I am new in storm framework(https://storm.incubator.apache.org/about/integrates.html),
I test locally with my code and I think If I remove stop words, it will perform well, but i search on line and I can't see any example that removing stopwords in storm.
If the size of the stop words list is small enough to fit in memory, the most straighforward approach would be to simply filter the tuples with an implementation of storm Filter that knows that list. This Filter could possibly poll the DB every so often to get the latest list of stop words if this list evolves over time.
If the size of the stop words list is bigger, then you can use a QueryFunction, called from your topology with the stateQuery function, which would:
receive a batch of tuples to check (say 10000 at a time)
build a single query from their content and look up corresponding stop words in persistence
attach a boolean to each tuple specifying what to with each one
+ add a Filter right after that to filter based on that boolean.
And if you feel adventurous:
Another and faster approach would be to use a bloom filter approximation. I heard that Algebird is meant to provide this kind of functionality and targets both Scalding and Storm (how cool is that?), but I don't know how stable it is nor do I have any experience in practically plugging it into Storm (maybe Sunday if it's rainy...).
Also, Cascading (which is not directly related to Storm but has a very similar set of primitive abstractions on top of map reduce) suggests in this tutorial a method based on left joins. Such joins exist in Storm and the right branch could possibly be fed with a FixedBatchSpout emitting all stop words every time, or even a custom spout that reads the latest version of the list of stop words from persistence every time, so maybe that would work too? Maybe? This also assumes the size of the stop words list is relatively small though.
using ODBC as the transport layer is convenient in that you easily connect via tcp to a remote machine. The drawback is all the round trips over the connection.
At the launch of the thick client, many data sets are required some with thousands of lines. This is data needed before thing #1 can be done by the user.
What I would like to do is create a single object (blob perhaps) to return with a single round trip meaning condense the result set into a table/blob/object that I can parse out upon receipt.
I can think of a few ugly ways to do this, something elegant would be great.
Assuming you mean SQL Server. if you use forwardonly cursors, each SQLFetch will not require a round trip to the server. If you find its taking a long time to do that, it may be worth reviewing just how you are calling the ODBC API. Normally a fetch from a forward only cursor will be limited by your network throughput speed, and the only round trips needed will be TCP ack's.
I am saving the fingerprints in a field "blob", then wonder if the only way to compare these impressions is retrieving all prints saved in the database and then create a vector to check, using the function "identify_finger"? You can check directly from the database using a SELECT?
I'm working with libfprint. In this code the verification is done in a vector:
def test_identify():
cur = DB.cursor()
cur.execute('select id, fp from print')
id = []
gallary = []
for row in cur.fetchall():
data = pyfprint.pyf.fp_print_data_from_data(str(row['fp']))
gallary.append(pyfprint.Fprint(data_ptr = data))
id.append(row['id'])
n, fp, img = FingerDevice.identify_finger(gallary)
There are two fundamentally different ways to use a fingerprint database. One is to verify the identity of a person who is known through other means, and one is to search for a person whose identity is unknown.
A simple library such as libfprint is suitable for the first case only. Since you're using it to verify someone you can use their identity to look up a single row from the database. Perhaps you've scanned more than one finger, or perhaps you've stored multiple scans per finger, but it will still be a small number of database blobs returned.
A fingerprint search algorithm must be designed from the ground up to narrow the search space, to compare quickly, and to rank the results and deal with false positives. Just as a Google search may come up with pages totally unrelated to what you're looking for, so too will a fingerprint search. There are companies that devote their entire existence to solving this problem.
Another way would be to have a mysql plugin that knows how to work with fingerprint images and select based on what you are looking for.
I really doubt that there is such a thing.
You could also try to parallelize the fingerprint comparation, ie - calling:
FingerDevice.identify_finger(gallary)
in parallel, on different cores/machines
You can't check directly from the database using a SELECT because each scan is different and will produce different blobs. libfprint does the hard work of comparing different scans and judging if they are from the same person or not
What zinking and Tudor are saying, I think, is that if you understand how does that judgement process works (which is by the way, by minutiae comparison) you can develop a method of storing the relevant data for the process (the *minutiae, maybe?) in the database and then a method for fetching the relevant values -- maybe a kind of index or some type of extension to the database.
