Redshift -- Query Performance Issues - amazon-web-services

SELECT
a.id,
b.url as codingurl
FROM fact_A a
INNER JOIN dim_B b
ON strpos(a.url,b.url)> 0
Records Count in Fact_A: 2 Million
Records Count in Dim_B : 1500
Time Taken to Execute : 10 Mins
No of Nodes: 2
Could someone help me with an understanding why the above query takes more time to execute?
We have declared the distribution key in Fact_A to appropriately distribute the records evenly in both the nodes and also Sort Key is created on URL in Fact_A.
Dim_B table is created with DISTRIBUTION ALL.

Redshift does not have full-text search indexes or prefix indexes, so a query like this (with strpos used in filter) will result in full table scan, executing strpos 3 billion times.
Depending on which urls are in dim_B, you might be able to optimise this by extracting prefixes into separate columns. For example, if you always compare subpaths of the form http[s]://hostname/part1/part2/part3 then you can extract "part1/part2/part3" as a separate column both in fact_A and dim_B, and make it the dist and sort keys.
You can also rely on parallelism of Redshift. If you resize your cluster from 2 nodes to 20 nodes, you should see immediate performance improvement of 8-10 times as this kind of query can be executed by each node in parallel (for the most part).

Related

Athena ignore LIMIT in some queries

I have a table with a lot of partitions (something that we're working on reducing)
When I query :
SELECT * FROM mytable LIMIT 10
I get :
"HIVE_EXCEEDED_PARTITION_LIMIT: Query over table 'mytable' can potentially read more than 1000000 partitions"
Why isn't the "LIMIT 10" part of the query sufficient for Athena to return a result without reading more that 1 or 3 partitions ?
ANSWER :
During the query planing phase, Athena attempts to list all partitions potentially needed to answer the query.
Since Athena doesn't know which partitions actually contain data (not empty partitions) it will add all partitions to the list.
Athena plans a query and then executes it. During planning it lists the partitions and all the files in those partitions. However, it does not know anything about the files, how many records they contain, etc.
When you say LIMIT 10 you're telling Athena you want at most 10 records in the result, and since you don't have any grouping or ordering you want 10 arbitrary records.
However, during the planning phase Athena can't know which partitions have files in them, and how many of those files it will need to read to find 10 records. Without listing the partition locations it can't know they're not all empty, and without reading the files it can't know they're not all empty too.
Therefore Athena first has to get the list of partitions, then list each partition's location on S3, even if you say you only want 10 arbitrary records.
In this case there are so many partitions that Athena short-circuits and says that you probably didn't mean to run this kind of query. If the table had fewer partitions Athena would execute the query and each worker would read as little as possible to return 10 records and then stop – but each worker would produce 10 records, because the worker can't assume that other workers would return any records. Finally the coordinator will pick the 10 records out of all the results form all workers to return as the final result.
Limit works on the display operation only, if I am not wrong. So query will still read everything but only display 10 records.
Try to limit data using where condition, that should solve the issue
I think Athena's workers try to read max number of the partitions (relative to the partition size of the table) to get that random chunk of data and stop when query is fulfilled (which in your case, is the specification of the limit).
In your case, it's not even starting to execute the above process because of too many partitions involved. Therefore, if Athena is not planning your random data selection query, you have to explicitly plan it and hand it over to the execution engine.
Something like:
select * from mytable
where (
partition_column in (
select partition_column from mytable limit cast(10 * rand() as integer)
)
)
limit 100

