Given an array of (sanitized) attribute headers (metatags), how might I automatically create columns for each in my database based on those tags? - database

So here is the unformatted list (this one, an income statement, has over row headers like these, so yes, automation is the way to go here).
["Revenue", "Other Revenue, Total", "Total Revenue", "Cost of Revenue, Total"...]
Here is the list after I ran each array entity (string) through my simple little sanitizer program, CleanZeeString.new.go(str).
["revenue", "other_revenue_total", "total_revenue", "cost_of_revenue_total"...]
So, I want to access Rails methods that will allow me to at least partially automate the database column creation process and migration, because this list has over 50 row headers, there are more lists, and I simply do not believe in doing things by hand anymore.

LATER (personal progress):
I'm starting to believe that a solution to this problem is going to involve getting outside of the rails "box" with regards to migrations. Yes, to solve this, I think we might have to think creatively about migrations...
I know how easy this is to do either by hand, or with the assistance of some sort of third party scripting solution, but I simply refuse. I should have been able to do this automatically last night after a couple of drinks if I wanted to. Given the array, and the fact that each column is the same type ("decimal" in rails), this should be doable in an automatic, rails-like way.
migration files are just normal ruby files. working on a solution based off that fact. time to get fancy. String#to_sym
Got it---
class CreateIncomeStatements < ActiveRecord::Migration
def change
f = File.open(File.join(Rails.root, 'lib', 'assets', 'is_list.json'))
is_ary = JSON.parse(f.read)
create_table :income_statements do |t|
is_ary.each do |k|
eval("t.decimal k.to_sym")
end
t.timestamps
end
end
end
I used the eval() method, and felt the ghost of my teacher slap me on the wrist, but, it worked. The key "ah hah" was re-considering the fact that migration files are just ruby files, and as such, I can just do whatever I want.

