installation would thereby be easier. But, users will have to reinstall the app every time there is a new version of the DB. Also, if the DB is large, it will make the installable too cumbersome.
Approach 2:
Users will have to download the full DB from the website (although I can provide a small, sample version of the DB via Approach 1). But, the installer will be simpler and smaller in size. Also, I would be able to provide future versions of the DB easily for those who might not want newer versions of the app.
Could you please tell me from a technical and an administrative standpoint which approach would be the better one and why?
If there is a third or fourth approach better than either of these, please let me know.
Thank you!
Andruid
I built a similar app for Android which gets periodic updates with data from a government agency. It's fairly easy to build an Android compatible db off the device using perl or similar and download it to the phone from a website; and this works rather well, plus the user gets current data whenever they download the app. It's also supposed to be possible to throw the data onto the sdcard if you want to avoid using primary data storage space, which is a bigger concern for my app which has a ~6Mb database.
In order to make Android happy with the DB, I believe you have to do the following (I build my DB using perl).
$st = $db->prepare( "CREATE TABLE \"android_metadata\" (\"locale\" TEXT DEFAULT 'en_US')");
$st->execute();
$st = $db->prepare( "INSERT INTO \"android_metadata\" VALUES ('en_US')");
$st->execute();
I have an update activity which checks weather updates are available and if so presents an "update now" screen. The download process looks like this and lives in a DatabaseHelperClass.
public void downloadUpdate(final Handler handler, final UpdateActivity updateActivity) {
URL url;
try {
close();
File f = new File(getDatabasePath());
if (f.exists()) {
f.delete();
}
getReadableDatabase();
close();
url = new URL("http://yourserver.com/" + currentDbVersion + ".sqlite");
URLConnection urlconn = url.openConnection();
final int contentLength = urlconn.getContentLength();
Log.i(TAG, String.format("Download size %d", contentLength));
handler.post(new Runnable() {
public void run() {
updateActivity.setProgressMax(contentLength);
}
});
InputStream is = urlconn.getInputStream();
// Open the empty db as the output stream
OutputStream os = new FileOutputStream(f);
// transfer bytes from the inputfile to the outputfile
byte[] buffer = new byte[1024 * 1000];
int written = 0;
int length = 0;
while (written < contentLength) {
length = is.read(buffer);
os.write(buffer, 0, length);
written += length;
final int currentprogress = written;
handler.post(new Runnable() {
public void run() {
Log.i(TAG, String.format("progress %d", currentprogress));
updateActivity.setCurrentProgress(currentprogress);
}
});
}
// Close the streams
os.flush();
os.close();
is.close();
Log.i(TAG, "Download complete");
openDatabase();
} catch (Exception e) {
Log.e(TAG, "bad things", e);
}
handler.post(new Runnable() {
public void run() {
updateActivity.refreshState(true);
}
});
}
Also note that I keep a version number in the filename of the db files, and a pointer to the current one in a text file on the server.
It sounds like your app and your db are tightly bound -- that is, the db is useless without the database and the database is useless without the app, so I'd say go ahead and put them both in the same .apk.
That being said, if you expect the db to change very slowly over time, but the app to change quicker, and you don't want your users to have to download the db with each new app revision, then you might want to unbundle them. To make this work, you can do one of two things:
Install them as separate applications, but make sure they share the same userID using the sharedUserId tag in the AndroidManifest.xml file.
Install them as separate applications, and create a ContentProvider for the database. This way other apps could make use of your database as well (if that is useful).
If you are going to store the db on your website then I would recommend that you just make rpc calls to your webserver and get data that way, so the device will never have to deal with a local database. Using a cache manager to avoid multiple lookups will help as well so pages will not have to lookup data each time a page reloads. Also if you need to update the data you do not have to send out a new app every time. Using HttpClient is pretty straight forward, if you need any examples please let me know
Can I do nested transactions in NHibernate, and how do I implement them? I'm using SQL Server 2008, so support is definitely in the DBMS.
I find that if I try something like this:
using (var outerTX = UnitOfWork.Current.BeginTransaction())
{
using (var nestedTX = UnitOfWork.Current.BeginTransaction())
{
... do stuff
nestedTX.Commit();
}
outerTX.Commit();
}
then by the time it comes to outerTX.Commit() the transaction has become inactive, and results in a ObjectDisposedException on the session AdoTransaction.
Are we therefore supposed to create nested NHibernate sessions instead? Or is there some other class we should use to wrap around the transactions (I've heard of TransactionScope, but I'm not sure what that is)?
I'm now using Ayende's UnitOfWork implementation (thanks Sneal).
Forgive any naivety in this question, I'm still new to NHibernate.
Thanks!