In other words, you would have to reimplement the libfprint algorithms in a more complex (and beautiful) way, instead of just accepting the libfprint method of comparing the scan with all stored fingerprint in a loop.
other solutions for speeding your program
use C:
I only know sufficient C to write kind of hello-world programs, but it was not hard to write code in pure C to use the fp_identify_finger_img function of libfprint and I can tell you it is much faster than pyfprint.identify_finger.
You can continue doing the enrollment part of the stuff in python. I do it.
use a time / location based SELECT:
If you know your users will scan their fingerprints with more probability at some time than other time, or at some place than other place (maybe arriving at work at some time and scanning their fingers, or leaving, or entering the building by one gate, or by other), you can collect data (at each scan) for measuring the probabilities and creating parallel tables to sort the users for their probability of arriving at each time and location.
We know that identify_finger tries to identify fingers in a loop with the fingerprint objects you provided in a list, so we can use that and give it the objects sorted in a way in which the more likely user for that time and that location will be the first in the list and so on.
When we fire a SQL query like
SELECT * FROM SOME_TABLE_NAME under ORACLE
What exactly happens internally? Is there any parser at work? Is it in C/C++ ?
Can any body please explain ?
Thanks in advance to all.
Short answer is yes, of course there is a parser module inside Oracle that interprets the statement text. My understanding is that the bulk of Oracle's source code is in C.
For general reference:
Any SQL statement potentially goes through three steps when Oracle is asked to execute it. Often, control is returned to the client between each of these steps, although the details can depend on the specific client being used and the manner in which calls are made.
(1) Parse -- I believe the first action is actually to check whether Oracle has a cached copy of the exact statement text. If so, it can save the work of parsing your statement again. If not, it must of course parse the text, then determine an execution plan that Oracle thinks is optimal for the statement. So conceptually at least there are two entities at work in this phase -- the parser and the optimizer.
(2) Execute -- For a SELECT statement this step would generally run just enough of the execution plan to be ready to return some rows to the client. Depending on the details of the plan, that might mean running the whole thing, or might mean doing just a very small fraction of the work. For any other kind of statement, the execute phase is when all of the work is actually done.
(3) Fetch -- This is when rows are actually returned to the client. Generally the client has a predetermined fetch array size which sets the maximum number of rows that will be returned by a single fetch call. So there may be many fetches made for a single statement. Of course if the statement is one that cannot return rows, then there is no fetch step necessary.
Manasi,
I think internally Oracle would have its own parser, which does parsing and tries compiling the query. Think its not related to C or C++.
But need to confirm.
-Justin Samuel.
Long story short, I'm rewriting a piece of a system and am looking for a way to store some hit counters in AWS SimpleDB.
For those of you not familiar with SimpleDB, the (main) problem with storing counters is that the cloud propagation delay is often over a second. Our application currently gets ~1,500 hits per second. Not all those hits will map to the same key, but a ballpark figure might be around 5-10 updates to a key every second. This means that if we were to use a traditional update mechanism (read, increment, store), we would end up inadvertently dropping a significant number of hits.
One potential solution is to keep the counters in memcache, and using a cron task to push the data. The big problem with this is that it isn't the "right" way to do it. Memcache shouldn't really be used for persistent storage... after all, it's a caching layer. In addition, then we'll end up with issues when we do the push, making sure we delete the correct elements, and hoping that there is no contention for them as we're deleting them (which is very likely).
Another potential solution is to keep a local SQL database and write the counters there, updating our SimpleDB out-of-band every so many requests or running a cron task to push the data. This solves the syncing problem, as we can include timestamps to easily set boundaries for the SimpleDB pushes. Of course, there are still other issues, and though this might work with a decent amount of hacking, it doesn't seem like the most elegant solution.
Has anyone encountered a similar issue in their experience, or have any novel approaches? Any advice or ideas would be appreciated, even if they're not completely flushed out. I've been thinking about this one for a while, and could use some new perspectives.
The existing SimpleDB API does not lend itself naturally to being a distributed counter. But it certainly can be done.
Working strictly within SimpleDB there are 2 ways to make it work. An easy method that requires something like a cron job to clean up. Or a much more complex technique that cleans as it goes.
