I am quite new to dynamo DB I have a requirement in which I need to fetch around 120 million rows from the dynamo DB table. Criteria to fetch is based on PK(basically I need to fetch all the rows pertaining to CAR_********* Primary key pattern). The only way which I can figure out is to perform get operation but it's consuming a lot of time. I also looked for the option of a bulk get but that too has a limit of 100 rows or 16mb of data.
So, Can someone suggest a better and faster approach to extract this data?
First off, DynamoDB is optimized for storing and retrieving single data objects by primary key. If you need to regularly retrieve or update millions of rows, you should look at an alternative datastore.
With that out of the way, if this is a one-time task I recommend spinning up a Redshift database and using the COPY command to retrieve the data from Dynamo. You can then download that data using a single SQL statement.
If you don't want to do this, or are expecting to retrieve the data more than once, you need to use the Scan API. This will return at most 1 MB per call, so you'll need to call it in a loop.
Regardless, you will almost certainly need to increase your read capacity to handle this task.
Related
This is my use case:
I have a JSON Api with 200k objects. The dataset looks a little something like this: date, bike model, production time in min. I use Lambda to read from a JSON Api and write in DynamoDB via http request. The Lambda function runs everyday and updates DynamoDB with the most recent data.
I then retrieve the data by date since I want to calculate the average production time for each day and put it in a second table. An Alexa skill is connected to the second table and reads out the average value for each day.
First question: Since the same bike model is produced multiple times per day, using a composite primary key with date and bike model won't give me a unique key. Shall I create a UUID for the entries instead? Or is there a better solution?
Second question: For the calculation I would need to do a full table scan each time, which is very costly and advised against by many. How can I solve this problem without doing a full table scan?
Third question: Is it better to avoid DynamoDB altogether for my use case? Which AWS database is more suitable for my use case then?
Yes, uuid or any other unique identifier (ex: date+bike model+created time) as pk is fine.
It seems your daily job for average value is some sort of data analytics job not really a transaction job. I would suggest to go with a service support data analytics such as Amazon Redshift. You should be able to add data to such database service using Dynamodb streams. Alternatively, you can stream data into s3 and use a service like Athena to get the daily average.
There is a simple database model that you could use for this task:
PartitionKey: a UUID or use any combination of fields that provide uniqueness.
SortKey: Production date, as a string, i.e. 2020-07-28
If you then create a secondary index which uses as PK the Production date and includes the production time, you can then query (not scan) the secondary index for a specific date and perform any calculations you need on production time. You can then provision the required read/write capacity on the secondary index and the table independently.
Regarding your third question, I don't see any real benefit of using DynamoDB for this task. Any RDS (i.e. MySQL), Redshift or even S3+Athena can easily handle such use case. If you require real time analytics, you could even consider AWS Kinesis.
To store api-gateway websocket-connections, I use a dynamoDB-table.
When posting to stored connections, I retrieve the connection in a lambda-function via:
const dynamodb = new DynamoDB.DocumentClient();
const { Items, Count } = await dynamodb.scan({ TableName: 'Websocket' }).promise();
// post to connections
This is not really fast; the query takes around 400 - 800ms which could be better in my opinion. Can I change something on my implementation or is there maybe another aws-service which is better for storing these tiny infos about the websocket-connection (its really just a small connection-id and a user-id)?
It has nothing to do with dynamodb, if you do a scan on any database which reads from disk, it will take time and money from your pocket.
You can use any of below solution to achieve what you are doing.
Instead of storing all the websocket ids as separate row, consider having single record in which ids are stored, so that you can do a single query (not scan) and proceed.
Cons:
a. multiple writes to same row will result in race condition. and few reads might get lost, you can use conditional write to update record to solve this problem (have a always increasing version, and update the record only if version in db = version you read from db)
b. There is a limit on size of single document in dynamodb. As of now it is 400kb.
Store websocket id as separate row but group them by different keys, and create secondary index on these keys. Store the keys in a single row. While doing a fetch first get all relevant groups, and then query (not scan) all the items of that group. It will not exactly solve your problem but you can do interesting things like, let's say there are 10 groups, every second, messages for 1 groups are sent. this will make sure that load on your message sending infrastructure is also balanced. And you can keep incrementing number of groups as user increases.
Keep the ids in a cache like aws elastic cache and add/remove ids as new entries are made in dynamodb by using aws lambda and dyanmodb streams. It will make sure that you reads are fast. At the same time if cache goes down you can use dynamodb to populate it again by doing scan on dynamodb.
Cons:
a. Extra component to maintain.
I am trying to use AWS Athena to provide analytics for an existing platform. Currently the flow looks like this:
Data is pumped into a Kinesis Firehose as JSON events.
The Firehose converts the data to parquet using a table in AWS Glue and writes to S3 either every 15 mins or when the stream reaches 128 MB (max supported values).
When the data is written to S3 it is partitioned with a path /year=!{timestamp:yyyy}/month=!{timestamp:MM}/day=!{timestamp:dd}/...
