BigQuery - how to decrease slot time of Coalesce execution step? - google-bigquery

I have a pretty complex query, with about 70 execution steps. The query was somewhat optimized for performance, so most of the steps in the execution plan run pretty fast - except Coalesce steps, which take about 10 to 100 times more slot time, compared to the others. As far as I understand, it prepares data for the following Join step, but why does it take so long even if actual nuber of records processed by this step is low? The most extreme case I saw looks like this (ZERO records processed by this step, but still takes 8 seconds! ):
S46: Coalesce
Slot time: 8223 ms
Duration: 92 ms
Bytes Shuffled: 0 B
I wasn't able to find any hints regarding this "Coalesce" step and ways to optimize it in Google documentation, so perhaps you can give me some advice about it or point to actual documentation that explains it.

Related

Check the execution time of a query accurate to the microsecond

I have a query in SQL Server 2019 that does a SELECT on the primary key fields of a table. This table has about 6 million rows of data in it. I want to know exactly how fast my query is down to the microsecond (or at least the 100 microsecond). My query is faster than a millisecond, but all I can find in SQL server is query measurements accurate to the millisecond.
What I've tried so far:
SET STATISTICS TIME ON
This only shows milliseconds
Wrapping my query like so:
SELECT #Start=SYSDATETIME()
SELECT TOP 1 b.COL_NAME FROM BLAH b WHERE b.key = 0x1234
SELECT #End=SYSDATETIME();
SELECT DATEDIFF(MICROSECOND,#Start,#End)
This shows that no time has elapsed at all. But this isn't accurate because if I add WAITFOR DELAY '00:00:00.001', which should add a measurable millisecond of delay, it still shows 0 for the datediff. Only if I wat for 2 milliseconds do I see it show up in the datediff
Looking up the execution plan and getting the total_worker_time from the sys.dm_exec_query_stats table.
Here I see 600 microseconds, however the microsoft docs seem to indicate that this number cannot be trusted:
total_worker_time ... Total amount of CPU time, reported in microseconds (but only accurate to milliseconds)
I've run out of ideas and could use some help. Does anyone know how I can accurately measure my query in microseconds? Would extended events help here? Is there another performance monitoring tool I could use? Thank you.
This is too long for a comment.
In general, you don't look for performance measurements measured in microseconds. There is just too much variation, based on what else is happening in the database, on the server, and in the network.
Instead, you set up a loop and run the query thousands -- or even millions -- of times and then average over the executions. There are further nuances, such as clearing caches if you want to be sure that the query is using cold caches.

BigQuery. Long execution time on small datasets

I created a new Google cloud project and set up BigQuery data base. I tried different queries, they all are executing too long. Currently we don't have a lot of data, so high performance was expected.
Below are some examples of queries and their execution time.
Query #1 (Job Id bquxjob_11022e81_172cd2d59ba):
select date(installtime) regtime
,count(distinct userclientid) users
,sum(fm.advcost) advspent
from DWH.DimUser du
join DWH.FactMarketingSpent fm on fm.date = date(du.installtime)
group by 1
The query failed in 1 hour + with error "Query exceeded resource limits. 14521.457814668494 CPU seconds were used, and this query must use less than 12800.0 CPU seconds."
Query execution plan: https://prnt.sc/t30bkz
Query #2 (Job Id bquxjob_41f963ae_172cd41083f):
select fd.date
,sum(fd.revenue) adrevenue
,sum(fm.advcost) advspent
from DWH.FactAdRevenue fd
join DWH.FactMarketingSpent fm on fm.date = fd.date
group by 1
Execution time ook 59.3 sec, 7.7 MB processed. What is too slow.
Query Execution plan: https://prnt.sc/t309t4
Query #3 (Job Id bquxjob_3b19482d_172cd31f629)
select date(installtime) regtime
,count(distinct userclientid) users
from DWH.DimUser du
group by 1
Execution time 5.0 sec elapsed, 42.3 MB processed. What is not terrible but must be faster for such small volumes of data.
Tables used :
DimUser - Table size 870.71 MB, Number of rows 2,771,379
FactAdRevenue - Table size 6.98 MB, Number of rows 53,816
FaceMarketingSpent - Table size 68.57 MB, Number of rows 453,600
The question is what am I doing wrong so that query execution time is so big? If everything is ok, I would be glad to hear any advice on how to reduce execution time for such simple queries. If anyone from google reads my question, I would appreciate if jobids are checked.
Thank you!
P.s. Previously I had experience using BigQuery for other projects and the performance and execution time were incredibly good for tables of 50+ TB size.
Posting same reply i've given in the gcp slack workspace:
Both your first two queries looks like you have one particular worker who is overloaded. Can see this because in the compute section, the max time is very different from the avg time. This could be for a number of reasons, but i can see that you are joining a table of 700k+ rows (looking at the 2nd input) to a table of ~50k (looking at the first input). This is not good practice, you should switch it so the larger table is the left most table. see https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/best-practices-performance-compute?hl=en_US#optimize_your_join_patterns
You may also have a heavily skew in your join keys (e.g. 90% of rows are on 1/1/2020, or NULL). check this.
For the third query, that time is expected, try a approx count instead to speed it up. Also note BQ starts to get better if you perform the same query over and over, so this will get quicker.

