My database consists of 5 tables with ~10000 rows combined. It takes ~1Mb in SQL Server CE which is on shared folder. The database itself is hierarchical Country-Region-City-Street-Building. I am using Entity Framework 4.
Because the database is small users are able to explore and edit all 2000 Cities in a WPF ListView. But with every approach I tried so far the GUI is sluggish (because of many database round-trips, with dummy data GUI is lightfast). How can I load entire database into memory with one or few database round-trips?
I tried multiple Include() but I noted great performance penalty as described here
Should I write my own ORM-light? I could also use plain ascii CSV files instead of database but it would obviously exclude concurrency.
Honestly, I've done something like this myself, and the answer for me was to copy the whole database locally and work on it.
If you're looking not only to read but also to write, I'd definitely suggest ditching CE and installing one of the Express versions of Sql Server. They are designed for this kind of situation; CE is not*.
*SP1 is better for concurrent access, but over the network will never be performant for large datasets.
I re-asked this question on Microsoft forum and they were kind to give me some guidance:
Basically my question can be restated as following:
read only once from database on application start
do all subsequent queries from local data, not database (for performance)
write to both context and database each time an entity is being added or deleted.
With plain EF it is not possible because each query goes to the database. This implies that I must read data fast on start and then cache it.
Implementation details:
The best way seems to be using ESQL to import data fast and then cache it, for example using entities not connected to context. From my first experiments it seems to work well.
Related
I'm working on a database heavy project, where the Microsoft SQL databases are very mature (16 or more years-old mature), and an old product uses VB6 and ADO to generate sql which interacts with the database. I've been given the task of porting/re-writing the ancient version with a new .NET version.
I'd love to use LINQ-to-* to ensure easy maintainability, but having tried for the last several weeks I feel like LINQ-to-SQL isn't flexible enough, LINQ-to-Entities has too much overhead, and LINQ-to-Datasets is pointless since I would be just as happy using Ado.Net.
The program operates on two databases at once: one is a database with a very consistent schema containing meta-data, and the other a database which has a varying schema, is tightly coupled to the meta-database, and dictates what information from the meta-database you are interested in at any given time. Furthermore, I need non-LINQ information from both databases (such as system-stored procedures, and system-tables).
Is there any way to use LINQ intelligently here? I'd love the static typing, but if I can't have it I don't want to force my square app into a round framework.
Just an FYI, you can get access system tables (and sys stored procs too?) using LINQ. Here is how:
Create a connection to the server you want.
Right-click the server and choose Change View > Object Type.
You should now see System Tables and User Tables. You should see sysjobs there, and you can easily drag it onto a .dbml surface.
Above was stolen from this post.
The best answer seems to be to use ADO.NET completely. I have the option of using Linq-to-Sql over the metabase and ADO.NET for any other database access, but that would make the code feel too inconsistent for me.
i'm using IronPython 2.6 for .Net4 to build an GUI logging application.
This application received data via serialport and stores these data in an sqlite3 database while showing the last 100 received items in an listview. The listview gathers it's data via an SQL SELECT from the database every 100ms. It only querys data that is not already visible in the listview.
At first, the useage of the sqlite3 module was good and solid but i'm now stuck with several issues that i can't solve.
The sqlite3 module throws after a while exceptions like:
database disk image is malformed
database or disk is full.
These errors occur sporadic and never under high system load.
I stuck with this kind if issues for some weeks now and i'm looking for an alternative way to store binary and ascii data in a database-like object.
Please, does somebody know a good database solution i could use with IronPython 2.6 for .Net4?
Thanks
good
That is highly subjective without far more detailed requirements.
You should be able to use any database with .NET support, whether out of the box (notably SQL Server Express and Compact) or installed separately (SQL Server-other editions, DB2, MySQL, Oracle, ...).
Ten select commands per second should be easily in each of any of the databases above, unless there is some performance issue (e.g. huge amount of data and not able to use an index).
If you don't need compatibility with CPython, then SQL Server Compact is probably your best bet given your requirements.