EDIT: I've discovered that you can use TransactionScope, such as:
using (var transactionScope = new TransactionScope())
{
using (var tx = UnitOfWork.Current.BeginTransaction())
{
... do stuff
tx.Commit();
}
using (var tx = UnitOfWork.Current.BeginTransaction())
{
... do stuff
tx.Commit();
}
transactionScope.Commit();
}
However I'm not all that excited about this, as it locks us in to using SQL Server, and also I've found that if the database is remote then you have to worry about having MSDTC enabled... one more component to go wrong. Nested transactions are so useful and easy to do in SQL that I kind of assumed NHibernate would have some way of emulating the same...
NHibernate sessions don't support nested transactions.
The following test is always true in version 2.1.2:
var session = sessionFactory.Open();
var tx1 = session.BeginTransaction();
var tx2 = session.BeginTransaction();
Assert.AreEqual(tx1, tx2);
You need to wrap it in a TransactionScope to support nested transactions.
MSDTC must be enabled or you will get error:
{"Network access for Distributed Transaction Manager (MSDTC) has been disabled. Please enable DTC for network access in the security configuration for MSDTC using the Component Services Administrative tool."}
As Satish suggested, nested transactions are not supported in NHibernate. I've not come across scenarios where nested transactions were needed, but certainly I've faced problems where I had to ignore creating transactions if other ones were already active in other units of work.
The blog link below provides an example implementation for NHibernate, but should also work for SQL server:
http://rajputyh.blogspot.com/2011/02/nested-transaction-handling-with.html
I've been struggling with this for a while now. Am going to have another crack at it.
I want to implement transactions in individual service containers - because that makes them self-contained - but then be able to nest a bunch of those service methods within a larger transaction and rollback the whole lot if necessary.
Because I'm using Rhino Commons I'm now going to try refactoring using the With.Transaction method. Basically it allows us to write code as if transactions were nested, though in reality there is only one.
For example:
private Project CreateProject(string name)
{
var project = new Project(name);
With.Transaction(delegate
{
UnitOfWork.CurrentSession.Save(project);
});
return project;
}
private Sample CreateSample(Project project, string code)
{
var sample = new Sample(project, code);
With.Transaction(delegate
{
UnitOfWork.CurrentSession.Save(sample);
});
return sample;
}
private void Test_NoNestedTransaction()
{
var project = CreateProject("Project 1");
}
private void TestNestedTransaction()
{
using (var tx = UnitOfWork.Current.BeginTransaction())
{
try
{
var project = CreateProject("Project 6");
var sample = CreateSample(project, "SAMPLE006", true);
}
catch
{
tx.Rollback();
throw;
}
tx.Commit();
}
}
In Test_NoNestedTransaction(), we are creating a project alone, without the context of a larger transaction. In this case, in CreateSample a new transaction will be created and committed, or rolled back if an exception occurs.
In Test_NestedTransaction(), we are creating both a sample and a project. If anything goes wrong, we want both to be rolled back. In reality, the code in CreateSample and CreateProject will run just as if there were no transactions at all; it is entirely the outer transaction that decides whether to rollback or commit, and does so based on whether an exception is thrown. Really that's why I'm using a manually created transaction for the outer transaction; so we I have control over whether to commit or rollback, rather than just defaulting to on-exception-rollback-else-commit.
You could achieve the same thing without Rhino.Commons by putting a whole lot of this sort of thing through your code:
if (!UnitOfWork.Current.IsInActiveTransaction)
{
tx = UnitOfWork.Current.BeginTransaction();
}
_auditRepository.SaveNew(auditEvent);
if (tx != null)
{
tx.Commit();
}
... and so on. But With.Transaction, despite the clunkiness of needing to create anonymous delegates, does that quite conveniently.
An advantage of this approach over using TransactionScopes (apart from the reliance on MSDTC) is that there ought to be just a single flush to the database in the final outer-transaction commit, regardless of how many methods have been called in-between. In other words, we don't need to write uncommitted data to the database as we go, we're always just writing it to the local NHibernate cache.
In short, this solution doesn't offer ultimate control over your transactions, because it doesn't ever use more than one transaction. I guess I can accept that, since nested transactions are by no means universally supported in every DBMS anyway. But now perhaps I can at least write code without worrying about whether we're already in a transaction or not.
That implementation doesn't support nesting, if you want nesting use Ayende's UnitOfWork implementation. Another problem with the implementation your are using (at least for web apps) is that it holds onto the ISession instance in a static variable.
I just rewrote our UnitOfWork yesterday for these reasons, it was originally based off of Gabriel's.
We don't use UnitOfWork.Current.BeginTransaction(), we use UnitofWork.TransactionalFlush(), which creates a separate transaction at the very end to flush all the changes at once.
using (var uow = UnitOfWork.Start())
{
var entity = repository.Get(1);
entity.Name = "Sneal";
uow.TransactionalFlush();
}