Related

Neo4j output format

After working with neo4j and now coming to the point of considering to make my own entity manager (object manager) to work with the fetched data in the application, i wonder about neo4j's output format.
When i run a query it's always returned as tabular data. Why is this??
Sure tables keep a big place in data and processing, but it seems so strange that a graph database can only output in this format.
Now when i want to create an object graph in my application i would have to hydrate all the objects and this is not really good for performance and doesn't leverage true graph performace.
Consider MATCH (A)-->(B) RETURN A, B when there is one A and three B's, it would return:
A B
1 1
1 2
1 3
That's the same A passed down 3 times over the database connection, while i only need it once and i know this before the data is fetched.
Something like this seems great http://nigelsmall.com/geoff
a load2neo is nice, a load-from-neo would also be nice! either in the geoff format or any other formats out there https://gephi.org/users/supported-graph-formats/
Each language could then implement it's own functions to create the objects directly.
To clarify:
Relations between nodes are lost in tabular data
Redundant (non-optimal) format for graphs
Edges (relations) and vertices (nodes) are usually not in the same table. (makes queries more complex?)
Another consideration (which might deserve it's own post), what's a good way to model relations in an object graph? As objects? or as data/method inside the node objects?
#Kikohs
Q: What do you mean by "Each language could then implement it's own functions to create the objects directly."?
A: With an (partial) graph provided by the database (as result of a query) a language as PHP could provide a factory method (in C preferably) to construct the object graph (this is usually an expensive operation). But only if the object graph is well defined in a standard format (because this function should be simple and universal).
Q: Do you want to export the full graph or just the result of a query?
A: The result of a query. However a query like MATCH (n) OPTIONAL MATCH (n)-[r]-() RETURN n, r should return the full graph.
Q: you want to dump to the disk the subgraph created from the result of a query ?
A: No, existing interfaces like REST are prefered to get the query result.
Q: do you want to create the subgraph which comes from a query in memory and then request it in another language ?
A: no i want the result of the query in another format then tabular (examples mentioned)
Q: You make a query which only returns the name of a node, in this case, would you like to get the full node associated or just the name ? Same for the edges.
A: Nodes don't have names. They have properties, labels and relations. I would like enough information to retrieve A) The node ID, it's labels, it's properties and B) the relation to other nodes which are in the same result.
Note that the first part of the question is not a concrete "how-to" question, rather "why is this not possible?" (or if it is, i like to be proven wrong on this one). The second is a real "how-to" question, namely "how to model relations". The two questions have in common that they both try to find the answer to "how to get graph data efficiently in PHP."
#Michael Hunger
You have a point when you say that not all result data can be expressed as an object graph. It reasonable to say that an alternative output format to a table would only be complementary to the table format and not replacing it.
I understand from your answer that the natural (rawish) output format from the database is the result format with duplicates in it ("streams the data out as it comes"). I that case i understand that it's now left to an alternative program (of the dev stack) to do the mapping. So my conclusion on neo4j implementing something like this:
Pro's - not having to do this in every implementation language (of the application)
Con's - 1) no application specific mapping is possible, 2) no performance gain if implementation language is fast
"Even if you use geoff, graphml or the gephi format you have to keep all the data in memory to deduplicate the results."
I don't understand this point entirely, are you saying that these formats are no able to hold deduplicated results (in certain cases)?? So infact that there is no possible textual format with which a graph can be described without duplication??
"There is also the questions on what you want to include in your output?"
I was under the assumption that the cypher language was powerful enough to specify this in the query. And so the output format would have whatever the database can provide as result.
"You could just return the paths that you get, which are unique paths through the graph in themselves".
Useful suggestion, i'll play around with this idea :)
"The dump command of the neo4j-shell uses the approach of pulling the cypher results into an in-memory structure, enriching it".
Does the enriching process fetch additional data from the database or is the data already contained in the initial result?
There is more to it.
First of all as you said tabular results from queries are really commonplace and needed to integrate with other systems and databases.
Secondly oftentimes you don't actually return raw graph data from your queries, but aggregated, projected, sliced, extracted information out of your graph. So the relationships to the original graph data are already lost in most of the results of queries I see being used.
The only time that people need / use the raw graph data is when to export subgraph-data from the database as a query result.
The problem of doing that as a de-duplicated graph is that the db has to fetch all the result data data in memory first to deduplicate, extract the needed relationships etc.
Normally it just streams the data out as it comes and uses little memory with that.
Even if you use geoff, graphml or the gephi format you have to keep all the data in memory to deduplicate the results (which are returned as paths with potential duplicate nodes and relationships).
There is also the questions on what you want to include in your output? Just the nodes and rels returned? Or additionally all the other rels between the nodes that you return? Or all the rels of the returned nodes (but then you also have to include the end-nodes of those relationships).
You could just return the paths that you get, which are unique paths through the graph in themselves:
MATCH p = (n)-[r]-(m)
WHERE ...
RETURN p
Another way to address this problem in Neo4j is to use sensible aggregations.
E.g. what you can do is to use collect to aggregate data per node (i.e. kind of subgraphs)
MATCH (n)-[r]-(m)
WHERE ...
RETURN n, collect([r,type(r),m])
or use the new literal map syntax (Neo4j 2.0)
MATCH (n)-[r]-(m)
WHERE ...
RETURN {node: n, neighbours: collect({ rel: r, type: type(r), node: m})}
The dump command of the neo4j-shell uses the approach of pulling the cypher results into an in-memory structure, enriching it and then outputting it as cypher create statement(s).
A similar approach can be used for other output formats too if you need it. But so far there hasn't been the need.
If you really need this functionality it makes sense to write a server-extension that uses cypher for query specification, but doesn't allow return statements. Instead you would always use RETURN *, aggregate the data into an in-memory structure (SubGraph in the org.neo4j.cypher packages). And then render it as a suitable format (e.g. JSON or one of those listed above).
These could be a starting points for that:
https://github.com/jexp/cypher-rs
https://github.com/jexp/cypher_websocket_endpoint
https://github.com/neo4j-contrib/rabbithole/blob/master/src/main/java/org/neo4j/community/console/SubGraph.java#L123
There are also other efforts, like GraphJSON from GraphAlchemist: https://github.com/GraphAlchemist/GraphJSON
And the d3 json format is also pretty useful. We use it in the neo4j console (console.neo4j.org) to return the graph visualization data that is then consumed by d3 directly.
I've been working with neo4j for a while now and I can tell you that if you are concerned about memory and performances you should drop cypher at all, and use indexes and the other graph-traversal methods instead (e.g. retrieve all the relationships of a certain type from or to a start node, and then iterate over the found nodes).
As the documentation says, Cypher is not intended for in-app usage, but more as a administration tool. Furthermore, in production-scale environments, it is VERY easy to crash the server by running the wrong query.
In second place, there is no mention in the docs of an API method to retrieve the output as a graph-like structure. You will have to process the output of the query and build it.
That said, in the example you give you say that there is only one A and that you know it before the data is fetched, so you don't need to do:
MATCH (A)-->(B) RETURN A, B
but just
MATCH (A)-->(B) RETURN B
(you don't need to receive A three times because you already know these are the nodes connected with A)
or better (if you need info about the relationships) something like
MATCH (A)-[r]->(B) RETURN r

How to make datastore keys mapreduce-friendly(-er)?