I am developing a data driven website and quite a lot of programming logic resides in database stored procedures and database functions. I found myself changing the stored proc/functions quite a lot in order to fix bugs or add new functionality. The data (tables) have remained mostly untouched.
The issue I am having is keeping track of versions of stored proc/functions. Currently I am incrementing version of whole database when I do a set of changes. As data is huge (10 Gb) I get issues having to run development version and release versions of databases in parallel.
I wish to put all the stored procs and functions in one database and keep data in one database, so that I can better manage the changes.
I am sure others would have encountered similar suggest and request suggestions on how to best handle this situation.
I would also recommend using source control keyword expansion in your stored procedures ($Version:$)
That way you can eyeball, grep, search syscomments, etc to see what version you have on your deployed database.
You can version just the schema dumps. In combination with source control keword expansion (as suggested by Rawheiser), you just take a look at what version you have in the database, generate a diff and apply it.
Also, there are several excellent tools to compare databases and their schemas, generate DDL scripts etc.: SQL Workbench, Power Architect, DDLUtils and Redgate SQL Compare, to name a few. SQL Compare is likely to work best with SQL Server, although all the others are FOSS and provide a higher ROI (in terms of time spent learning and what you can do with them) as they are platoform and RDBMS independent.
Finally, I have to say...I understand that the immediate results you get with logic in the DB are tempting, but if you've gone beyond more than a couple of procedures in the database, you're setting your self up for quite a lot of pain, sifting through what easily turns into spaghetti code and locking your application to a single database vendor. You might have your reasons, but I've been there and didn't like it very much. Logic can live very nicely in a different layer.
For source control you have several options:
Use a Visual Studio Database project.
Use SQL Server 2005's built-in support for source control
Use a third part tool such as SQL Compare
IMO Option 1. is preferable.
Bear in mind here, I am not an Access guru. I am proficient with SQL Server and .Net framework. Here is my situation:
A very large MS Access 2007 application was built for my company by a contractor.
The application has been split into two tiers BY ACCESS; there is a front end portion that holds all of the Ms Access forms, and then on the back end part, which are access tables, queries, etc., that is stored on a computer on the network.
Well, of course, there is a need to convert the data storage portion to SQL Server 2005 while keeping all of these GUI forms which were built in Ms Access. This is where I come in.
I have read a little, and have found that you can link the forms or maybe even the access tables to SQL Server tables, but I am still very unsure on what exactly can be done and how to do it.
Has anyone done this? Please comment on any capabilities, limitations, considerations about such an undertaking. Thanks!
Do not use the upsizing wizard from Access:
First, it won't work with SQL Server 2008.
Second, there is a much better tool for the job:
SSMA, the SQL Server Migration Assistant for Access which is provided for free by Microsoft.
It will do a lot for you:
move your data from Access to SQL Server
automatically link the tables back into Access
give you lots of information about potential issues due to differences in the two databases
keeps track of the changes so you can keep the two synchronised over time until your migration is complete.
I wrote a blog entry about it recently.
You have a couple of options, the upsizing wizard does a decent(ish) job of moving structure and data from access to Sql. You can then setup linked tables so your application 'should' work pretty much as it does now. Unfortunately the Sql dialect used by Access is different from Sql Server, so if there are any 'raw sql' statements in the code they may need to be changed.
As you've linked to tables though all the other features of Access, the QBE, forms and so on should work as expected. That's the simplest and probably best approach.
Another way of approaching the issue would be to migrate the data as above, and then rather than using linked tables, make use of ADO from within access. That approach is kind of famaliar if you're used to other languages/dev environments, but it's the wrong approach. Access comes with loads of built in stuff that makes working with data really easy, if you go back to use ADO/Sql you then lose many of those benefits.
I suggest start on a small part of the application - non essential data, and migrate a few tables and see how it goes. Of course you back everything up first.
Good luck
Others have suggested upsizing the Jet back end to SQL Server and linking via ODBC. In an ideal world, the app will work beautifully without needing to change anything.
