How to pause Web API ? Is it even possible? - sql

We are facing odd issue.
We have two parts
1. Windows task to update database
2. Web API using same database to provide search results
We want to pause API while Windows task updating the database. So Search results won't be partial or incorrect.
Is it possible to pause API request while database is being updated? Database update take about 10-15 seconds.

When you say "pause", what do you expect to happen to callers? It seems like you are choosing to give them errors instead of incomplete data.
If possible, your database updates should be wrapped in a transaction so consumers get current, complete data until the transaction is committed. Then, the next call will have updated and complete data.
I would hope that transactional processing would also help you recover from errors in your updates. What happens now if something fails part way through an update?
This post may help you: How to Decide to use Database Transactions

If the API knows when the this task is being starting, you can do have the thread sleep for 10 seconds by calling:
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(10000)

Related

Decide large process and notify users

I have some processing to do at server side.
When user selects large amount of data for processing (let's say, they are insert, update, delete in database and file read/write stuffs), it takes so much time.
I am using c# with .net core mvc web application.
In this case, is it possible to decide when process takes more than some decided time, run it into background (or say transfer process to another tool if possible) and notify user that it will take some time and u will be notified once done (that notification need not be real time. We can mail)
So is there any mechanism to do this?
You can go ahead and create a job for processing the data, you can try hangfire, that allows you to create background jobs inside your aspnet core application.
I don't think you will be able to make what you want. On the other hand you can use parallel foreach to process more data faster.
Ex:
Parallel.ForEach([list of entities],
new ParallelOptions { MaxDegreeOfParallelism = 2 },
[entity] =>
{
//YOURCODE PROCESSING THE ENTITY (INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE)
}
);
The property MaxDegreeOfParallelism defines how many threads you're going to use in maximum. I suggest you to start with 2 and increase one by one to see what's the best fit for you.
Parallel foreach is going to use more threads to process your data.
If parallel foreach does not solve your problem, you can use an strategy that consists in receiving your users data, assumes that this processing is going to take a long time, stores this data as is on your database or any other kind of storage, give your user a answer back with a transaction id and a text explaining that it's going to take a long time and the response is going to be sent by e-mail. By doing it you will need to build another service to process these transaction and e-mail the users with anything you think is necessary.
Another possibility is, instead of notifying the user through e-mail, you can create a method to check the processing status based on a transaction id and do a pooling strategy so the user won't even notice that the processing is being done in background.
Hope you succeed
Best Regards

How to Avoid SQL Server hangs due to uncommited transaction caused by poor SW design

The problem: a .NET application trying to save many records to SQL Server. BeginTrans was used, and right before commit a warning messages shows to end user to confirm to proceed to save data or not. The user simply left the computer and go away!!!
Now all other users are unable to access the locked records. Sometimes almost the entire system is affected. Almost all transaction are updating the same records; the confirmation message must be shown after data gets updated, and before commit so if user can rollback. What could be the best solution?
If no solution is found, the last thing i might do is to rollback, show the confirmation message, if user accepts then i will again save the data without any confirmation message (which i don't thing the right way)
My question is: What best i can do? any ideas?
This sounds like a WinForms app? It also sounds like you want to confirm the intent of user's action. Are you in a position to only start the transaction once they confirm they intend to save the data?
Ideally, you should
Prompt the user via [OK | Cancel]
Perform the database transaction
If the result of the transaction is deadlock (or any other failure), inform the user the save operation failed
In other words, the update of records should be a synchronous call.
EDIT: after understanding the specifics as mentioned in the comment below, I would recommend some form of server side task queue that all these requests would need to flow through. Your client would submit a request to the server, and the server application would then become the software responsible for updating records in the database. The clients would make their requests to this application and would be processed in the order they were received. I don't have much experience with inventory tracking software, but understand it's need to be absolutely correct. So this is just a rough idea, I'm sure someone with more experience in inventory tracking will have a better pattern. The proposed pattern creates a large bottleneck on the server that is responsible for updating the records. For example, this pattern would be terrible for someone like Amazon.