The Easy Way
The easy way is to make a different item for each "hit". With a single attribute which is the key. Pump the domain(s) with counts quickly and easily. When you need to fetch the count (presumable much less often) you have to issue a query
SELECT count(*) FROM domain WHERE key='myKey'
Of course this will cause your domain(s) to grow unbounded and the queries will take longer and longer to execute over time. The solution is a summary record where you roll up all the counts collected so far for each key. It's just an item with attributes for the key {summary='myKey'} and a "Last-Updated" timestamp with granularity down to the millisecond. This also requires that you add the "timestamp" attribute to your "hit" items. The summary records don't need to be in the same domain. In fact, depending on your setup, they might best be kept in a separate domain. Either way you can use the key as the itemName and use GetAttributes instead of doing a SELECT.
Now getting the count is a two step process. You have to pull the summary record and also query for 'Timestamp' strictly greater than whatever the 'Last-Updated' time is in your summary record and add the two counts together.
SELECT count(*) FROM domain WHERE key='myKey' AND timestamp > '...'
You will also need a way to update your summary record periodically. You can do this on a schedule (every hour) or dynamically based on some other criteria (for example do it during regular processing whenever the query returns more than one page). Just make sure that when you update your summary record you base it on a time that is far enough in the past that you are past the eventual consistency window. 1 minute is more than safe.
This solution works in the face of concurrent updates because even if many summary records are written at the same time, they are all correct and whichever one wins will still be correct because the count and the 'Last-Updated' attribute will be consistent with each other.
This also works well across multiple domains even if you keep your summary records with the hit records, you can pull the summary records from all your domains simultaneously and then issue your queries to all domains in parallel. The reason to do this is if you need higher throughput for a key than what you can get from one domain.
This works well with caching. If your cache fails you have an authoritative backup.
The time will come where someone wants to go back and edit / remove / add a record that has an old 'Timestamp' value. You will have to update your summary record (for that domain) at that time or your counts will be off until you recompute that summary.
This will give you a count that is in sync with the data currently viewable within the consistency window. This won't give you a count that is accurate up to the millisecond.
The Hard Way
The other way way is to do the normal read - increment - store mechanism but also write a composite value that includes a version number along with your value. Where the version number you use is 1 greater than the version number of the value you are updating.
get(key) returns the attribute value="Ver015 Count089"
Here you retrieve a count of 89 that was stored as version 15. When you do an update you write a value like this:
put(key, value="Ver016 Count090")
The previous value is not removed and you end up with an audit trail of updates that are reminiscent of lamport clocks.
This requires you to do a few extra things.
the ability to identify and resolve conflicts whenever you do a GET
a simple version number isn't going to work you'll want to include a timestamp with resolution down to at least the millisecond and maybe a process ID as well.
in practice you'll want your value to include the current version number and the version number of the value your update is based on to more easily resolve conflicts.
you can't keep an infinite audit trail in one item so you'll need to issue delete's for older values as you go.
What you get with this technique is like a tree of divergent updates. you'll have one value and then all of a sudden multiple updates will occur and you will have a bunch of updates based off the same old value none of which know about each other.
When I say resolve conflicts at GET time I mean that if you read an item and the value looks like this:
11 --- 12
/
10 --- 11
\
11
You have to to be able to figure that the real value is 14. Which you can do if you include for each new value the version of the value(s) you are updating.
It shouldn't be rocket science
If all you want is a simple counter: this is way over-kill. It shouldn't be rocket science to make a simple counter. Which is why SimpleDB may not be the best choice for making simple counters.
That isn't the only way but most of those things will need to be done if you implement an SimpleDB solution in lieu of actually having a lock.
Don't get me wrong, I actually like this method precisely because there is no lock and the bound on the number of processes that can use this counter simultaneously is around 100. (because of the limit on the number of attributes in an item) And you can get beyond 100 with some changes.
Note
But if all these implementation details were hidden from you and you just had to call increment(key), it wouldn't be complex at all. With SimpleDB the client library is the key to making the complex things simple. But currently there are no publicly available libraries that implement this functionality (to my knowledge).
To anyone revisiting this issue, Amazon just added support for Conditional Puts, which makes implementing a counter much easier.
Now, to implement a counter - simply call GetAttributes, increment the count, and then call PutAttributes, with the Expected Value set correctly. If Amazon responds with an error ConditionalCheckFailed, then retry the whole operation.