In the real world, you'll find that some of your front-end objects that were engineered to be efficient and fast with a Jet back end don't actually work very well with a server database. Sometimes Jet guesses wrong and sends something really inefficient to the server. This is particular the case with mass updates of records -- in order not to hog server resources (a good thing), Jet will send a single UPDATE statement for each record (which is a bad thing for your app, since it's much, much slower than a single UPDATE statement).
What you have to do is evaluate everything in your app after you've upsized it and where there are performance problems, move some of the logic to the server. This means you may create a few server-side views, or you may use passthrough queries (to hand off the whole SQL statement to SQL Server and not letting Jet worry about it), or you may need to create stored procedures on the server (especially for update operations).
But in general, it's actually quite safe to assume that most of it will work fine without change. It likely won't be as fast as the old Access/Jet app, but that's where you can use SQL Profiler to figure out what the holdup is and re-architect things to be more efficient with the SQL Server back end.
If the Access app was already efficiently designed (e.g., forms are never bound to full tables, but instead to recordsources with restrictive WHERE clauses returning only 1 or a few records), then it will likely work pretty well. On the other hand, if it uses a lot of the bad practices seen in the Access sample databases and templates, you could run into huge problems.
It's my opinion that every Access/Jet app should be designed from the beginning with the idea that someday it will be upsized to use a server back end. This means that the Access/Jet app will actually be quite efficient and speedy, but also that when you do upsize, it will cause a minimum of pain.
This is your lowest-cost option. You're going to want to set up an ODBC connection for your Access clients pointing to your SQL Server. You can then use the (I think) "Import" option to "link" a table to the SQL Server via the ODBC source. Migrate your data from the Access tables to SQL Server, and you have your data on SQL Server in a form you can manage and back up. Important, queries can then be written on SQL Server as views and presented to the Access db as linked tables as well.
Linked Access tables work fine but I've only used them with ODBC and other databases (Firebird, MySQL, Sqlite3). Information on primary or foreign keys wasn't passing through. There were also problems with datatype interpretation: a date in MySQL is not the same thing as in Access VBA. I guess these problems aren't nearly as bad when using SQL Server.
Important Point: If you link the tables in Access to SQL Server, then EVERY table must have a Primary Key defined (Contractor? Access? Experience says that probably some tables don't have PKs). If a PK is not defined, then the Access forms will not be able to update and insert rows, rendering the tables effectively read-only.
Take a look at this Access to SQL Server migration tool. It might be one of the few, if not the ONLY, true peer-to-peer or server-to-server migration tools running as a pure Web Application. It uses mostly ASP 3.0, XML, the File System Object, the Data Dictionary Object, ADO, ADO Extensions (ADOX), the Dictionary Scripting Objects and a few other neat Microsoft techniques and technologies. If you have the Source Access Table on one server and the destination SQL Server on another server or even the same server and you want to run this as a Web Internet solution this is the product for you. This example discusses the VPASP Shopping Cart, but it will work for ANY version of Access and for ANY version of SQL Server from SQL 2000 to SQL 2008.
I am finishing up development for a generic Database Upgrade Conversion process involving the automated conversion of Access Table, View and Index Structures in a VPASP Shopping or any other Access System to their SQL Server 2005/2008 equivalents. It runs right from your server without the need for any outside assistance from external staff or consultants.
After creating a clone of your Access tables, indexes and views in SQL Server this data migration routine will selectively migrate all the data from your Access tables into your new SQL Server 2005/2008 tables without having to give out either your actual Access Database or the Table Contents or your passwords to anyone.
Here is the Reverse Engineering part of the process running against a system with almost 200 tables and almost 300 indexes and Views which is being done as a system acceptance test. Still a work in progress, but the core pieces are in place.
http://www.21stcenturyecommerce.com/SQLDDL/ViewDBTables.asp
I do the automated reverse engineering of the Access Table DDLs (Data Definition Language) and convert them into SQL equivalent DDL Statements, because table structures and even extra tables might be slightly different for every VPASP customer and for every version of VP-ASP out there.
I am finishing the actual data conversion routine which would migrate the data from Access to SQL Server after these new SQL Tables have been created including any views or indexes. It is written entirely in ASP, with VB Scripting, the File System Object (FSO), the Dictionary Object, XML, DHTML, JavaScript right now and runs pretty quickly as you will see against a SQL Server 2008 Database just for the sake of an example.