Edit: See my answer. Problem was in our code. MR works fine, it may have a status reporting problem, but at least the input readers work fine.
I ran an experiment several times now and I am now sure that mapreduce (or DatastoreInputReader) has odd behavior. I suspect this might have something to do with key ranges and splitting them, but that is just my guess.
Anyway, here's the setup we have:
we have an NDB model called "AdGroup", when creating new entities
of this model - we use the same id returned from AdWords (it's an
integer), but we use it as string: AdGroup(id=str(adgroupId))
we have 1,163,871 of these entities in our datastore (that's what
the "Datastore Admin" page tells us - I know it's not entirely
accurate number, but we don't create/delete adgroups very often, so
we can say for sure, that the number is 1.1 million or more).
mapreduce is started (from another pipeline) like this:
yield mapreduce_pipeline.MapreducePipeline(
job_name='AdGroup-process',
mapper_spec='process.adgroup_mapper',
reducer_spec='process.adgroup_reducer',
input_reader_spec='mapreduce.input_readers.DatastoreInputReader',
mapper_params={
'entity_kind': 'model.AdGroup',
'shard_count': 120,
'processing_rate': 500,
'batch_size': 20,
},
)
So, I've tried to run this mapreduce several times today without changing anything in the code and without making changes to the datastore. Every time I ran it, mapper-calls counter had a different value ranging from 450,000 to 550,000.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but considering that I use the very basic DatastoreInputReader - mapper-calls should be equal to the number of entities. So it should be 1.1 million or more.
Note: the reason why I noticed this issue in the first place is because our marketing guys started complaining that "it's been 4 days after we added new adgroups and they still don't show up in your app!".
Right now, I can think of only one workaround - write all keys of all adgroups into a blobstore file (one per line) and then use BlobstoreLineInputReader. The writing to blob part would have to be written in a way that does not utilize DatastoreInputReader, of course. Should I go with this for now, or can you suggest something better?
Note: I have also tried using DatastoreKeyInputReader with the same code - the results were similar - mapper-calls were between 450,000 and 550,000.
So, finally questions. Is it important how you generate ids for your entities? Is it better to use int ids instead of str ids? In general, what can I do to make it easier for mapreduce to find all of my entities mapping them?
PS: I'm still in the process of experimenting with this, I might add more details later.
After further investigation we have found that the error was actually in our code. So, mapreduce actually works as expected (mapper is called for every single datastore entity).
Our code was calling some google services functions that were sometimes failing (the wonderful cryptic ApplicationError messages). Due to these failures, MR tasks were being retried. However, we have set a limit on taskqueue retries. MR did not detect nor report this in any way - MR was still showing "success" in the status page for all shards. That is why we thought that everything is fine with our code and that there is something wrong with the input reader.

Zend_Db_Profiler How to extend class to log rows count

Like I said in the topic,
My team developed social website based on Zend Framework (1.11).
The problem is that our client wants a debug (on screen list of DB queries) with
execution time, how many rows were affected and statement sentence.
Time and statement Zend_DB_profiler gets for us with no hassle, but
we need also the amount of rows that query affected (fetched, update, inserted or deleted).
Please help, how to cope with this task?
This is the current implementation which prevents you from getting what you want.
$qp->start($this->_queryId);
$retval = $this->_execute($params);
$prof->queryEnd($this->_queryId);
Possible solution would be:
Create your own class for Statement, let's say extended from Zend_Db_Statement_Mysqli or what have you.
Redefine its execute method so that $retval is carried on into $prof->queryEnd($this->_queryId);
Redefine $_defaultStmtClass in Zend_Db_Adapter_Mysqli with your new statement class name
Create your own Zend_Db_Profiler with public function queryEnd($queryId) redefined, so it accepts $retval and handles $retval