An AWS Glue crawler update a table with the latest partition data every 24 hours and makes it available for queries.
The basic flow works. However, there are a couple of problems with this...
The first (and most important) is that this data is part of a multi-tenancy application. There is a property inside each event called account_id. Every query that will ever be issued will be issued by a specific account and I don't want to be scanning all account data for every query. I need to find a scalable way query only the relevant data. I did look into trying to us Kinesis to extract the account_id and use it as a partition. However, this currently isn't supported and with > 10,000 accounts the AWS 20k partition limit quickly becomes a problem.
The second problem is file size! AWS recommend that files not be < 128 MB as this has a detrimental effect on query times as the execution engine might be spending additional time with the overhead of opening Amazon S3 files. Given the nature of the Firehose I can only ever reach a maximum size of 128 MB per file.
With that many accounts you probably don't want to use account_id as partition key for many reasons. I think you're fine limits-wise, the partition limit per table is 1M, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.
You can decrease the amount of data scanned significantly by partitioning on parts of the account ID, though. If your account IDs are uniformly distributed (like AWS account IDs) you can partition on a prefix. If your account IDs are numeric partitioning on the first digit would decrease the amount of data each query would scan by 90%, and with two digits 99% – while still keeping the number of partitions at very reasonable levels.
Unfortunately I don't know either how to do that with Glue. I've found Glue very unhelpful in general when it comes to doing ETL. Even simple things are hard in my experience. I've had much more success using Athena's CTAS feature combined with some simple S3 operation for adding the data produced by a CTAS operation as a partition in an existing table.
If you figure out a way to extract the account ID you can also experiment with separate tables per account, you can have 100K tables in a database. It wouldn't be very different from partitions in a table, but could be faster depending on how Athena determines which partitions to query.
Don't worry too much about the 128 MB file size rule of thumb. It's absolutely true that having lots of small files is worse than having few large files – but it's also true that scanning through a lot of data to filter out just a tiny portion is very bad for performance, and cost. Athena can deliver results in a second even for queries over hundreds of files that are just a few KB in size. I would worry about making sure Athena was reading the right data first, and about ideal file sizes later.
If you tell me more about the amount of data per account and expected life time of accounts I can give more detailed suggestions on what to aim for.
Update: Given that Firehose doesn't let you change the directory structure of the input data, and that Glue is generally pretty bad, and the additional context you provided in a comment, I would do something like this:
Create an Athena table with columns for all properties in the data, and date as partition key. This is your input table, only ETL queries will be run against this table. Don't worry that the input data has separate directories for year, month, and date, you only need one partition key. It just complicates things to have these as separate partition keys, and having one means that it can be of type DATE, instead of three separate STRING columns that you have to assemble into a date every time you want to do a date calculation.
Create another Athena table with the same columns, but partitioned by account_id_prefix and either date or month. This will be the table you run queries against. account_id_prefix will be one or two characters from your account ID – you'll have to test what works best. You'll also have to decide whether to partition on date or a longer time span. Dates will make ETL easier and cheaper, but longer time spans will produce fewer and larger files, which can make queries more efficient (but possibly more expensive).
Create a Step Functions state machine that does the following (in Lambda functions):
Add new partitions to the input table. If you schedule your state machine to run once per day it can just add the partition that correspond to the current date. Use the Glue CreatePartition API call to create the partition (unfortunately this needs a lot of information to work, you can run a GetTable call to get it, though. Use for example ["2019-04-29"] as Values and "s3://some-bucket/firehose/year=2019/month=04/day=29" as StorageDescriptor.Location. This is the equivalent of running ALTER TABLE some_table ADD PARTITION (date = '2019-04-29) LOCATION 's3://some-bucket/firehose/year=2019/month=04/day=29' – but doing it through Glue is faster than running queries in Athena and more suitable for Lambda.
Start a CTAS query over the input table with a filter on the current date, partitioned by the first character(s) or the account ID and the current date. Use a location for the CTAS output that is below your query table's location. Generate a random name for the table created by the CTAS operation, this table will be dropped in a later step. Use Parquet as the format.
Look at the Poll for Job Status example state machine for inspiration on how to wait for the CTAS operation to complete.
When the CTAS operation has completed list the partitions created in the temporary table created with Glue GetPartitions and create the same partitions in the query table with BatchCreatePartitions.
Finally delete all files that belong to the partitions of the query table you deleted and drop the temporary table created by the CTAS operation.
If you decide on a partitioning on something longer than date you can still use the process above, but you also need to delete partitions in the query table and the corresponding data on S3, because each update will replace existing data (e.g. with partitioning by month, which I would recommend you try, every day you would create new files for the whole month, which means that the old files need to be removed). If you want to update your query table multiple times per day it would be the same.
This looks like a lot, and looks like what Glue Crawlers and Glue ETL does – but in my experience they don't make it this easy.
