I have a table where the majority of columns are very, very often read (SELECTed) and are almost never updated.
I now need to add a set of columns to the same table (they are properties of the same entity), only these will be less often read, and also very often updated
If I add the new columns into the same table, will the UPDATEs interfere with the SELECTs?
Should I instead create a new table with a 1-to-1 relationship to the previous table?
If it matters I am using Azure SQL Server.
In my opinion, splitting things out into separate tables is never a bad idea. However, in this case it shouldn't matter. The UPDATE statements will not interfere with the SELECTs unless the SELECT statements are selecting the columns to be updates (which it sounds like, since these are new columns your adding, would not be the case unless the select statements are SELECT * ). In other words, if your SELECT statement looks something like this:
SELECT distinct * FROM my.Table where [NewColumn] is not NULL
In this case it may depend on when the UPDATE statement was run because if we assume the new column(s) are null by default and the UPDATE statement updates the first row, then the SELECT statement runs before it updates the next row, you could end up selecting only 1 row when you meant to select 2 rows.
Based on how you've described the table, it sounds to me like your better off splitting things up even though it is very unlikely that the statements would interfere with each other.
Related
I have a number of tables with a large number of columns (> 100) in a SQL Server database. In some cases when selecting (using views) I need to replace exactly ONE of the columns with a fixed result value instead of the data from the row(s).
Is there a way to use something like
select table.*, 'value' as Column1 from table
if Column1 is a column name within the table?
Of course I can list all the columns which are expected as result in the select Statement, replacing the one with a value.
However, this is very inconvinient and having 3 or 4 those views I have to maintain them all if columns are added or removed from the table.
Nope, you have to specify columns in this case.
And you have much more serious problems if tables are being changed often. This may be a signal of large architectural defects.
Anyway, listing all columns instead of * is a good practice, because if columns number will change, it may cause cascade errors.
As other responses have noted, this can't be done in a single statement. There is a workaround, however, which is not perfect but does circumvent the need to list columns manually: save your initial, unmodified query to a temp table, update the column(s) you need to overwrite, then select the results:
--we're going to use a temp table; make sure it doesn't already exist
if (object_id('tempdb..#tmpTbl') is not null)
drop table #tmpTbl
--initial query to retrieve all the columns
select *
into #tmpTbl
from TblWithManycolumns
--update column(s) from another table or query
update #tmpTbl
set ColToBeReplaced = trv.ColWithReplacementValue
from #tmpTbl t
join TableWithReplacementValue trv
on trv.KeyCol = t.KeyCol
--where trv.FilterCol = #FilterVal -- if needed
--this select contains the final output data
select * from #tmpTbl
drop table #tmpTbl
This has plenty of drawbacks. Complexity, performance, etc. But it is very flexible and solves the major problem of preventing changes to the main table (TblWithManyColumns) from breaking the query or requiring manual changes. This is particularly important if you're trying to generate SQL.
I'm currently using Oracle 11g and let's say I have a table with the following columns (more or less)
Table1
ID varchar(64)
Status int(1)
Transaction_date date
tons of other columns
And this table has about 1 Billion rows. I would want to update the status column with a specific where clause, let's say
where transaction_date = somedatehere
What other alternatives can I use rather than just the normal UPDATE statement?
Currently what I'm trying to do is using CTAS or Insert into select to get the rows that I want to update and put on another table while using AS COLUMN_NAME so the values are already updated on the new/temporary table, which looks something like this:
INSERT INTO TABLE1_TEMPORARY (
ID,
STATUS,
TRANSACTION_DATE,
TONS_OF_OTHER_COLUMNS)
SELECT
ID
3 AS STATUS,
TRANSACTION_DATE,
TONS_OF_OTHER_COLUMNS
FROM TABLE1
WHERE
TRANSACTION_DATE = SOMEDATE
So far everything seems to work faster than the normal update statement. The problem now is I would want to get the remaining data from the original table which I do not need to update but I do need to be included on my updated table/list.
What I tried to do at first was use DELETE on the same original table using the same where clause so that in theory, everything that should be left on that table should be all the data that i do not need to update, leaving me now with the two tables:
TABLE1 --which now contains the rows that i did not need to update
TABLE1_TEMPORARY --which contains the data I updated
But the delete statement in itself is also too slow or as slow as the orginal UPDATE statement so without the delete statement brings me to this point.
TABLE1 --which contains BOTH the data that I want to update and do not want to update
TABLE1_TEMPORARY --which contains the data I updated
What other alternatives can I use in order to get the data that's the opposite of my WHERE clause (take note that the where clause in this example has been simplified so I'm not looking for an answer of NOT EXISTS/NOT IN/NOT EQUALS plus those clauses are slower too compared to positive clauses)
I have ruled out deletion by partition since the data I need to update and not update can exist in different partitions, as well as TRUNCATE since I'm not updating all of the data, just part of it.
Is there some kind of JOIN statement I use with my TABLE1 and TABLE1_TEMPORARY in order to filter out the data that does not need to be updated?
I would also like to achieve this using as less REDO/UNDO/LOGGING as possible.
Thanks in advance.
I'm assuming this is not a one-time operation, but you are trying to design for a repeatable procedure.
Partition/subpartition the table in a way so the rows touched are not totally spread over all partitions but confined to a few partitions.
Ensure your transactions wouldn't use these partitions for now.
Per each partition/subpartition you would normally UPDATE, perform CTAS of all the rows (I mean even the rows which stay the same go to TABLE1_TEMPORARY). Then EXCHANGE PARTITION and rebuild index partitions.
At the end rebuild global indexes.
