rereduce and group=true in CouchDB - mapreduce

Actually this question was raised by someone else at here https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13338799/does-couchdbs-group-true-prevent-rereduce.
But there is no convincing answer.
group=true is the conceptual equivalent of group_level=exact, so CouchDB runs a reduce per unique key in the map row set.
This is how it is explained in doc.
It sounds like CouchDB would collect all the values for the same key and only reduce one time per each distinct key.
But in another article, it is said that
If the query is on the reduce value of each key (group_by_key = true),
then CouchDB try to locate the boundary of each key. Since this range
is probably not fitting exactly along the B+Tree node, CouchDB need to
figure out the edge of both ends to locate the partially matched leave
B+Tree node and resend its map result (with that key) to the View
Server. This reduce result will then merge with existing rereduce
result to compute the final reduce result of this key.
It sounds like rereduce may happen when group=true.
In my project, there are many documents but there are most 2 values with the same key after grouping for each distinct key.
Will rereduce happen in this case?
Best Regards

Yes. Rereduce is always a possibility.
If this is a problem, there is a rereduce parameter in the reduce function, which allows you to detect if this is happening.
http://docs.couchdb.org/en/latest/couchapp/ddocs.html#reduce-and-rereduce-functions

Related

Difference between RangeKeyCondition and FilterKeyCondition in aws DynamoDb

I am new to AWS. while reading the docs here and example I came to know that sort key is not only use to sort the data in partitions but also used to enhance the searching criteria on dynamoDB table.But the same we can do with the help of filterCondition. So what is the difference,
and also acc. to example given we can use sort/range key in withKeyConditionExpression("CreateDate = :v_date and begins_with(IssueId, :v_issue)")
but when I tried it gave me exception
com.amazonaws.services.dynamodbv2.model.AmazonDynamoDBException: Query key condition not supported
Thanks
To limit the Items returned rather than returning all Items with a particular HASH key.
There are two different ways we can handle this
The ideal way is to build the element we want to query into the RANGE key. This allows us to use Key Expressions to query our data, allowing DynamoDB to quickly find the Items that satisfy our Query.
A second way to handle this is with filtering based on non-key attributes. This is less efficient than Key Expressions but can still be helpful in the right situations. Filter expressions are used to apply server-side filters on Item attributes before they are returned to the client making the call. Filtering is Applied after DynamoDB Query is completed . If you retrieve 100KB of data in Query step but filter it down to 1KB of data, you will consume the Read Capacity Units for 100KB of data
Moral is - Filtering and projection expressions aren't a magic bullet - they won't make it easy to quickly query your data in additional ways. However, they can save network transfer time by limiting the number and size of items transferred back to your network. They can also simplify application complexity by pre-filtering your results rather than requiring application-side filtering.
From dynamodbguide
dynamodbguide

Better method for querying DynamoDB table randomly?

I've included some links along with our approaches to other answers, which seem to be the most optimal on the web right now.
Our records need to be categorized (eg. "horror", "thriller", "tv"), and randomly accessible both in specific categories and across all/some categories. We generally need to access about 20 - 100 items at a time. We also have a smallish number of categories (less than 100).
We write to the database for uploading/removing content, although this is done in batches and does not need to be real time.
We have tried two different approaches, with two different data structures.
Approach 1
AWS DynamoDB - Pick a record/item randomly?
Help selecting nth record in query.
In short, using the category as a hash key, and a UUID as the sort key. Generate a random UUID, query Dynamo using greater than or less than, and limit to 1. This is even suggested by an AWS employee in the second link. (We've also tried increasing the limit to the number of items we need, but this increases the probability of the query failing the first time around).
Issues with this approach:
First query can fail if it is greater than/less than any of the UUIDs
Querying on any specific category will cause throttling at scale (Small number of partitions)
We've also considered adding a suffix to each category to artificially increase the number of partitions we have, as pointed out in the following link.
AWS Database Blog
Choosing the Right DynamoDB Partition Key
Approach 2
Amazon Web Services: How do we get random item from the dynamoDb's table?
Doing something similar to this, where we concatenate the category with a sequential number, and use this as the hash key. e.g. horror-000001.
By knowing the number of records in each category, we're able to perform random queries across our entire data set, while also avoiding hot partitions/keys.
Issues with this approach
We need a secondary data structure to manage the sequential counts across each category
Writing (especially deleting) is significantly more complex, although this doesn't need to happen in real time.
Conclusion
Both approaches solve our main use case of random queries on category/categories, but the cons they offer are really deterring us from using them. We're leaning more towards approach #1 using suffixes to solve the hot partitioning issue, although we would need the additional retry logic for failed queries.
Is there a better way of approaching this problem? Specifically looking for solutions capable of scaling well (No scan), without requiring extra resources be implemented. #1 fits the bill, but needing to manage suffixes and failed attempts really deters us from using it, especially when it is being called inside a lambda (billed for time used).
Thanks!
Follow Up
After more research and testing, my team has decided to move towards MySQL hosted on RDS for these tables. We learned that this is one of the few use cases were DynamoDB does not fit, and requires rewriting your use case to fit the DB (Bad).
We felt that the extra complexity required to integrate random sampling on DynamoDB wasn't worth it, and we were unable to come up with any comparable solutions. We are, however, sticking with DynamoDB for our tables that do not need random accessibility due to the price and response times.
For anyone wondering why we chose MySQL, it was largely due to the Nodejs library available, great online resources (which DynamoDB definitely lacks), easy integration via RDS with our Lambdas, and the option to migrate to Amazons Aurora database.
We also looked at PostgreSQL, but we weren't as happy with the client library or admin tools, and we believe that MySQL will suit our needs for these tables.
If anybody has anything else they'd like to add or a specific question please leave a comment or send me a message!
This was too long for a comment, and I guess it's pretty much a full fledged answer now.
Approach 2
I've found that my typical time to get a single item from dynamodb to a host in the same region is <10ms. As long as you're okay with at most 1-2 extra calls, you can quite easily implement approach 2.
If you use a keys only GSI where the category is your hash key and the primary key of the table is your range key, you can quickly find the largest numbered single item within a category.
When you add a new item, find the largest number for that category from the GSI and then write the new item to the table with sequence number n+1.
When you delete, find the item with the largest sequence number for that category from the GSI, overwrite the item you are deleting, and then delete the now duplicated item from its position at the highest sequence number.
To randomly get an item, query the GSI to find the highest numbered item in the category, and then randomly pick a number since you now know the valid range.
Approach 1
I'm not sure exactly what you mean when you say "without requiring extra resources to be implemented". If you're okay with using a managed resource (no dev work to implement), you can also make Approach 1 work by putting a DAX cluster in front of your dynamodb table. Then you can query to your heart's content without really worrying about hot partitions. (Though the caching layer means that new/deleted items won't be reflected right away.)