Joining Solution using Co-Group by SideInput Apache Beam

I have 2 Tables to Join, its a Left Join. Below is the two Condition, how my pipeline is working.
The job is running in batch mode and its all User data and we want to process in Google Dataflow.
Day 1:
Table A: 5000000 Records. (Size 3TB)
Table B: 200 Records. (Size 1GB)
Both Tables Joined through SideInput where TableB Data was Taken as SideInput and it was working fine.
Day 2:
Table A: 5000010 Records. (Size 3.001TB)
Table B: 20000 Records. (Size 100GB)
On second day my pipeline is slowing down because SideInput uses cache and my cache size got exhausted, because of size of TableB got Increased.
So I tried Using Co-Group by, but Day 1 data processing was pretty slow with a Log: Having 10000 plus values on Single Key.
So is there any better performant way to perform the Joining when Hotkey get introduced.
It is true that the performance can drop precipitously once table B no longer fits into cache, and there aren't many good solutions. The slowdown in using CoGroupByKey is not solely due to having many values on a single key, but also the fact that you're now shuffling (aka grouping) Table A at all (which was avoided when using a side input).
Depending on the distribution of your keys, one possible mitigation could be to process your hot keys into a path that does the side-input joining as before, and your long-tail keys into a GoGBK. This could be done by producing a truncated TableB' as a side input, and your ParDo would attempt to look up the key emitting to one PCollection if it was found in TableB' and another if it was not [1]. One would then pass this second PCollection to a CoGroupByKey with all of TableB, and flatten the results.
[1] https://beam.apache.org/documentation/programming-guide/#additional-outputs

AWS Athena partition fetch all paths

Recently, I've experienced an issue with AWS Athena when there is quite high number of partitions.
The old version had a database and tables with only 1 partition level, say id=x. Let's take one table; for example, where we store payment parameters per id (product), and there are not plenty of IDs. Assume its around 1000-5000. Now while querying that table with passing id number on where clause like ".. where id = 10". The queries were returned pretty fast actually. Assume we update the data twice a day.
Lately, we've been thinking to add another partition level for day like, "../id=x/dt=yyyy-mm-dd/..". This means that partition number grows xID times per day if a month passes and if we have 3000 IDs, we'd approximately get 3000x30=90000 partitions a month. Thus, a rapid grow in number of partitions.
On, say 3 months old data (~270k partitions), we'd like to see a query like the following would return in at most 20 seconds or so.
select count(*) from db.table where id = x and dt = 'yyyy-mm-dd'
This takes like a minute.
The Real Case
It turns out Athena first fetches the all partitions (metadata) and s3 paths (regardless the usage of where clause) and then filter those s3 paths that you would like to see on where condition. The first part (fetching all s3 paths by partitions lasts long proportionally to the number of partitions)
The more partitions you have, the slower the query executed.
Intuitively, I expected that Athena fetches only s3 paths stated on where clause, I mean this would be the one way of magic of the partitioning. Maybe it fetches all paths
Does anybody know a work around, or do we use Athena in a wrong way ?
Should Athena be used only with small number of partitions ?
Edit
In order to clarify the statement above, I add a piece from support mail.
from Support
...
You mentioned that your new system has 360000 which is a huge number.
So when you are doing select * from <partitioned table>, Athena first download all partition metadata and searched S3 path mapped with
those partitions. This process of fetching data for each partition
lead to longer time in query execution.
...
Update
An issue opened on AWS forums. The linked issue raised on aws forums is here.
Thanks.
This is impossible to properly answer without knowing the amount of data, what file formats, and how many files we're talking about.
TL; DR I suspect you have partitions with thousands of files and that the bottleneck is listing and reading them all.
For any data set that grows over time you should have a temporal partitioning, on date or even time, depending on query patterns. If you should have partitioning on other properties depends on a lot of factors and in the end it often turns out that not partitioning is better. Not always, but often.
Using reasonably sized (~100 MB) Parquet can in many cases be more effective than partitioning. The reason is that partitioning increases the number of prefixes that have to be listed on S3, and the number of files that have to be read. A single 100 MB Parquet file can be more efficient than ten 10 MB files in many cases.
When Athena executes a query it will first load partitions from Glue. Glue supports limited filtering on partitions, and will help a bit in pruning the list of partitions – so to the best of my knowledge it's not true that Athena reads all partition metadata.
When it has the partitions it will issue LIST operations to the partition locations to gather the files that are involved in the query – in other words, Athena won't list every partition location, just the ones in partitions selected for the query. This may still be a large number, and these list operations are definitely a bottleneck. It becomes especially bad if there is more than 1000 files in a partition because that's the page size of S3's list operations, and multiple requests will have to be made sequentially.
With all files listed Athena will generate a list of splits, which may or may not equal the list of files – some file formats are splittable, and if files are big enough they are split and processed in parallel.
Only after all of that work is done the actual query processing starts. Depending on the total number of splits and the amount of available capacity in the Athena cluster your query will be allocated resources and start executing.
If your data was in Parquet format, and there was one or a few files per partition, the count query in your question should run in a second or less. Parquet has enough metadata in the files that a count query doesn't have to read the data, just the file footer. It's hard to get any query to run in less than a second due to the multiple steps involved, but a query hitting a single partition should run quickly.
Since it takes two minutes I suspect you have hundreds of files per partition, if not thousands, and your bottleneck is that it takes too much time to run all the list and get operations in S3.

