Simple query working for years, then suddenly very slow - django

I've had a query that has been running fine for about 2 years. The database table has about 50 million rows, and is growing slowly. This last week one of my queries went from returning almost instantly to taking hours to run.
Rank.objects.filter(site=Site.objects.get(profile__client=client, profile__is_active=False)).latest('id')
I have narrowed the slow query down to the Rank model. It seems to have something to do with using the latest() method. If I just ask for a queryset, it returns an empty queryset right away.
#count returns 0 and is fast
Rank.objects.filter(site=Site.objects.get(profile__client=client, profile__is_active=False)).count() == 0
Rank.objects.filter(site=Site.objects.get(profile__client=client, profile__is_active=False)) == [] #also very fast
Here are the results of running EXPLAIN. http://explain.depesz.com/s/wPh
And EXPLAIN ANALYZE: http://explain.depesz.com/s/ggi
I tried vacuuming the table, no change. There is already an index on the "site" field (ForeignKey).
Strangely, if I run this same query for another client that already has Rank objects associated with her account, then the query returns very quickly once again. So it seems that this is only a problem when their are no Rank objects for that client.
Any ideas?
Versions:
Postgres 9.1,
Django 1.4 svn trunk rev 17047

Well, you've not shown the actual SQL, so that makes it difficult to be sure. But, the explain output suggests it thinks the quickest way to find a match is by scanning an index on "id" backwards until it finds the client in question.
Since you said it has been fast until recently, this is probably not a silly choice. However, there is always the chance that a particular client's record will be right at the far end of this search.
So - try two things first:
Run an analyze on the table in question, see if that gives the planner enough info.
If not, increase the stats (ALTER TABLE ... SET STATISTICS) on the columns in question and re-analyze. See if that does it.
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/planner-stats.html
If that's still not helping, then consider an index on (client,id), and drop the index on id (if not needed elsewhere). That should give you lightning fast answers.

latests is normally used for date comparison, maybe you should try to order by id desc and then limit to one.

Related

Django query to find value of objects from previous period (if exists)

I have a simple django project and I am trying to keep track of ranks for certain objects to see how they change over time. For example, what was the rank of US GDP (compared to other countries) over last 3 years. Below is the postgres db structure I am working with:
Below is what I am trying to achieve:
What I am finding challenging is that the previous period value may or may not exist and it's possible that even the entity may or may not be in the pervious period. Period can be year, quarter or months but for a specific record it can be either of one and stays consistently same for all the years for that record.
Can someone guide me in the right direction to write a query to achieve those tables? I am trying to avoid writing heavy forloop queries because there may be 100s of entities and many years of data.
So far I have only been able to achieve the below output:
I am just trying to figure out how to use annotate to fetch previous period values and ranks but I am pretty much stuck.

First-run of queries are extremely slow

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'!

How to optimize writing this data to a postgres database

I'm parsing poker hand histories, and storing the data in a postgres database. Here's a quick view of that:
I'm getting a relatively bad performance, and parsing files will take several hours. I can see that the database part takes 97% of the total program time. So only a little optimization would make this a lot quicker.
The way I have it set-up now is as follows:
Read next file into a string.
Parse one game and store it into object GameData.
For every player, check if we have his name in the std::map. If so; store the playerids in an array and go to 5.
Insert the player, add it to the std::map, store the playerids in an array.
Using the playerids array, insert the moves for this betting round, store the moveids in an array.
Using the moveids array, insert a movesequence, store the movesequenceids in an array.
If this isn't the last round played, go to 5.
Using the movesequenceids array, insert a game.
If this was not the final game, go to 2.
If this was not the last file, go to 1.
Since I'm sending queries for every move, for every movesequence, for every game, I'm obviously doing too many queries. How should I bundle them for best performance? I don't mind rewriting a bit of code, so don't hold back. :)
Thanks in advance.
CX
It's very hard to answer this without any queries, schema, or a Pg version.
In general, though, the answer to these problems is to batch the work into bigger coarser batches to avoid repeating lots of work, and, most importantly, by doing it all in one transaction.
You haven't said anything about transactions, so I'm wondering if you're doing all this in autocommit mode. Bad plan. Try wrapping the whole process in a BEGIN and COMMIT. If it's a seriously long-running process the COMMIT every few minutes / tens of games / whatever, write a checkpoint file or DB entry your program can use to resume the import from that point, and open a new transaction to carry on.
It'll help to use multi-valued inserts where you're inserting multiple rows to the same table. Eg:
INSERT INTO some_table(col1, col2, col3) VALUES
('a','b','c'),
('1','2','3'),
('bork','spam','eggs');
You can improve commit rates with synchronous_commit=off and a commit_delay, but that's not very useful if you're batching work into bigger transactions.
One very good option will be to insert your new data into UNLOGGED tables (PostgreSQL 9.1 or newer) or TEMPORARY tables (all versions, but lost when session disconnects), then at the end of the process copy all the new rows into the main tables and drop the import tables with commands like:
INSERT INTO the_table
SELECT * FROM the_table_import;
When doing this, CREATE TABLE ... LIKE is useful.
Another option - really a more extreme version of the above - is to write your results to CSV flat files as you read and convert them, then COPY them into the database. Since you're working in C++ I'm assuming you're using libpq - in which case you're hopefully also using libpqtypes. libpq offers access to the COPY api for bulk-loading, so your app wouldn't need to call out to psql to load the CSV data once it'd produced it.

Use a long running database migration script

I'm trialing FluentMigrator as a way of keeping my database schema up to date with minimum effort.
For the release I'm currently building, I need to run a database script to make a simple change to a large number of rows of existing data (around 2% of 21,000,000 rows need to be updated).
There's too much data for to be updated in a single transaction (the transaction log gets full and the script aborts), so I use a WHILE loop to iterate through the table, updating 10,000 rows at a time, each batch in a separate transacticon. This works, and takes around 15 minutes to run to completion.
Now I have the script complete, I'm trying to integrate it into FluentMigrator.
FluentMigrator seems to run all the migrations for a single batch in one transaction.
How do I get FM to run each migration in a separate transaction?
Can I tell FM to not use a transaction for a specific migration?
This is not possible as of now.
There are ongoing discussions and some work already in progress.
Check it out here : https://github.com/schambers/fluentmigrator/pull/178
But your use case will surely help in pushing the things in the right direction.
You are welcome to take part to the discussion!
Maybe someone will find a temporary workaround?

SimpleDB Incremental Index

I understand SimpleDB doesn't have an auto increment but I am working on a script where I need to query the database by sending the id of the last record I've already pulled and pull all subsequent records. In a normal SQL fashion if there were 6200 records I already have 6100 of them when I run the script I query records with an ID greater than > 6100. Looking at the response object, I don't see anything I can use. It just seems like there should be a sequential index there. The other option I was thinking would be a real time stamp. Any ideas are much appreciated.
Using a timestamp was perfect for what I needed to do. I followed this article to help me on my way:http://aws.amazon.com/articles/1232 I would still welcome if anyone knows if there is a way to get an incremental index number.