I am programming a Google Apps Engine Go application and I would like to change a variable name inside a structure that is stored in the datastore.
Say I have a struct:
type AA struct{
A string
BB string
}
And would like to change BB into B. If I try just changing BB into B, the datastore will start giving me errors when it would try to assign stored BB values to new struct AA that does not have that variable. I can add B and still keep BB, but then the struct would start getting messy.
How can I neatly change variable structure in GAE Go datastore without resorting to temporary copying over the entire database and wiping a lot of data?
You can have your AA implement PropertyLoadSaver as described in the Datastore docs, an then
in Load method copy BB into B
in Save method just save A and B
Take a look at the App Engine documentation about Updating Your Model's Schema tha describes the flow you need to follow in order to update your schema and then delete obsolete properties.
Hope this helps.
Related
Here's what I have:
class A{
Ref<foo> b;
Ref<foo> c;
int code;
Date timestamp
}
The pseudo "where" clause of the SQL statement would like like this:
where b = object or (c = object and code = 1) order by timestamp
In plain English, give me all the records of A if b equals the specific object or if c equals the specified object when code equals 1. Order the result w/ timestamp.
Is the composite query part even possible w/ datastore (Objectify)? I really don't want to do two queries and merge the results, because I have to sort by timestamp.
Any help is appreciated.
P.S. I already tried
new FilterPredicate(b, EQUAL, object)
This didn't work, because the entity type is not a support type.
Thanks!
Pass a native datastore Key object to the FilterPredicate. The Google SDK Key, not the generic Objectify Key<?>.
Normally when filtering on properties, Objectify translates Ref<?> and Key<?> objects to native datastore keys for you. With the google-supplied FilterPredicate, that isn't an option. So you have to do the translation manually.
Objectify stores all Key<?> and Ref<?> fields and native datastore Keys, so you can freely interchange them (or even change the type of fields if you want).
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
I read in "hadoop design pattern" book, "HBase supports batch queries, so it would be ideal to buffer all the queries we want to execute up to some predetermined size. This constant depends on how many records you can comfortably store in memory before querying HBase."
I tried to search some examples online but couldn't find any, can someone show me the example using java map reduce?
Thanks.
Dan
Is this what you want? You can save HBase Get object in a list and submit the list at the same time. It's a little better than invoke table.get(get) multiple times.
Configuration conf = HBaseConfiguration.create();
pool = new HTablePool(conf, 5);
HTableInterface table = pool.getTable('table');
List<Get> gets = new ArrayList<Get>();
table.get(gets);
I've been developing a couple apps using Google App Engine Go SDK that use Memcache as a buffer for loading data from the Datastore. As the Memcache is only able to store data as []byte, I often find myself creating functions to encode the various structures as strings, and also functions to reverse the process. Needless to say, it is quite tedious when I need to do this sort of thing 5 times over.
Is there an easy way to convert any arbitrary structure that can be stored in Datastore into []byte in order to store it in Memcache and then load it back without having to create custom code for various structures in GAE Golang?
http://golang.org/pkg/encoding/gob or http://golang.org/pkg/encoding/json can turn arbitrary datatypes into []byte slices given certain rules apply to the datastructures being encoded. You probably want one of them gob will encode to smaller sizes but json is more easily shareable with other languages if that is a requirement.
I found myself needing the same thing. So I created a package called:
AEGo/ds
Documentation | Source
go get github.com/scotch/aego/ds
It uses the same API as the "appengine/datastore" so It will work as a drop in replacement.
import "github.com/scotch/aego/v1/ds"
u = &User{Name: "Bob"}
key := datastore.NewKey(c, "User", "bob", 0, nil)
key, err := ds.Put(c, key, u)
u = new(User)
err = ds.Get(c, key, u)
By default it will cache all Puts and Gets to memcache, but you can modify this behavior by calling the ds.Register method:
ds.Register("User", true, false, false)
The Register method takes a string representing the Kind and 3 bool - userDatastore, useMemcache, useMemory. Passing a true value will cause AEgo/ds to persist the record to that store. The Memory store is useful for records that you do not expect to change, but could contain stale data if you have more then one instance running.
Supported methods are:
Put
PutMulti
Get
GetMulti
Delete
DeleteMulti
AllocateIDs
Note: Currently cashing only occures with Get. GetMulti pulls from the datastore.
AEGo/ds is a work in progress, but the code is well tested. Any feedback would be appreciated.
And to answer you question here's how I serialized the entities to gob for the memcache persistence.
I am trying a case where we changed a field name in our entity. we have something like this for example
class Person {
String name; //The original declaration was "String fullName"
}
According to objectify you have to use annonation #AutoLoad(""). This is ok and it works as Google Datastore doesn't delete the data Actually but it makes a new field so this annotation is like a mapping between the old and the new field. No problem when you are reading the whole table.
The problem arises when you apply a filter on your query (Suppose you made 5 objects with old name and 5 with new name). The result of your query depends on whether you used the old variable name or the new one (returns back only 5 but never the 10). It won't fetch both of them and map them. Any Suggestions for this problem? I hope i explained it in a clear way.
Thanks in advance
The simplest straight forward solution. fetch all data with the annonation "AutoLoad()". Then store them again. In this way they will be saved as the new field. The old one doesn't exist anymore or at least it doesn't contain any data anymore. It is like migrating the data from the old name to the new name. Anyone has better suggestions ?
If you've changed the name of your field, you need to load and re-put all your data (using the mapreduce API would be one option here). There's no magic way around this - the data you've stored exists with two different names on disk.
You can use #OldName
http://www.mail-archive.com/google-appengine-java#googlegroups.com/msg05586.html