On Amazon Redshift, do concurrent queries affect each others performance?
For example, lets say there are two queries: one on a relatively small table (~5m rows) retrieving all rows, and another on a large table (~500m) rows. Both tables have the same fields, both have no compression. Both queries retrieve all data in their respective tables to compute their results. There are no joins or filters. Both queries retrieve about 2-4 fields for their computations.
Running by itself, the small query returns in about 700ms. However, while the large query is running (which by itself takes a few minutes), the small query returns in 4-6 seconds.
This is the observed behavior on a cluster with a single XL node.
Is this the expected behavior? Is there a configuration setting that will promise performance consistency of the small query, even if the large query is running?
Copy-pasted from: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=137540#
I've performed some concurrent query benchmarking.
I created a straightforward query which by itself took about a minute
to run. I then ran one of those queries at once, then two, them three,
etc, and timed each query.
Each query basically halved database performance - e.g. what you'd
expect; double the load, halve the performance.
Actually, it's a bit better than halving - you get about an extra 10%
performance.
This performance behaviour held true up to 5 concurrent queries, which
is the max number of concurrent queries configured on the database I
was working with. If I ran six queries, the final query could not
execute until one of the first queries had finished and freed up a
slot.
Finally, vacuum acts much like a normal query - it halves performance.
It's not special.
Actually, vacuum is something more than halving - it's equivelent to a
pretty heavy query.
There are no guarantees because all of this is running on a fixed number of CPUs. With a fixed capacity of work when you increase the work it lowers the throughput. The short answer is get a bigger machine (ie more nodes).
Here is the specifics of your answer:
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=437015#
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/c_workload_mngmt_classification.html
Related
I want to take a general Idea of how I can optimise the query performance in redshift Database, I have Huge queries with lots of joins , I do understand using sort and Dist key it can be achieved but is there a method which we can follow in order to get some optimal results.
What to look in a table and how to approach query optimisation in redshift?
What are the necessary steps to look for or approach in order to have a certain plan for optimisation?
Any guidance will help a lot
Having improved many queries on Redshift there are a few things I can point you towards. First let me list a few tools / techniques to make sure you have these in your toolbox.
Ability to read and EXPLAIN plan and find expected costly points
Know where to find the query "actual" execution report
Know the system tables to find join, distribution, and disk io reports
So with those understood let's look at where many queries go sideways on Redshift. I will try to list these out in pareto order but any of these, or combos, can create significant issue.
#1 - Fat in the middle queries. When joining it is possible to expand the number of rows being operated upon many fold. Cross joining is a clear way this can happen but isn't how this usually happens. If the join on conditions create a many to many join pattern the number of rows can expand. When the table sizes are very large and the "multiplication" can make absurd data sizes. The explain plan can show this but not always - use of DISTINCT and GROUP BY can "hide" the true size of the dataset in play. Performing a SELECT COUNT(*) on your join tree can help show how big this is. You may also may need to look a pieces of the join tree if a later join is collapsing the rows (failure of the query optimizer?). Redshift is a columnar database and not well set up for the creation of data - this includes during the execution of query.
#2 - Distribution of large amounts of data. Redshift is a cluster and the node are connected together by ethernet cables and these connections are the slowest part of the cluster. A lot of work is done by the query optimizer to minimize the amount of data that needs to move around the network. However, it doesn't know your data as well as you do and doesn't always do this well. Look at the type of joins you are getting - is distribution needed? how much data is being distributed? Also, group by (and window functions) need to combine rows and therefore may need redistribution to complete. How big are the data sets entering your aggregation steps?
Moving a lot of data around the network will be slow. The difficulty is that it isn't always clear how to reduce this movement. Large join trees like you say you have can do "odd" things when it comes to the resulting distribution of the "joined" data. Joins are performed one at a time and the order these happen can matter. The query optimizer is making a number of decisions about the order of joins and how to organize the resulting data from each join. The choices it makes is based on what it sees in the table metadata so completeness of metadata matters. WHERE conditions can also impact the optimizer's choices. There are just way to many interactions to itemize them out here. Best advice is to look at the performance per step and see if data distribution is a factor. Then work to control how data is distributed in the query's execution. This may mean changing the join trees or even decomposing the query into several with temp table that have distribution set so that data movement is minimized.
#3 Excessive IO traffic - While not as slow as the networks, the disk IO subsystem is often a bottleneck. This shows up in a few ways. Are you reading more data from disk than is needed? (Metadata up to date?) Do you need a redundant WHERE clause to eliminate data? (Redundant WHERE clause is one that isn't needed functionally but is added so Redshift can perform the metadata comparisons that will reduce data read at scan.) Data spill is another way that disk IO can be strained (this goes back to #1). If data needs to spill to disk it can bring the disk IO performance down considerably. Use your metadata and Where clauses well.
Now these 3 areas often team up to kill your performance. Read too many rows from your tables, join all these extra rows together across the network while also making many new rows. This data doesn't fit in memory so now Redshift needs to spill to disk to complete the query. Things slow down real fast in these conditions.