BigQuery Count Appears to be Processing Data

I noticed that running a SELECT count(*) FROM myTable on my larger BQ tables yields long running times, upwards of 30/40 seconds despite the validator claiming the query processes 0 bytes. This doesn't seem quite right when 500 GB queries run faster. Additionally, total row counts are listed under details -> Table Info. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a way to get total row counts instantly?
When you run a count BigQuery still needs to allocate resources (such as: slot units, shards etc). You might be reaching some limits which cause a delay. For example, the slots default per project is 2,000 units.
BigQuery execution plan provides very detail information about the process which can help you better understand the source of the delay.
One way to overcome this is to use an approximate method described in this link
This Slide by Google might also help you
For more details see this video about how to understand the execution plan

mysqldumpslow: What does these fields indicate..?

Recently we have started on optimizing live slow queries. As part of that, we thought to use mysqldumpslow to prioritize slow queries. I am new to this tool. I am able to understand some basic info, but I would like to know what exactly the below fields in the out put will tell us.
OUTPUT: Count: 6 Time=22.64s (135s) Lock=0.00s (0s) Rows=1.0 (6)
What about the below fields ?
Time : Is it the average time taken of all these 6 times of occurance...?
135s : What is this 135 seconds....?
Rows=1.0 (6): again what does this mean...?
I didn't find a better explanation. Really thanks in advance.
Regards,
UDAY
I made a research for that coz i wanted to know that too.
I have a log from a pretty highly used DB server.
The command mysqldumpslow has several optional parameters (https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/mysqldumpslow.html), including sort by (-s)
thanks to many queries I can work with, I can tell, that:
value before brackets represents an average value from all the same queries within to group ('count' in total) and the value within brackets is the maximum value of one of the queries. Meaning, in your case:
you have a query that was called 6 times, it is executed within 22.64 seconds (average), but once it took about 135 seconds to execute it. The same applies for locks (if provided) and rows. So most of the time it returns about one row, however it returned 6 rows at least once

Is my execution plan trying to trick me?

I am trying to speed up a long running query that I have (takes about 10 minutes to run...). In order to track down what part of the query is costing me the most time I included the Actual Execution Plan when I ran it and found a particular section that was taking up 55% (screen shot below)
alt text http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/9571/53218794.png
This didn't quite seem right to me so I added Print '1' and Print '2' before and after this trouble section. When I run the query for a mere 17 seconds and then cancel it the 1 and 2 print out which I'm assuming means it's getting through that section in the first 17 seconds.
alt text http://img297.imageshack.us/img297/4739/66797633.png
Am I doing something wrong here or is my Execution plan misleading me?
Metrics from perfmon will also help figure out what's going wrong... you could be running into some serious IO issues with the drive your tempDB is residing on. Additionally, run a trace and look at the CPU & IO of the actual run.
Good perfmon metrics to look at are disk queue length (avg & writes).
If you don't have access to perfmon or don't want to trace things, use "SET STATISTICS IO ON" at the beginning of your query and allow it to complete...don't stop it. Just because an execution plan says it's taking over have the cost doesn't mean it will run for half of the query time...it could be much more (or less).
It says Query 10: Query cost (relative to the batch): 55%. Are 100% positive that it is the 10th statement in the batch that you surounded with Print statements? Could the INSERT ... INTO #mpProgramSet2 execute multiple times, some times in under 17 seconds other time for 5 minutes, depending on how much data was selected/inserted?
As a side note you should run with SET STATISTICS TIME ON rather that prints, this will give you exact compile/time and execution time of each statement in the batch.
I wouldn't trust that printing the '1' and '2' will prove anything about what has executed and what has not. I do the same thing, but I just wouldn't rely on it as proof. You could print the ##rowcount from that first insert query - that would indicate for sure that the insert has occurred.
Although the plan says that query may take 55% of the cost, it may not be 55% of the execution time, especially if the query results are cached.
Another advantage of printing the ##rowcount is to compare the actual number of rows to the estimated rows (51K). If they differ by a lot then you might investigate the statistics for your indexes.
We would need the full query to understand what's going on; but I would probably start with setting MAXDOP to 1 in order to limit the number of processors it's running on.
Note that sometimes queries need to be limited to only 1 processor due to locks etc.
Further you might try adding NOLOCKs to any of your selects which can get away with dirty reads.