I have 100 tables each of size of order of few tenths of GB. The schema of each table is the following:
A: string | B: string | C: string
In each table I would like to retain only the rows for which the (B, C) appears at least 10 times in a concatenation of all 100 tables. Is there any efficient way to achieve this?
A very vague question, excluding your DBMS as well isn't helpful as SQL comes in different forms.
But first, you would have to join all of the tables together - there may be a faster way of doing this, but without knowing which flavor of SQL you are using it is hard to tell.
Something like this will work:
SELECT * FROM table_1
UNION
SELECT * FROM table_2
...
UNION
SELECT * FROM table_100
Once you have all of the data you do something like this:
WITH tables_with_counts as (SELECT
A,
B,
C,
COUNT(1) OVER(PARTITION BY(B, C)) AS bc_count
FROM
aggragated_tables)
SELECT
A,
B,
C
FROM
tables_with_counts
WHERE
bc_count >= 10
Here is my take:
Step 1 : Aggregate all tables into one. It would be bulky but if you are using Oracle database, I think it shouldn't be an issue.
Step 2: Create md5 checksum hash values for B,C columns like below :
SELECT APEX_ITEM.MD5_CHECKSUM(B,C) md5_cks,
A,B,C
FROM aggregated_tables
Step 3: take count based on checksum values and retain the rows where count > 10
Step 4: Get rid of duplicate data using rank() or dense rank() in delete statement.
The short answer, which I'm sure that you don't want to hear, is "no." In the context of relational databases there is no efficient query to merge 100 tables.
It is not all bad news though. If it were just one table (let's say it was named "combined" just to have concrete examples) you could use an elegant SQL using windowed functions
select A,B,C from (select A,B,C,count(1) over (partition by B,C) as counts from combined)counted where counts>=10
Option 1. So the question is how to get a "combined" table so that the snippet above works. If we stick with ANSI (standard) sql, you could use UNION ALL, which and collect it into a WITH clause to keep things neat.
Here is an example:
with
combined as (
select * from table_1
union all
select * from table_2),
counted as (
select
A,B,C,
count(1) over (partition by B,C) as counts
from
combined)
select A,B,C from counted where counts>=10;
I only included 2 tables, but the real query would extend that up to table_100. Thats a lot of typing and not very efficient with the programmer's time. Also unions and union all's are notoriously poor performing for databases, so this is not efficient in terms of system resources or time, either. Personally I would not do it this way, but it is an answer.
Option 2 There are other options which do not exactly match your question, but may be helpful to know. Any time you are tempted to create multiple tables with exactly the same schema, you will be better off creating a single table with multiple partitions. see MySQL, Postgres, Sql Server, Oracle, Hive. Every database platform has its own syntax for partitioning tables but they are all similar. For this table, each of the original tables becomes a single partition in the table, and the table name would be a really good candidate for the string value in the partition identifier (partition column)
If you are able to stuff all of your 100 tables into 100 partitions of one table then you can run the first query after all. The advantage is that the database can optimize that query because all modern databases are optimized to manage partitioned queries.
In addition, adding a partition to a table is really no more trouble than creating a new table instead, but supporting and maintaining one table is a lot less trouble than 100 tables.
A third option, since you tagged "big data" is to use a big data engine like Spark with SparkSQL. This would be objectively best because you can actually load a dataframe with 100 combined tables very efficiently with spark, and the SQL after that is not much different from the relational database sql we have been considering. That's kind of out of scope here, but worth considering. If you submit a more specific question and specifically for spark we could go into more details.
Related
I am generating reports on electoral data that group voters into their age groups, and then assign those age groups a quartile, before finally returning the table of age groups and quartiles.
By the time I arrive at the table with the schema and data that I want, I have created 7 intermediate tables that might as well be deleted at this point.
My question is, is it plausible that so many intermediate tables are necessary? Or this a sign that I am "doing it wrong?"