Lastly these factors I've listed are cluster wide "resources" of Redshift. If one query take up a lot of one of these then there is less for other queries running at the same time. What often happens is that the query writers on a cluster follow similar patterns (good or bad) and when their pattern is costly on one axis then many of their queries are costly on the same axis. This shows up as queries that work "ok" when run in isolation but very badly when others are using the cluster. This generally means that many queries are contributing to pushing the cluster "over the edge" on some limited resource. There are system tables that you can look at to see aggregated IO or network traffic to see these effects.
Good queries are:
Don't make a lot of new "rows" during execution (not fat in the middle)
Keep large data sets "on node" and only redistribute data once the data has been pared down significantly
Don't read more data from disk than is necessary and don't spill
The problem is that doing all of these isn't always possible the trick is to not over subscribe the cluster resources you have.
I currently have a large set of json data that I'd like to import into Amazon Athena for visualization in Amazon Quicksight. In each json, there are two fields: one is a comma separated string of ids (orderlist), and the other field is an array of strings(locations). Because Quicksight doesn't support array searching, I'm currently resorting to creating a view where I generate crossjoins across the two string arrays:
select id,
try_CAST(orderid AS bigint) orderid_targeting,
location
from advertising_json
CROSS JOIN UNNEST(split(orderlist, ',')) as x(orderid)
CROSS JOIN UNNEST(locations) t (location)
With two cross joins, this can explode out the data to 20x-30x the original size.
If I were working on individual queries on Athena, I could use Presto array functions to search through the arrays. Is there a better way to make these fields accessible for filtering on Quicksight?
You have two options: keep doing what you're doing or implement an ETL workflow where you periodically materialise the view, for example using CTAS. The latter has the added benefit that you can produce Parquet files, which could help speed up your queries.
On the other hand it's not as simple as it sounds. If you're in luck you can use INSERT INTO to transform partitions from your current table into an optimised table after a point in time when they will not change – but in my experience most of the time your most recent data gets updated during some window of time, but you still want to be able to query it during that window. In that situation the ETL process becomes much more complicated since you need to remove data from the optimised table to avoid ending up with duplicate data. It's not hard, it's just a lot of code and juggling S3 and Glue Data Catalog operations so that you never have tables that have duplicate data nor too little data.
Unless you feel like your current setup with the view is too slow, don't go implementing something big and complicated. Remember that you pay for bytes scanned in Athena, not the amount of time Athena spends crunching your query. You get quite a lot of compute power running your queries and in my experience there's rarely any point in micro-optimisation of queries, the gains you make are orders of magnitude lower than minimising the amount of data you process, either through clever partitioning or moving to columnar file formats. Most of the time the gains from small optimisations are not measurable because the error bars caused by Athena's query queue and waiting for S3 operations. You may get your query to run 50ms faster, but sometimes it gets queued for 500ms, and spends another 2000ms doing list operations on S3 so how can you tell?
If you decide to go down the materialisation route, first do it once using CTAS and run your QuickSight visualisation against the results. Don't implement the whole ETL workflow before you've checked that you get something that is significantly more performant.
If all you are worried about is that it's less performant to apply filters after the unnesting of your arrays than using array functions, write the two versions of the query and benchmark them against each other. I suspect array functions are going to be slightly faster – but for the same reasons I mentioned above, the gains may drown in the error bars caused by Athena's queuing and other operations.
Make sure to benchmark at different points during the day, and be especially conscious of the fact that top-of-the-hour behaviour in Athena is extremely different from other times (run queries at 10:00 and then at 10:10 – your total execution times will be very different because everyone's cron jobs run at the top of the hour).
Our Redshift queries are extremely slow during their first execution. Subsequent executions are much faster (e.g., 45 seconds -> 2 seconds). After investigating this problem, the query compilation appears to be the culprit. This is a known issue and is even referenced on the AWS Query Planning And Execution Workflow and Factors Affecting Query Performance pages. Amazon itself is quite tight lipped about how the query cache works (tl;dr it's a magic black box that you shouldn't worry about).
One of the things that we tried was increasing the number of nodes we had, however we didn't expect it to solve anything seeing as how query compilation is a single-node operation anyway. It did not solve anything but it was a fun diversion for a bit.
As noted, this is a known issue, however, anywhere it is discussed online, the only takeaway is either "this is just something you have to live with using Redshift" or "here's a super kludgy workaround that only works part of the time because we don't know how the query cache works".
Is there anything we can do to speed up the compilation process or otherwise deal with this? So far about the best solution that's been found is "pre-run every query you might expect to run in a given day on a schedule" which is....not great, especially given how little we know about how the query cache works.
there are 3 things to consider
The first run of any query causes the query to be "compiled" by
redshift . this can take 2-20 seconds depending on how big it is.
subsequent executions of the same query use the same compiled code,
even if the where clause parameters change there is no re-compile.