In your case the data is partitioned using Hive style partitioning, which Glue Crawlers understand, but in many cases you don't get Hive style partitions but just Y/M/D (and I didn't actually know that Firehose could deliver data this way, I thought it only did Y/M/D). A Glue Crawler will also do a lot of extra work every time it runs because it can't know where data has been added, but you know that the only partition that has been added since yesterday is the one for yesterday, so crawling is reduced to a one-step-deal.
Glue ETL is also makes things very hard, and it's an expensive service compared to Lambda and Step Functions. All you want to do is to convert your raw data form JSON to Parquet and re-partition it. As far as I know it's not possible to do that with less code than an Athena CTAS query. Even if you could make the conversion operation with Glue ETL in less code, you'd still have to write a lot of code to replace partitions in your destination table – because that's something that Glue ETL and Spark simply doesn't support.
Athena CTAS wasn't really made to do ETL, and I think the method I've outlined above is much more complex than it should be, but I'm confident that it's less complex than trying to do the same thing (i.e. continuously update and potentially replace partitions in a table based on the data in another table without rebuilding the whole table every time).
What you get with this ETL process is that your ingestion doesn't have to worry about partitioning more than by time, but you still get tables that are optimised for querying.
I am using dynamo db as back end database in my project, I am storing items in the table with each of size 80 Kb or more(contains nested JSON), and my partition key is a unique valued column(unique for each item). Now i want to perform pagination on this table i.e., my UI will provide(start-Integer, limit-Integer and type-2 string constants) and my API should retrieve the items from dynamo db based on the provided input query parameters from UI. I am using SCAN method from boto3 (python SDK) but this scan is reading all the items from my table prior to considering my filters and causing provision throughput error, but I cannot afford to either increase my table's throughput or opt table auto-scaling. Is there any way how my problem can be solved? Please give your suggestions
Do you have a limit set on your scan call? If not, DynamoDB will return you 1MB of data by default. You could try using limit and some kind of sleep or delay in your code, so that you process your table at a slower rate and stay within your provisioned read capacity. If you do this, you'll have to use the LastEvaluatedKey returned to you to page through your table.
Keep in mind that just to read a single one of your 80kb items, you'll be using 10 read capacity units, and perhaps more if your items are larger.
I’m quite new to NoSQL and DynamoDB and I used to RDBMS. I’m designing database for a game and we're using DynamoDB and AWS Lambda for our backend. I created a table name “Users” for player profile that contains the user information and resources. Because the game has inventory system I also created a table name “UserItems”.
It’s all good until I realized DynamoDB don’t have transaction and any operation that is executed on both table (for example using an item that increase resource) has a chance of failure on one table while success on other and will cause missing data which affect our customers.
So I was thinking maybe my multiple tables design is not good since it’s a habit of me to design multiple table when I’m working with RDBMS. Which let me to think of storing the entire “UserItems” as hash in “Users” but I’m not sure this is a good practice because the size of a single row in Users table will be really big (we may have 500 unique items per users) and each time I pull or put data from/to “Users” (most of the time don’t need “UserItems” data) the read/write throughput will be also really large.
What should I do, keep the multiple tables design and handle transaction manually or switch to single table design? Or maybe there is a 3rd option?
Updated: more information about my use case
Currently I have 2 tables
Users: UserId (key), Username, Gold
UserItems: UserId (partition key), ItemId (sort key), Name, GoldValue
Scenarios:
User buy an item: Users.Gold will be deduced, new UserItem will be add to UserItems table.
User sell an item: Users.Gold will be increased, the Item will be deleted from UserItems table.
In both scenarios above I will have to do 2 update operation for 2 tables which without transaction there is a chance one of them failed.
To solve that I consider using single table solution which is a single Users table with 4 columns UserId(key), Username, Gold, UserItems. However there are two things I'm worried about:
Data in UserItems might be come to big for a single cell because one user could have up to 500 items.
To add/delete item I have to pull the UserItems from dynamodb, add/delete item and then put it back into Users. So I have to do 1 read and 1 write operation for 1 action. And because of issue (1) the read/write data size could become really big.
FWIW, the AWS documentation on NoSQL Design for DynamoDB suggests to use a single table:
As a general rule, you should maintain as few tables as possible in a
DynamoDB application. As emphasized earlier, most well designed
applications require only one table, unless there is a specific reason
for using multiple tables.
Exceptions are cases where high-volume time series data are involved,
or datasets that have very different access patterns—but these are
exceptions. A single table with inverted indexes can usually enable
simple queries to create and retrieve the complex hierarchical data
structures required by your application.
NoSql database is best suited for non-trasactional data. If you bring normalization(splitting your data into multiple tables) into noSQL, then you are beating the whole purpose of it. If performance is what matters most, then you should consider only having a single table for your use case. DynamoDB supports Range Keys, and also supports Secondary Indices. For your usecase, it would be better to redesign your table to use Range Keys.
If you can share more details about your current table, maybe i can help you with more inputs.