Quickly finding the last item in a database Cakephp

I just inherited some cakePHP code and I am not very familiar with it (or any other php/serverside language). I need to set the id of the item I am adding to the database to be the value of the last item plus one, originally I did a call like this:
$id = $this->Project->find('count') + 1;
but this seems to add about 8 seconds to my page loading (which seems weird because the database only has about 400 items) but that is another problem. For now I need a faster way to find the id of the last item in the database, is there a way using find to quickly retrieve the last item in a given table?
That's a very bad approach on setting the id.
You do know that, for example, MySQL supports auto-increment for INT-fields and therefore will set the id automatically for you?
The suggested functions getLastInsertId and getInsertId will only work after an insert and not always.
I also can't understand that your call adds 8 seconds to your siteload. If I do such a call on my table (which also has around 400 records) the call itself only needs a few milliseconds. There is no delay the user would notice.
I think there might be a problem with your database-setup as this seems very unlikely.
Also please have a look if your database supports auto-increment (I can't imagine that's not possible) as this would be the easiest way of adding your wanted functionality.
I would try
$id = $this->Project->getLastInsertID();
$id++;
The method can be found in cake/libs/model/model.php in line 2768
As well as on this SO page
Cheers!
If you are looking for the cakePHP3 solution to this you simply use last().
ie:
use Cake\ORM\TableRegistry;
....
$myrecordstable=Tableregistry::get('Myrecords');
$myrecords=$myrecordstable->find()->last();
$lastId = $myrecords->id;
....

SSIS/VB.NET Equivalent of SQL IN (anonymous array.Contains())

I've got some SQL which performs complex logic on combinations of GL account numbers and cost centers like this:
WHEN (#IntGLAcct In (
882001, 882025, 83000154, 83000155, 83000120, 83000130,
83000140, 83000157, 83000010, 83000159, 83000160, 83000161,
83000162, 83000011, 83000166, 83000168, 83000169, 82504000,
82504003, 82504005, 82504008, 82504029, 82530003, 82530004,
83000000, 83000100, 83000101, 83000102, 83000103, 83000104,
83000105, 83000106, 83000107, 83000108, 83000109, 83000110,
83000111, 83000112, 83000113, 83100005, 83100010, 83100015,
82518001, 82552004, 884424, 82550072, 82552000, 82552001,
82552002, 82552003, 82552005, 82552012, 82552015, 884433,
884450, 884501, 82504025, 82508010, 82508011, 82508012,
83016003, 82552014, 81000021, 80002222, 82506001, 82506005,
82532001, 82550000, 82500009, 82532000))
Overall, the whole thing is poorly performing in a UDF, especially when it's all nested and the order of the steps is important etc. I can't make it table-driven just yet, because the business logic is so terribly convoluted.
So I'm doing a little exploratory work in moving it into SSIS to see about doing it in a little bit of a different way. Inside my script task, however, I've got to use VB.NET, so I'm looking for an alternative to this:
Select Case IntGLAcct = 882001 OR IntGLAcct = 882025 OR ...
Which is obviously a lot more verbose, and would make it terribly hard to port the process.
Even something like ({90605, 90607, 90610} AS List(Of Integer)).Contains(IntGLAcct) would be easier to port, but I can't get the initializer to give me an anonymous array like that. And there are so many of these little collections, I'm not sure I can create them all in advance.
It really all NEEDS to be in one place. The business changes this logic regularly. My strategy was to use the udf to mirror their old "include" file, but performance has been poor. Now each of the functions takes just 2 or three parameters. It turns out that in a dark corner of the existing system they actually build a multi-million row table of all these results - even though the pre-calced table is not used much.
So my new experiment is to (since I'm still building the massive cross join table to reconcile that part of the process) go ahead and use the table instead of the code, but go ahead and populate this table during an SSIS phase instead of calling the udf 12 million times - because my udf version just basically stopped working within a reasonable time frame and the DBAs are not of much help right now. Yet, I know that SSIS can process these rows pretty efficiently - because each month I bring in the known good results dozens of multi-million row tables from the legacy system in minutes AND run queries to reconcile that there are no differences with the new versions.
The SSIS code would theoretically become the keeper of the business logic, and the efficient table would be built from that (based on all known parameter combinations). Of course, if I can simplify the logic down to a real logic table, that would be the ultimate design - but that's not really foreseeable at this point.
Try this:
Array.IndexOf(New Integer() {90605, 90607, 90610}, IntGLAcct) >-1
What if you used a conditional split transform on your incoming data set and then used expressions or something similar (I'm not sure if your GL Accounts are fixed or if you're going to dynamically pass them in) to apply to the results? You can then take the resulting data from that and process as necessary.

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