Azure SQL DW table not using all the distributions on the compute nodes to store data

One of the Fact tables in our Azure SQL DW (stores the train telemetry data) is created as a HASH distributed table (HASH key is VehicleDimId – integer field referencing the Vehicle Dimension table). The total number of records in the table are approx. 1.3 billion.
There are 60 unique VehicleDimId (i.e. we have data for 60 unique vehicles) values in the table which means that they have 60 unique hash keys as well. Based on my understanding, I expect the records corresponding to these 60 unique hash key VehicleDimId should be distributed across 60 distributions available (1 hash key for 1 distribution).
However, currently all the data is distributed across just 36 distributions leaving other 24 distributions with no records. In effect, that is just 60% usage of the compute nodes available. Changing the Data Warehouse scale does not have any effect as the number of distributions remain the same to 60. We are currently running our SQL DW at DW400 level. Below is the compute node level record counts of the table.
You can see that the data is not evenly distributed across compute nodes (which is due to the data not being distributed evenly across the underlying distributions).
I am struggling to understand what I need to do to get the SQL DW to use all the distributions rather than just 60% of them.
Hash distribution takes a hash of the binary representation of your distribution key then deterministically sends the row to the assigned distribution. Basically an int value of 999 ends up on the same distribution on every Azure SQL DW predictably. It doesn't look at your specific 60 unique vehicle IDs and evenly divide them.
The best practice is to choose a field (best if it is used in joins or group bys or distinct counts) which has at least 600 (10x the number of distributions) fairly evenly used values. Are there other fields that meet that criteria?
To quote from this article adding some emphasis:
Has many unique values. The column can have some duplicate values.
However, all rows with the same value are assigned to the same
distribution. Since there are 60 distributions, the column should have
at least 60 unique values. Usually the number of unique values is much
greater.
If you only have 60 distinct values your likelihood of ending up with even distribution is very small. With 10x more distinct values your likelihood of achieving even distribution is much higher.
The fallback is to use round robin distribution. Only do this if there are no other good distribution keys which produce even distribution and which are used in queries. Round robin should achieve optimal loading performance but query performance will suffer because the first step of every query will be a shuffle.
In my opinion, concatenating two columns together (as Ellis' answer suggests) to use as the distribution key is usually a worse option than round robin distribution unless you actually use the concatenated column in group bys or joins or distinct counts.
It is possible that keeping the current Vehicle ID distribution is the best choice for query performance since it will eliminate a shuffle step in many queries that join or group on Vehicle ID. However the load performance may be much worse because of the heavy skew (uneven distribution).
Another option is to create a concatenated join key which could be a concatenation of two different keys which will create a higher cardinality than what you have now with 60 x new row cardinality should generally be in the thousands or greater. The caveat here is that key needs to then be referenced in every join so that the work is done one each node. Then, when you hash on this key, you'll get a more even spread.
The only downside is that you have to propagate this concatenated key to the dimension table as well and ensure that your join conditions include this concatenated key until the last query. As an example, you keep the surrogate key in the subqueries and remove it only in the top level query to force collocated joins.

What's the difference between BatchGetItem and Query in DynamoDB?