Add Indexes (db_index=True)

I'm reading a book about coding style in Django and one thing they discuss is db_index=True. Ever since I started using Django, I've never used this function because I'm not really sure what it does.
So my question is, when to consider adding indexes?
This is not really django specific; more to do with databases. You add indexes on columns when you want to speed up searches on that column.
Typically, only the primary key is indexed by the database. This means look ups using the primary key are optimized.
If you do a lot of lookups on a secondary column, consider adding an index to that column to speed things up.
Keep in mind, like most problems of scale, these only apply if you have a statistically large number of rows (10,000 is not large).
Additionally, every time you do an insert, indexes need to be updated. So be careful on which column you add indexes.
As always, you can only optimize what you can measure - so use the EXPLAIN statement and your database logs (especially any slow query logs) to find out where indexes can be useful.
The above answer is correct but in some cases where the search is being done on columns that have only varchar datatype like email. There you need to add an index.
Following is the way of doing that:
Index(name='covering_index', fields=['headline'], include=['pub_date'])
reference from https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/ref/models/indexes/

DynamoDB query() versus getItem() for single-item retrieval based on the index

If I'm retrieving a single item from my table based on the indexed hash key, is there a performance difference between query() or getItem()?
getItem will be faster
getItem retrieve via hash and range key is a 1:1 fit, the time it takes (hence performance) to retrieve it is limited by the hash and sharding internally.
Query results in a search on "all" range keys. It adds computational work, thus considered slower.
Edit: Just for quick comparison adding the following picture from this blog entry.
In Amazon's DynamoDB, your performances are guaranteed whatever the access method. (you pay for it).
There may be a couple a milliseconds differences on the DynamoDB servers themselves as suggested by Chen Harel but these are negligible because of the HTTP request RTT.
This said, it's a good practice to issue a GET instead of QUERY when you have enough informations to do so.
As suggested by aws employee in one of the discussion, I quote:
The latency of GetItem vs Query with limit=1 will be equivalent.
AWS discussion link
There is no performance difference between the two. The hash calculation in both the queries are done 1 by 1.
The latter, i.e., get item is just provided as an analogy to the JPA repository/spring findOne/findById to make wiring in Spring Bean wiring/ Hibernate configs easier.

MongoDB: what is the most efficient way to query a single random document?

I need to pick a document from a collection at random (alternatively - a small number of successive documents from a randomly-positioned "window").
I've found two solutions: 1 and 2. The first is unacceptable since I anticipate large collection size and wish to minimize the document size. The second seems ineffective (I'm not sure about the complexity of skip operation). And here one can find a mention of querying a document with a specified index, but I don't know how to do it (I'm using C++ driver).
Are there other solutions to the problem? Which is the most efficient?
I had a similar issue once. In my case, I had a date property on my documents. I knew the earliest date possible in the dataset so in my application code, I would generate a random date within the range of EARLIEST_DATE_IN_SET and NOW and then query mongodb using a GTE query on the date property and simply limit it to 1 result.
There was a small chance that the random date would be greater than the highest date in the data set, so i accounted for that in the application code.
With an index on the date property, this was a super fast query.
It seems like you could mold solution 1 there, (assuming your _id key was an auto-inc value), then just do a count on your records, and use that as the upper limit for a random int in c++, then grab that row.
Likewise, if you don't have an autoinc _id key, just create one with your results.. having an additional field with an INT shouldn't add that much to your document size.
If you don't have an auto-inc field Mongo talks about how to quickly add one here:
Auto Inc Field.