Note that you can only have one expected value per PutAttributes call. So, if you want to have multiple counters in a single row, then use a version attribute.
pseudo-code:
begin
attributes = SimpleDB.GetAttributes
initial_version = attributes[:version]
attributes[:counter1] += 3
attributes[:counter2] += 7
attributes[:version] += 1
SimpleDB.PutAttributes(attributes, :expected => {:version => initial_version})
rescue ConditionalCheckFailed
retry
end
I see you've accepted an answer already, but this might count as a novel approach.
If you're building a web app then you can use Google's Analytics product to track page impressions (if the page to domain-item mapping fits) and then to use the Analytics API to periodically push that data up into the items themselves.
I haven't thought this through in detail so there may be holes. I'd actually be quite interested in your feedback on this approach given your experience in the area.
Thanks
Scott
For anyone interested in how I ended up dealing with this... (slightly Java-specific)
I ended up using an EhCache on each servlet instance. I used the UUID as a key, and a Java AtomicInteger as the value. Periodically a thread iterates through the cache and pushes rows to a simpledb temp stats domain, as well as writing a row with the key to an invalidation domain (which fails silently if the key already exists). The thread also decrements the counter with the previous value, ensuring that we don't miss any hits while it was updating. A separate thread pings the simpledb invalidation domain, and rolls up the stats in the temporary domains (there are multiple rows to each key, since we're using ec2 instances), pushing it to the actual stats domain.
I've done a little load testing, and it seems to scale well. Locally I was able to handle about 500 hits/second before the load tester broke (not the servlets - hah), so if anything I think running on ec2 should only improve performance.
Answer to feynmansbastard:
If you want to store huge amount of events i suggest you to use distributed commit log systems such as kafka or aws kinesis. They allow to consume stream of events cheap and simple (kinesis's pricing is 25$ per month for 1K events per seconds) – you just need to implement consumer (using any language), which bulk reads all events from previous checkpoint, aggregates counters in memory then flushes data into permanent storage (dynamodb or mysql) and commit checkpoint.
Events can be logged simply using nginx log and transfered to kafka/kinesis using fluentd. This is very cheap, performant and simple solution.
Also had similiar needs/challenges.
I looked at using google analytics and count.ly. the latter seemed too expensive to be worth it (plus they have a somewhat confusion definition of sessions). GA i would have loved to use, but I spent two days using their libraries and some 3rd party ones (gadotnet and one other from maybe codeproject). unfortunately I could only ever see counters post in GA realtime section, never in the normal dashboards even when the api reported success. we were probably doing something wrong but we exceeded our time budget for ga.
We already had an existing simpledb counter that updated using conditional updates as mentioned by previous commentor. This works well, but suffers when there is contention and conccurency where counts are missed (for example, our most updated counter lost several million counts over a period of 3 months, versus a backup system).
We implemented a newer solution which is somewhat similiar to the answer for this question, except much simpler.
We just sharded/partitioned the counters. When you create a counter you specify the # of shards which is a function of how many simulatenous updates you expect. this creates a number of sub counters, each which has the shard count started with it as an attribute :
COUNTER (w/5shards) creates :
shard0 { numshards = 5 } (informational only)
shard1 { count = 0, numshards = 5, timestamp = 0 }
shard2 { count = 0, numshards = 5, timestamp = 0 }
shard3 { count = 0, numshards = 5, timestamp = 0 }
shard4 { count = 0, numshards = 5, timestamp = 0 }
shard5 { count = 0, numshards = 5, timestamp = 0 }
Sharded Writes
Knowing the shard count, just randomly pick a shard and try to write to it conditionally. If it fails because of contention, choose another shard and retry.
If you don't know the shard count, get it from the root shard which is present regardless of how many shards exist. Because it supports multiple writes per counter, it lessens the contention issue to whatever your needs are.
Sharded Reads
if you know the shard count, read every shard and sum them.
If you don't know the shard count, get it from the root shard and then read all and sum.
Because of slow update propogation, you can still miss counts in reading but they should get picked up later. This is sufficient for our needs, although if you wanted more control over this you could ensure that- when reading- the last timestamp was as you expect and retry.