Technical Specifics:
Postgres 9.4
I am chaining tables, starting with the raw database tables and successively transforming the table closer to what I want. For instance, I do something like:
CREATE TABLE gm.race_code_and_turnout_count AS
SELECT race_code, count(*)
FROM gm.active_dem_voters_34th_house_in_2012_primary
GROUP BY race_code
And then I do
CREATE TABLE gm.race_code_and_percent_of_total_turnout AS
SELECT race_code, count, round((count::numeric/11362)*100,2) AS percent_of_total_turnout
FROM gm.race_code_and_turnout_count
And that first table goes off in a second branch:
CREATE TABLE gm.race_code_and_turnout_percentage AS
SELECT t1.race_code, round((t1.count::numeric / t2.count)*100,2) as turnout_percentage
FROM gm.race_code_and_turnout_count AS t1
JOIN gm.race_code_and_total_count AS t2
ON t1.race_code = t2.race_code
So each table is building on the one before it.
While temporary tables are used a lot in SQL Server (mainly to overcome the peculiar locking behaviour that it has) it is far less common in Postgres (and your example uses regular tables, not temporary tables).
Usually the overhead of creating a new table is higher than letting the system store intermediate on disk.
From my experience, creating intermediate tables usually only helps if:
you have a lot of data that is aggregated and can't be aggregated in memory
the aggregation drastically reduces the data volume to be processed so that the next step (or one of the next steps) can handle the data in memory
you can efficiently index the intermediate tables so that the next step can make use of those indexes to improve performance.
you re-use a pre-computed result several times in different steps
The above list is not completely and using this approach can also be beneficial if only some of these conditions are true.
If you keep creating those tables create them at least as temporary or unlogged tables to minimized the IO overhead that comes with writing that data and thus keep as much data in memory as possible.
However I would always start with a single query instead of maintaining many different tables (that all need to be changed if you have to change the structure of the report).
For example your first two queries from your question can easily be combined into a single query with no performance loss:
SELECT race_code,
count(*) as cnt,
round((count(*)::numeric/11362)*100,2) AS percent_of_total_turnout
FROM gm.active_dem_voters_34th_house_in_2012_primary
GROUP BY race_code;
This is going to be faster than writing the data twice to disk (including all transactional overhead).
If you stack your queries using common table expressions Postgres will automatically store the data on disk if it gets too big, if not it will process it in-memory. When manually creating the tables you force Postgres to write everything to disk.
So you might want to try something like this:
with race_code_and_turnout_count as (
SELECT race_code,
count(*) as cnt,
round((count(*)::numeric/11362)*100,2) AS percent_of_total_turnout
FROM gm.active_dem_voters_34th_house_in_2012_primary
GROUP BY race_code
), race_code_and_total_count as (
select ....
from ....
), race_code_and_turnout_percentage as (
SELECT t1.race_code,
round((t1.count::numeric / t2.count)*100,2) as turnout_percentage
FROM ace_code_and_turnout_count AS t1
JOIN race_code_and_total_count AS t2
ON t1.race_code = t2.race_code
)
select *
from ....;
and see how that performs.
If you don't re-use the intermediate steps more than once, writing them as a derived table instead of a CTE might be faster in Postgres due to the way the optimizer works, e.g.:
SELECT t1.race_code,
round((t1.count::numeric / t2.count)*100,2) as turnout_percentage
FROM (
SELECT race_code,
count(*) as cnt,
round((count(*)::numeric/11362)*100,2) AS percent_of_total_turnout
FROM gm.active_dem_voters_34th_house_in_2012_primary
GROUP BY race_code
) AS t1
JOIN race_code_and_total_count AS t2
ON t1.race_code = t2.race_code
If it performs well and results in the right output, I see nothing wrong with it. I do however suggest to use (local) temporary tables if you need intermediate tables.
Your series of queries can always be optimized to use fewer intermediate steps. Do that if you feel your reports start performing poorly.
I am referring to Jordan's answer regarding "dealing with evolving schemas "Dealing with evolving schemas.
As I share similar problem I have tried to query tables with different schema and got the following results:
Select a,b,c
FROM (Select 1 as a, 2 as b), --Test_a
(Select 1 as a, 2 as b, 3 as c), --Test_b
runs fine...