Data is measured as marked as "hot" when a query has been run
against it, and is cached in redshift memory. you cannot (reliably) manually
clear this in any way EXCEPT a restart of the cluster.
Redshift will "results cache", depending on your redshift parameters
(enabled by default) redshift will quickly return the same result
for the exact same query, if the underlying data has not changed. if
your query includes current_timestamp or similar, then this will
stop if from caching. This can be turned off with SET enable_result_cache_for_session TO OFF;.
Considering your issue, you may need to run some example queries to pre compile or redesign your queries ( i guess you have some dynamic query building going on that changes the shape of the query a lot).
In my experience, more nodes will increase the compile time. this process happens on the master node not the data nodes, and is made more complex by having more data nodes to consider.
The query is probably not actually running a second time -- rather, Redshift is just returning the same result for the same query.
This can be tested by turning off the cache. Run this command:
SET enable_result_cache_for_session TO OFF;
Then, run the query twice. It should take the same time for each execution.
The result cache is great for repeated queries. Rather than being disappointed that the first execution is 'slow', be happy that subsequent cached queries are 'fast'!
I am reading this paper: "Need for Speed - Boost Performance in Data Processing with SAS/Access® Interface to Oracle". And I would like to know how to clear the cache / buffer in SAS, so my repeated query / test will be reflective of the changes accurately?
I noticed the same query running the first time takes 10 seconds, and (without) changes running it immediately after will take shorter time (say 1-2 seconds). Is there a command / instruction to clear the cache / buffer. So I can have a clean test for my new changes.
I am using SAS Enterprise Guide with data hosted on an Oracle server. Thanks!
In order to flush caches on the Oracle side, you need both DBA privileges (to run alter system flush buffer_cache; in Oracle) and OS-level access (to flush the OS' buffer cache - echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches on common filesystems under Linux).
If you're running against a production database, you probably don't have those permissions -- you wouldn't want to run those commands on a production database anyways, since it would degrade the performance for all users of the database, and other queries would affect the time it takes to run yours.
Instead of trying to accurately measure the time it takes to run your query, I would suggest paying attention to how the query is executed:
what part of it is 'pushed down' to the DB and how much data flows between SAS and Oracle
what is Oracle's explain plan for the query -- does it have obvious inefficiencies
When a query is executed in a clearly suboptimal way, you will find (more often than not) that the fixed version will run faster both with cold and hot caches.
To apply this to the case you mention (10 seconds vs 2 seconds) - before thinking how to measure this accurately, start by looking
if your query gets correctly pushed down to Oracle (it probably does),
and whether it requires a full table (partition) scan of a sufficiently large table (depending on how slow the IO in your DB is - on the order of 1-10 GB).
If you find that the query needs to read 1 GB of data and your typical (in-database) read speed is 100MB/s, then 10s with cold cache is the expected time to run it.
I'm no Oracle expert but I doubt there's any way you can 'clear' the oracle cache (and if there were you would probably need to be a DBA to do so).
Typically what I do is I change the parameters of the query slightly so that the exact query no longer matches anything in the cache. For example, you could change the date range you are querying against.
It won't give you an exact performance comparison (because you're pulling different results) but it will give you a pretty good idea if one query performs significantly better than the other.
I'm putting together some simple analysis to benchmark DWU impact on read and write based on a CTAS statement.
The query is aggregating 1.7b row table to a table of 993k rows. Source and destination tables are round-robin distribution (source won't be RR long-term, will move to HASH) the query is roughly as follows:
create table CTAS_My_DWU_Test
with (distribution = round_robin)
as
select TableKey1, TableKey2,
SumCcolumn=SUM(SalesAmt),
MaxQuantity=MAX(SalesQty),
MinQuantity=MIN(SalesQty)
from FactSales
group by TableKey1, TableKey2
option (label='MyDWUTest');
I am analysing the performance via the sys.dm_pdw_dms_workers DMV, getting an average bytes_per_second over each distribution for both type=DIRECT_READER and type=WRITER.
My process is to change the DWU, drop the CTAS, re-create it and analyse the data in the DMV.
I'm not seeing a consistent improvement in performance as I increase the DWU. My goal is to look for clear proof of increase compute, however sometimes a higher DWU is slower and returning less bytes_per_sec than a smaller DWU.
If I happen to run the CTAS statement twice on the same DWU, without going through the scale process, the second & subsequent executions run nearly 10x faster.
Looking for help to on the process based on one table, want to keep data movement/join out of the equation for the moment.
Good question! The architecture of Azure SQL Data Warehouse is more performant when there is less data movement. I recommend following the steps in this article to determine which step is slowing the process down: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/sql-data-warehouse-manage-monitor/
It's possible that your query is analyzing each of the aggregations over the 1.7b rows in serial, which doesn't maximize the parallel nature of our product, but the best way to find out what is going on is to take a look at the query plan, etc. in the link above.
As for the 10x performance on a repeat run, that's coming from internal caching in our system.
Let us know what you find in the query plan, execution plan, etc.