It takes perhaps 15-20 seconds to reverse engineer almost 500 different database objects. There might be a total of over 2,000 columns involved in this example for the 170 tables and 270 indexes involved.
I have even come up with a way for you to run both VPASP systems in parallel using 2 different database connection files on the same server just to be sure that orders entered on the Access System and the SQL Server system produce the same results before actual cutover to production.
John (a/k/a The SQL Dude)
sales#designersyles.biz
(This is a VP-ASP Demo Site)
Here is a technique I've heard one developer speak on. This is if you really want something like a Client-Server application.
Create .mdb/.mde frontend files distributed to each user (You'll see why).
For every table they need to perform an CRUD, have a local copy in the file in #1.
The forms stay linked to the local tables.
Write VBA code to handle the CRUD from the local tables to the SQL Server database.
Reports can be based off of temp tables created from the SQL Server (Won't be able to create temp tables in mde file I don't think).
Once you decide how you want to do this with a single form, it is not too difficult to apply the same technique to the rest. The nice thing about working with the form on a local table is you can keep a lot of the existing functionality as the existing application (Which is why they used and continue to use Access I hope). You just need to address getting data back and forth to the SQL Server.
You can continue to have linked tables, and then gradually phase them out with this technique as time and performance needs dictate.
Since each user has their own local file, they can work on their local copy of the data. Only the minimum required to do their task should ever be copied locally. Example: if they are updating a single record, the table would only have that record. When a user adds a new record, you would notice that the ID field for the record is Null, so an insert statement is needed.
I guess the local table acts like a dataset in .NET? I'm sure in some way this is an imperfect analogy.
We have a SQL server database. To manipulate the data non-programmatically, I can use SQL Server Management Studio by right-clicking a table and selecting "Open Table". However this is slow for very large tables and sorting and filtering is cumbersome.
Typically what we have done until now is to create an Access database containing linked tables which point to the SQL Server tables and views. Opening a large table is much faster this way, and Access has easy-to-use right-click filtering and sorting.
However, since Access 2007, sorting in particular has been quite slow when working with large tables. The Access database can also inadvertently lock the database tables, blocking other processes that may need to access the data. Creating the Access database in the first place, and updating it when new tables are added to SQL Server, is also tedious.
Is there a better way to work with the data that offers the usability of Access without its drawbacks?
Joel Coehoorn's answer is of course correct, that if the data is critical or there are naive users using the data, then a application front end should be developed. That being said, I have cases where a wise user (ok, me) user needs to just get in there and poke around.
Instead of directly looking at the tables, use MS Access but use queries to narrow down what you're looking at both column wise and row wise. That will improve the speed. Then edit the query properties and make sure that the query is No Locks. That should eliminate any blocking behavior. You may want to limit the number of rows returned which again will improve the speed. You can still edit the data in the query as you look at it.
Depending on what you're looking at, it may also be useful to set up database Views in the SQL Server to do some of the heavy lifting on the server rather than on the client.
I don't know how well it will do with really large tables, but Visual Studio is much quicker than SQL Management Studio for basic table operations. Open up your database in Server Explorer, right-click on a table, and select either "Open" to just display the data or "New Query" to filter, sort, etc.
I've used Visual Studio to do lots of stuff, just for convenience rather than having to log into the server and work on the database manager directly.
However, have you tried Toad for MS SQL (from Quest Software)? I use it all the time for Oracle, and have had good results (often better than Oracle's tools).
Editing raw data is a dangerous no-no. Better to identify the situations where you find yourself doing that and put together an application interface to act as an intermediary that can prevent you from doing stupid things like breaking a foreign key.
I don't know what the performance would be like for large datasets, but open office has a database program (Base), which is an Access clone and may just be what you are looking for.
You might want to read
Tony Toews's Access Performance FAQ, which provides a number of hints on how to improve performance in an Access application. Perhaps one of those tips will solve the problem in your A2K7 app.