I have put Test_a and Test_b into physical tables (all fields are nullable) and tried:
Select a,b,c
FROM (Select a,b, from BI_WORKSPACE.Test_a),
(Select a,b,c from BI_WORKSPACE.Test_b)
It also runs fine
but when i tried
Select a,b,c
FROM BI_WORKSPACE.Test_a,
BI_WORKSPACE.Test_b
It failed...
Is there a bug, something i do wrong?
the last sample is the one i am after as it allows me to "evolve" my schema over time. i would like to avoid altering schema of all existing tables whenever i add a column to support a new business need.
Many thanks for your help.
The reason for asking:
We hold our data in "Daily tables" so when querying we pay only for the period we are interested in.
As BQ doesn’t support "Dynamic SQL", we have created an offline process that takes a query template and generates a query for desired period. Something like:
Input:
Select a,b,c FROM [<Source>]
Output:
Select a,b,c FROM [MYDATASET.TABLE20140201], [MYDATASET.TABLE20140202], [MYDATASET.TABLE20140203], [MYDATASET.TABLE20140204] , [MYDATASET.TABLE20140205] , [MYDATASET.TABLE20140206] , [MYDATASET.TABLE20140207]
Our process is unaware of the query logic. Sometimes we add fields to support evolving business needs.
Using dynamic sub selects will complicate staff a lot, and altering the schema for all hundreds of existing tables is expensive and prone to mistakes.
Any suggestions?
I don't think the last query should work. You're asking for columns a,b, and c from two tables, but one of those tables doesn't have a column with that name. That looks like a query error to me, since you are explicitly asking for a column that doesn't exist on the table.
There is a workaround -- to use a subselect -- which you noticed, if you know that a field may be missing from one schema. The other workaround, of course, is to update the schema.
This seems like it is working as intended. If you don't agree, can you let me know why?
It's possible to select from union of tables with different schemas.
Simple trick is to use subquery with asterisk as Jordan proposed. There's no need to alter schema.
In your case this will work (legacy SQL dialect)
SELECT a,b,c
FROM ( SELECT * FROM BI_WORKSPACE.Test_a ),
( SELECT * FROM BI_WORKSPACE.Test_b )
I need to write a query to retrieve a big list of ids.
We do support many backends (MySQL, Firebird, SQLServer, Oracle, PostgreSQL ...) so I need to write a standard SQL.
The size of the id set could be big, the query would be generated programmatically. So, what is the best approach?
1) Writing a query using IN
SELECT * FROM TABLE WHERE ID IN (id1, id2, ..., idn)
My question here is. What happens if n is very big? Also, what about performance?
2) Writing a query using OR
SELECT * FROM TABLE WHERE ID = id1 OR ID = id2 OR ... OR ID = idn
I think that this approach does not have n limit, but what about performance if n is very big?
3) Writing a programmatic solution:
foreach (var id in myIdList)
{
var item = GetItemByQuery("SELECT * FROM TABLE WHERE ID = " + id);
myObjectList.Add(item);
}
We experienced some problems with this approach when the database server is queried over the network. Normally is better to do one query that retrieve all results versus making a lot of small queries. Maybe I'm wrong.
What would be a correct solution for this problem?
Option 1 is the only good solution.
Why?
Option 2 does the same but you repeat the column name lots of times; additionally the SQL engine doesn't immediately know that you want to check if the value is one of the values in a fixed list. However, a good SQL engine could optimize it to have equal performance like with IN. There's still the readability issue though...
Option 3 is simply horrible performance-wise. It sends a query every loop and hammers the database with small queries. It also prevents it from using any optimizations for "value is one of those in a given list"
An alternative approach might be to use another table to contain id values. This other table can then be inner joined on your TABLE to constrain returned rows. This will have the major advantage that you won't need dynamic SQL (problematic at the best of times), and you won't have an infinitely long IN clause.
You would truncate this other table, insert your large number of rows, then perhaps create an index to aid the join performance. It would also let you detach the accumulation of these rows from the retrieval of data, perhaps giving you more options to tune performance.
