My apologies in advance for sounding like a newbie. This is really just a curiosity question I have as an outsider observing my team clash with our client. Please ask any questions you have, and I will try my best to answer it.
Currently, we are storing our transformation queries in a DynamoDB table. When needed, we pull into Databricks and execute the query. Simple as that. Our client has called this out as “hard coding” (more on that soon)
Our client has come up with an alternative that involves creating JSON config files containing the transformation rules (all tables/attributes required, target table names, Alias names, join keys, etc. etc.). From here, the SQL query is dynamically created. This approach is still “hard coding” since these config files would need to be manually edited anytime there is a change in the rules.
The way I see this: I think storing the transform rules in JSON is more business user friendly, but that’s about where I see the pros end. It brings in much more complexity to the code and likely will need to be continuously developed to support new queries. Also, I don’t see anyway to prevent “hard coding”. The client business leads seem to think there is some magical tool to convert plain English text to complex SQL queries
I just wanted to get some experts thoughts on this. Which solution is better, or is there another approach that should be taken?
Yugabyte seems to support Redis, Cassandra and SQL queries. Do they work with each other? For example, can I write data with Cassandra API and later perform SQL queries against them?
These APIs do not work with each other as is, meaning you would not be able to query YCQL data from YSQL. This is because the data types are all not always present in the other APIs, and they often have different semantics.
That said, we get asked this a lot and the plan is to enable this scenario using a foreign data wrapper. So, in effect, you would be able to "import" the YCQL table into the YSQL side and use it there. Note that PostgreSQL already has a bunch of these wrappers (for example, see this generic list of PG FDWs here - it has entries for Cassandra and Redis). The idea is to re-use/enhance these and get them to work out of the box.
If you're interested, please open a GitHub issue and we can continue there. Would love to understand your use-case better to make sure we are able to address it and work with you closely on this.
I do not have control of how this data is stored (I know as normalized data would be better for sql), because it is saved via the WordPress GravityForms plugin. The plugin uses a serialized array to define the question id (field_id), question label (label). My goal is to extract these three values in the following format:
field_id label
1 1. I know my organization’s mission (what it is trying to accomplish).
2 2. I know my organization’s vision (where it is trying to go in the future).
Here is the serialized array.
Can anyone please provide a specific example as to how to parse these values out with sql?
A specific example, no. This kind of stuff is complex. If your are working with straight json-formatted data, here are several options, none of which are simple.
You can build your own parser. Yuck.
You can upgrade everything you have to just-released SQL 2016, and hope that the built-in json tools do what you need (I've heard iffy things about them, but don't know what their final form is like. Too, updating all your database servers right now, oh sure.)
Phil Factor over on SimpleTalk built a json T-SQL parser (https://www.simple-talk.com/sql/t-sql-programming/consuming-json-strings-in-sql-server/). It looks horrible and may run poorly, but it would do the needful.
Buried in the comments of that article are links to a CLR tool that John Galt built (at https://github.com/jgcoding/J-SQL). I have used this successfully, though I haven't done anything too complex. (If you're json is relatively simple, this could do the trick.)
There are other json parsers for SQL out there, some free, some for sale. The key thing would be to not try and write your own, but rather find and use someone else's solution that addresses your requirements.
I've got a small real-time chat application and would now like to store message history in Redis instead of MySQL, simply because it is much, much faster.
However, I would like my users to be able to search the message history. How could I achieve that in Redis?
After some Googling I found that I would have to create a index of all words in Redis, but this seems to be a bit overkill.
Would a better approach be to sync data back to MySQL and have users search a table there instead?
I really would like to use Redis for the history part as my tests have shown it is a lot faster in my case.
Any ideas of another approach?
I'm going to go out on a limb and say, Redis is the wrong choice for your particular use case. Check the stackoverflow post on the Use Cases of Redis for some insight.
You say that redis is much much faster, but how can you say that if we have no solution to compare with? Redis commands will be much faster than the equivalent SQL ones, but as soon as you start creating off-purpose data structures you're killing what Redis is good at.
Some more reasons:
1. Unstructured content
If you have a fixed structure to search that would be somewhat plausible to consider, for example, you only allow for user/data search. Your keys could look like
user:message_time
Do you a proper search on free form text, you'll probably better off with something that is good at analyzing metadata and finding out what you need, probably something similar to elasticsearch (not an expert myself).