How to look at past DML on your table?

a friend asked me if there is a way to see the past dml statements and I wasn't really sure on how to go about answering that question. What he wants to see is the last set of insert statements. So that means it could be more than 1 record. At first I was just saying to check the latest identity, but then he asked what if more inserts were performed at the same time. Can you guys help me out? Is there a DMV I should use that I just don't know about? Thanks.
If you did not prepare for this question then there is no build in way to get to that information. However, you could use third party log reader tools to recover (all) the last statements that where executed against the database. This requires the database to be in Full recovery mode. You could potentially go back as far as you have log backups with this method.
If you want to prepare for that question being ask in the future, you have several options.
The most obvious one is Change Data Capture. You also could write a trigger yourself that records data changes.
You could also run a trace capturing SQL Batch Started.
Finally you could use a third party network sniffer/logger to capture all statements send to the server (this however requires that connection encryption is not used).

Best way to use a DB queue to make http calls and update the status in the db

I am using c#.net, the db is MS SQL 2008 R2.
I have a question that seems to have been asked a lot in the forums here. I want to use a database table as a a queue...but the processing of these messages cannot be done from the database.
I have a table that stores the requests i get from a .Net component. I now have to read the data from these tables and make http calls to 2 webservices. Based on the response received from the webservices, the data gets archived or deleted.
I had a few specific questions:
1. How do i make sure that if i pick a record for processing and the http call fails I should be able to go on to the next record, and then come back to this record at the end of the run
2. Is there an alternative to using the database as a queue(like MSMQ etc.), which option is better
3. I want to maintain an audit trail of the record status. Is creating a trigger to log the changes before the edit the best way to do it?
Regards
Leo
Use Service Broker!
I am using it for a while and think its great thing althought its takes time to understand how it works. Was using book to learn.
Service Broker solves:
concurency
application state
... many, many other things

Database Job Scheduling

I have a procedure written in PLJava that sends out updates over JMS in my postgres database.
What I would like to do is have that function called on an interval (every 15 seconds) internally in the database (preferably not from an outside process). Is this possible? Any ideas?
If you need no external access, you are presumably able to modify the database design so that you don't need the update at all. Can you explain more about what the update is doing?
As depesz said, you could use either cron or pgAgent, but they are only able to go down to a one minute granularity, not 15 seconds. Considering sleeping inside the stored procedure until the next iteration is not a good idea, because you will have an open transaction for all that time which is a really bad idea.
Strict answer: it is not possible. Since you don't want outside process, and PostgreSQL doesn't support jobs - you are out of luck.
If you'll reconsider using outside processes, then you're most likely want something like cron, or better yet pgagent.
On absolutely other hand - what do you need to do that has to happen every 30 seconds? this seems like a problem with design.
First, you'll spend the least amount of effort if you just go with a cron job.
However, if you were starting from scracth: You are trying to periodically replicate rows from your database. I think you are looking at a replication queue.
The PGQ project (used for Londiste replication, both from Skype's SkyTools) has a queue that you can use independently. When configuring it, you set a maximum event count, and a loop delay, before batched events are generated. You can get batches spaced by no more than 15 seconds that way. You now have to produce the events that will be batched, using a trigger that calls pgq.insert_event; and consume the queues. The consumer can call your PL/Java stored proc; you'll have to rewrite the procedure to send everything in the batch instead of scanning the base table for new events.
As far as I know postgresql doesn't support scheduled tasks. You'll need to use a script with cron or at (depending on your operating system.)
Sounds like you're doing sort of replication? Every 15s sounds like a lot of updates. Could you setup a trigger (or a number of triggers) instead of polling?
If you are using JMS why not just have th task wait for input on the queue?
Per your depesz comment, you have a PL/Java stored procedure that "flushes out database tables (updates) as java objects". Since you want it to run in 15 second intervals, it must be processing a batch of updates each time. Rather than processing a batch of updates in a stored procedure every 15 seconds, why not process them one at a time when they happen via an after update trigger and eliminate the need for a timed interval. If you are aggregrating data from multiple tables to build your objects than add the triggers to you upper most tables only.
In my case the problem was that agent couldn't authorize to database so after I've made all connections trusted from localhost the service started successfully and job works fine
for more information about error you should see into windows event viewer or eq in unix based system. see my config file C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\10\data\pg_hba.conf