I've been going through AWS DynamoDB docs and, for the life of me, cannot figure out what's the core difference between batchGetItem() and Query(). Both retrieve items based on primary keys from tables and indexes. The only difference is in the size of the items retrieved but that doesn't seem like a ground breaking difference. Both also support conditional updates.
In what cases should I use batchGetItem over Query and vice-versa?
There’s an important distinction that is missing from the other answers:
Query requires a partition key
BatchGetItems requires a primary key
Query is only useful if the items you want to get happen to share a partition (hash) key, and you must provide this value. Furthermore, you have to provide the exact value; you can’t do any partial matching against the partition key. From there you can specify an additional (and potentially partial/conditional) value for the sort key to reduce the amount of data read, and further reduce the output with a FilterExpression. This is great, but it has the big limitation that you can’t get data that lives outside a single partition.
BatchGetItems is the flip side of this. You can get data across many partitions (and even across multiple tables), but you have to know the full and exact primary key: that is, both the partition (hash) key and any sort (range). It’s literally like calling GetItem multiple times in a single operation. You don’t have the partial-searching and filtering options of Query, but you’re not limited to a single partition either.
As per the official documentation:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/WorkingWithTables.html#CapacityUnitCalculations
For BatchGetItem, each item in the batch is read separately, so DynamoDB first rounds up the size of each item to the next 4 KB and then calculates the total size. The result is not necessarily the same as the total size of all the items. For example, if BatchGetItem reads a 1.5 KB item and a 6.5 KB item, DynamoDB will calculate the size as 12 KB (4 KB + 8 KB), not 8 KB (1.5 KB + 6.5 KB).
For Query, all items returned are treated as a single read operation. As a result, DynamoDB computes the total size of all items and then rounds up to the next 4 KB boundary. For example, suppose your query returns 10 items whose combined size is 40.8 KB. DynamoDB rounds the item size for the operation to 44 KB. If a query returns 1500 items of 64 bytes each, the cumulative size is 96 KB.
You should use BatchGetItem if you need to retrieve many items with little HTTP overhead when compared to GetItem.
A BatchGetItem costs the same as calling GetItem for each individual item. However, it can be faster since you are making fewer network requests.
In a nutshell:
BatchGetItem works on tables and uses the hash key to identify the items you want to retrieve. You can get up to 16MB or 100 items in a response
Query works on tables, local secondary indexes and global secondary indexes. You can get at most 1MB of data in a response. The biggest difference is that query support filter expressions, which means that you can request data and DDB will filter it server side for you.
You can probably achieve the same thing if you want using any of these if you really want to, but rule of the thumb is you do a BatchGet when you need to bulk dump stuff from DDB and you query when you need to narrow down what you want to retrieve (and you want dynamo to do the heavy lifting filtering the data for you).
DynamoDB stores values in two kinds of keys: a single key, called a partition key, like "jupiter"; or a compound partition and range key, like "jupiter"/"planetInfo", "jupiter"/"moon001" and "jupiter"/"moon002".
A BatchGet helps you fetch the values for a large number of keys at the same time. This assumes that you know the full key(s) for each item you want to fetch. So you can do a BatchGet("jupiter", "satrun", "neptune") if you have only partition keys, or BatchGet(["jupiter","planetInfo"], ["satrun","planetInfo"], ["neptune", "planetInfo"]) if you're using partition + range keys. Each item is charged independently and the cost is same as individual gets, it's just that the results are batched and the call saves time (not money).
A Query on the other hand, works only inside a partition + range key combo and helps you find items and keys that you don't necessarily know. If you wanted to count Jupiter's moons, you'd do a Query(select(COUNT), partitionKey: "jupiter", rangeKeyCondition: "startsWith:'moon'"). Or if you wanted the fetch moons no. 7 to 15 you'd do Query(select(ALL), partitionKey: "jupiter", rangeKeyCondition: "BETWEEN:'moon007'-'moon015'"). Here you're charged based on the size of the data items read by the query, irrespective of how many there are.
Adding an important difference. Query supports Consistent Reads, while BatchGetITem does not.
BatchGetITem Can use Consistent Reads through TableKeysAndAttributes
Thanks #colmlg for the information.