Update: Although you could use a temporary table, I did not mean to imply that you must or even should. A permanent table used for temporary data is a common solution with merits beyond that described here.
What Ed Guiness suggested is really a performance booster , I had a query like this
select * from table where id in (id1,id2.........long list)
what i did :
DECLARE #temp table(
ID int
)
insert into #temp
select * from dbo.fnSplitter('#idlist#')
Then inner joined the temp with main table :
select * from table inner join temp on temp.id = table.id
And performance improved drastically.
First option is definitely the best option.
SELECT * FROM TABLE WHERE ID IN (id1, id2, ..., idn)
However considering that the list of ids is very huge, say millions, you should consider chunk sizes like below:
Divide you list of Ids into chunks of fixed number, say 100
Chunk size should be decided based upon the memory size of your server
Suppose you have 10000 Ids, you will have 10000/100 = 100 chunks
Process one chunk at a time resulting in 100 database calls for select
Why should you divide into chunks?
You will never get memory overflow exception which is very common in scenarios like yours.
You will have optimized number of database calls resulting in better performance.
It has always worked like charm for me. Hope it would work for my fellow developers as well :)
Doing the SELECT * FROM MyTable where id in () command on an Azure SQL table with 500 million records resulted in a wait time of > 7min!
Doing this instead returned results immediately:
select b.id, a.* from MyTable a
join (values (250000), (2500001), (2600000)) as b(id)
ON a.id = b.id
Use a join.
In most database systems, IN (val1, val2, …) and a series of OR are optimized to the same plan.
The third way would be importing the list of values into a temporary table and join it which is more efficient in most systems, if there are lots of values.
You may want to read this articles:
Passing parameters in MySQL: IN list vs. temporary table
I think you mean SqlServer but on Oracle you have a hard limit how many IN elements you can specify: 1000.
Sample 3 would be the worst performer out of them all because you are hitting up the database countless times for no apparent reason.
Loading the data into a temp table and then joining on that would be by far the fastest. After that the IN should work slightly faster than the group of ORs.
For 1st option
Add IDs into temp table and add inner join with main table.
CREATE TABLE #temp (column int)
INSERT INTO #temp (column)
SELECT t.column1 FROM (VALUES (1),(2),(3),...(10000)) AS t(column1)
Try this
SELECT Position_ID , Position_Name
FROM
position
WHERE Position_ID IN (6 ,7 ,8)
ORDER BY Position_Name
The typical way of selecting data is:
select * from my_table
But what if the table contains 10 million records and you only want records 300,010 to 300,020
Is there a way to create a SQL statement on Microsoft SQL that only gets 10 records at once?
E.g.
select * from my_table from records 300,010 to 300,020
This would be way more efficient than retrieving 10 million records across the network, storing them in the IIS server and then counting to the records you want.
SELECT * FROM my_table is just the tip of the iceberg. Assuming you're talking a table with an identity field for the primary key, you can just say:
SELECT * FROM my_table WHERE ID >= 300010 AND ID <= 300020
You should also know that selecting * is considered poor practice in many circles. They want you specify the exact column list.
Try looking at info about pagination. Here's a short summary of it for SQL Server.
Absolutely. On MySQL and PostgreSQL (the two databases I've used), the syntax would be
SELECT [columns] FROM table LIMIT 10 OFFSET 300010;
On MS SQL, it's something like SELECT TOP 10 ...; I don't know the syntax for offsetting the record list.
Note that you never want to use SELECT *; it's a maintenance nightmare if anything ever changes. This query, though, is going to be incredibly slow since your database will have to scan through and throw away the first 300,010 records to get to the 10 you want. It'll also be unpredictable, since you haven't told the database which order you want the records in.
This is the core of SQL: tell it which 10 records you want, identified by a key in a specific range, and the database will do its best to grab and return those records with minimal work. Look up any tutorial on SQL for more information on how it works.
When working with large tables, it is often a good idea to make use of Partitioning techniques available in SQL Server.
The rules of your partitition function typically dictate that only a range of data can reside within a given partition. You could split your partitions by date range or ID for example.
In order to select from a particular partition you would use a query similar to the following.