2. Redis is not a decent archive
For a chat app I would imagine using Redis as a cache for recent conversations, but in the end you don't want Redis to be storing all your messages and metadata for searching and indexing, do you? If your replication is not pristine you might lose all your data, in the end Redis is an In-Memory Database.
3. Key scan nightmare
I cannot even imagine how this can be done using Redis, maybe some other users do. What kind of scan would you do on the keys? You would probably need to do multiple queries to get something decent.
Redis isn't really the best tool for this but it's possible, check out https://github.com/tj/reds for an example.
I was searching the net for something like a wiki database, just like wikipedia but instead stores structured content, editable by users. What I was looking for was an online database accessible by everyone where people can design the schema and data with proper versioning of both schema and data. I couldn't find any such site. I am not sure if it is my search skills or if there really is no wiki database as of now. Does anyone out there know anything like this?
I think there is a great potential for something like this. A possible example will be a website with a GUI for querying a MySQL DB where any website visitor can create DB objects and populate data.
UPDATE: I had registered the domain wikidatabase.org to get started on a tool but I didn't find enough time yet. If anyone is interested in spending some time and coding on this, please let me know at wikidatabase.org
It's not quite what you're looking for, but Semantic Mediawiki adds database-like features to MediaWiki:
http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki
It's still fundamentally a Wiki, but you can add semantic tags to pages ([[foo::bar]] [[baz::1000]]) and then do database-type queries across them: SELECT baz FROM pages WHERE foo=bar would be {{#ask: [[foo::bar]] | ?baz}}. There is even an embryonic SPARQL implementation for pseudo-SQL queries.
OK this question is old, but Google led me here, so for anyone else out there looking for a wiki for structured data: Take a look at Foswiki.
This might be like what you're looking for: dbpedia.org. They're working on extracting data from Wikipedia, and encoding it in a structured format using RDF, so that it can be queried using SPARQL.
Linkeddata.org has a big list of RDF data sets.
Do you mean something like http://www.freebase.com?
You should check out https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page which is a bit different but still may be of interest.
Something that might come close to your requirements is Google Docs.
What's offered is document editing roughly similar to MS Word, and spreadsheets roughly similar to Excel. I'm thinking of the latter, of course.
In Google Docs, You can create spreadsheets for free; being spreadsheets, they naturally have a row-and-column structure similar to a database, and which you can define flexibly. You can also share these sheets with other people. This seems to be a by-invite-only process rather than open-to-all, but there may be other possibilities I'm not aware of, or that level of sharing might be enough for you in any case.
mindtouch should be able to do it. It's rather easy to get data in / out. (for example: it's trivial to aggregate all the IP's for servers into one table).
I pretty much use it as a DB in the wiki itself (pages have tables, key/value..inheritance, templates, etc...) but you can also interface with the API, write dekiscript, grab the XML...
I like this idea. I have heard of some sites that are trying to pull together large datasets for various things for open consumption, but none that would allow a wiki feel.
You could start with something as simple as an installation of phpMyAdmin with a known password that would allow people to log in, create a database, edit data and query from any other site on the web.
It might suffer from more accuracy problems than wikipedia though.
OpenRecord, development of which seems to have halted in 2008, seems to approach this. It is a structured wiki in which pages are views on the data. Unlike RDBMSes it is loosely typed - the system tries to make a best guess about what data you entered, but defaults to text when it cannot guess. Schemas appear to have been implied.
http://openrecord.org
An example of the typing that is given is that of a date. If you enter '2008' in a record, the system interprets this as a date. If you enter 'unknown' however, the system allows that as well.
Perhaps you might be interested in Couch DB:
Apache CouchDB is a document-oriented
database that can be queried and
indexed in a MapReduce fashion using
JavaScript. CouchDB also offers
incremental replication with
bi-directional conflict detection and
resolution.
I'm working on an Open Source PHP / Symfony / PostgreSQL app that does this.
It allows multiple projects, each project can have multiple directories, each directory has a defined field structure. Admins set all this up.
Then members of the public can suggest new records, edit or report existing ones. All this is moderated and versioned.
It's early days yet but it basically works and is already in real world use in several projects.
Future plans already in progress include tools to help keep the data up to date, better searching/querying and field types that allow translations of content between languages.
There is more at http://www.directoki.org/
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Wikibase yet, which is the software that powers Wikidata.