SELECT <Column Name1>…/*
FROM <Table Name>
WHERE $PARTITION.<Partition Function Name>(<Column Name>) = <Partition Number>
Take a look at the following white paper for more detailed infromation on partitioning in SQL Server 2005.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345146.aspx
I hope this helps however please feel free to pose further questions.
Cheers, John
I use wrapper queries to select the core query and then just isolate the ROW numbers that i wish to take from the query - this allows the SQL server to do all the heavy lifting inside the CORE query and just pass out the small amount of the table that i have requested. All you need to do is pass the [start_row_variable] and the [end_row_variable] into the SQL query.
NOTE: The order clause is specified OUTSIDE the core query [sql_order_clause]
w1 and w2 are TEMPORARY table created by the SQL server as the wrapper tables.
SELECT
w1.*
FROM(
SELECT w2.*,
ROW_NUMBER() OVER ([sql_order_clause]) AS ROW
FROM (
<!--- CORE QUERY START --->
SELECT [columns]
FROM [table_name]
WHERE [sql_string]
<!--- CORE QUERY END --->
) AS w2
) AS w1
WHERE ROW BETWEEN [start_row_variable] AND [end_row_variable]
This method has hugely optimized my database systems. It works very well.
IMPORTANT: Be sure to always explicitly specify only the exact columns you wish to retrieve in the core query as fetching unnecessary data in these CORE queries can cost you serious overhead
Use TOP to select only a limited amont of rows like:
SELECT TOP 10 * FROM my_table WHERE ID >= 300010
Add an ORDER BY if you want the results in a particular order.
To be efficient there has to be an index on the ID column.
Ok, here is my dilemma I have a database set up with about 5 tables all with the exact same data structure. The data is separated in this manner for localization purposes and to split up a total of about 4.5 million records.
A majority of the time only one table is needed and all is well. However, sometimes data is needed from 2 or more of the tables and it needs to be sorted by a user defined column. This is where I am having problems.
data columns:
id, band_name, song_name, album_name, genre
MySQL statment:
SELECT * from us_music, de_music where `genre` = 'punk'
MySQL spits out this error:
#1052 - Column 'genre' in where clause is ambiguous
Obviously, I am doing this wrong. Anyone care to shed some light on this for me?
I think you're looking for the UNION clause, a la
(SELECT * from us_music where `genre` = 'punk')
UNION
(SELECT * from de_music where `genre` = 'punk')
It sounds like you'd be happer with a single table. The five having the same schema, and sometimes needing to be presented as if they came from one table point to putting it all in one table.
Add a new column which can be used to distinguish among the five languages (I'm assuming it's language that is different among the tables since you said it was for localization). Don't worry about having 4.5 million records. Any real database can handle that size no problem. Add the correct indexes, and you'll have no trouble dealing with them as a single table.
Any of the above answers are valid, or an alternative way is to expand the table name to include the database name as well - eg:
SELECT * from us_music, de_music where `us_music.genre` = 'punk' AND `de_music.genre` = 'punk'
The column is ambiguous because it appears in both tables you would need to specify the where (or sort) field fully such as us_music.genre or de_music.genre but you'd usually specify two tables if you were then going to join them together in some fashion. The structure your dealing with is occasionally referred to as a partitioned table although it's usually done to separate the dataset into distinct files as well rather than to just split the dataset arbitrarily. If you're in charge of the database structure and there's no good reason to partition the data then I'd build one big table with an extra "origin" field that contains a country code but you're probably doing it for legitimate performance reason.
Either use a union to join the tables you're interested in http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/union.html or by using the Merge database engine http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/merge-storage-engine.html.
Your original attempt to span both tables creates an implicit JOIN. This is frowned upon by most experienced SQL programmers because it separates the tables to be combined with the condition of how.
The UNION is a good solution for the tables as they are, but there should be no reason they can't be put into the one table with decent indexing. I've seen adding the correct index to a large table increase query speed by three orders of magnitude.
The union statement cause a deal time in huge data. It is good to perform the select in 2 steps:
select the id
then select the main table with it