If you don't have Oracle Enterprise Edition, you would need to either CTAS entire billion of rows (followed by ALTER TABLE RENAME instead of ALTER TABLE EXCHANGE PARTITION) or to prepare some kind of "poor man's partitioning" using a view (SELECT UNION ALL SELECT UNION ALL SELECT etc) and a bunch of tables.
There is some chance that this mess would actually be faster than UPDATE.
I'm not saying that this is elegant or optimal, I'm saying that this is the canonical way of speeding up large UPDATE operations in Oracle.
How about keeping in the UPDATE in the same table, but breaking it into multiple small chunks?
UPDATE .. WHERE transaction_date = somedatehere AND id BETWEEN 0000000 and 0999999
COMMIT
UPDATE .. WHERE transaction_date = somedatehere AND id BETWEEN 1000000 and 1999999
COMMIT
UPDATE .. WHERE transaction_date = somedatehere AND id BETWEEN 2000000 and 2999999
COMMIT
This could help if the total workload is potentially manageable, but doing it all in one chunk is the problem. This approach breaks it into modest-sized pieces.
Doing it this way could, for example, enable other apps to keep running & give other workloads a look in; and would avoid needing a single humungous transaction in the logfile.
I have sensor data from a client which is in ongoing acquisition. Every week we get a table of new data (about one million rows each) and each table has the same prefix. I'd like to run a query and select some columns across all of these tables.
what would be the best way to go about this ?
I have seen some solutions that use dynammic sql and i was considering writing a stored procedure that would form a dynamic sql statement and execute it for me. But im not sure this is the best way.
I see you are using Postgresql. This is an ideal case for partitioning with constraint exclusion based on dates. You create one master table without data, and the other tables added daily inherit from it. In your case, you don't even have to worry about the nuisance of triggers on INSERT; sounds like there is never any insertion other than the daily bulk creation of a new table. See the link above for full documentation.
Queries can be run against the parent table, and Postgres takes care of looking in all the child tables, plus it is smart enough to skip child tables ruled out by WHERE criteria.
You could query the meta data for tables with the same prefix.
select table_name from information_schema.tables where table_name like 'week%'
Then you could use union all to combine queries like
select * from week001
union all
select * from week002
[...]
However I suggest appending new records to one single table, and use an index on the timestamp column. This would especially speed up queries which span multiple weeks etc. It will simplify your queries a lot, if you only have to deal with one table. If the table is getting too large, you could partition by date etc. So there should be no need to partition manually by having multiple tables.
You are correct, sometimes you have to write dynamic SQL to handle cases such as this.
If all of your tables are loaded you can query for table names within your stored procedure. Something like this:
SELECT TABLE_NAME
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES
WHERE TABLE_TYPE = 'BASE TABLE'
Play with that to get the specific table names you need.
How are the table names differentiated? By date? Some incrementing ID?
I have a CREATE TABLE query which can be done using two methods (create as select statement for thousands/million records):
First method:
create table as select some data minus (select data from other table)
OR
first i should create the table as
create table as select .....
and then
delete from ..where exist.
I guess the second method is better.For which query the cost is less?Why is minus query not as fast as the second method?
EDIT:
I forgot to mention that the create statement has join from two tables as well.
The minus is slow probably because it needs to sort the tables on disk in order to compare them.
Try to rewrite the first query with NOT EXISTS instead of MINUS, it should be faster and will generate less REDO and UNDO (as a_horse_with_no_name mentioned). Of course, make sure that all the fields involved in the WHERE clauses are indexed!
The second one will write lots of records to disk and then remove them. This will in 9 of 10 cases take way longer then filtering what you write in to begin with.
So if the first one actually isn't faster we need more information about the tables and statements involved.
I've researched and realize I have a unique situation.
First off, I am not allowed to post images yet to the board since I'm a new user, so see appropriate links below
I have multiple tables where a column (not always the identifier column) is sequentially numbered and shouldn't have any breaks in the numbering. My goal is to make sure this stays true.
Down and Dirty
We have an 'Event' table where we randomly select a percentage of the rows and insert the rows into table 'Results'. The "ID" column from the 'Results' is passed to a bunch of delete queries.
This more or less ensures that there are missing rows in several tables.
My problem:
Figuring out an sql query that will renumber the column I specify. I prefer to not drop the column.
Example delete query:
delete ItemVoid
from ItemTicket
join ItemVoid
on ItemTicket.item_ticket_id = itemvoid.item_ticket_id
where itemticket.ID in (select ID
from results)
Example Tables Before:
Example Tables After:
As you can see 2 rows were delete from both tables based on the ID column. So now I gotta figure out how to renumber the item_ticket_id and the item_void_id columns where the the higher number decreases to the missing value, and the next highest one decreases, etc. Problem #2, if the item_ticket_id changes in order to be sequential in ItemTickets, then
it has to update that change in ItemVoid's item_ticket_id.
I appreciate any advice you can give on this.
(answering an old question as it's the first search result when I was looking this up)
(MS T-SQL)
To resequence an ID column (not an Identity one) that has gaps,
can be performed using only a simple CTE with a row_number() to generate a new sequence.
The UPDATE works via the CTE 'virtual table' without any extra problems, actually updating the underlying original table.
Don't worry about the ID fields clashing during the update, if you wonder what happens when ID's are set that already exist, it
doesn't suffer that problem - the original sequence is changed to the new sequence in one go.
WITH NewSequence AS
(
SELECT
ID,
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY ID) as ID_New
FROM YourTable
)
UPDATE NewSequence SET ID = ID_New;
Since you are looking for advice on this, my advice is you need to redesign this as I see a big flaw in your design.
Instead of deleting the records and then going through the hassle of renumbering the remaining records, use a bit flag that will mark the records as Inactive. Then when you are querying the records, just include a WHERE clause to only include the records are that active:
SELECT *
FROM yourTable
WHERE Inactive = 0
Then you never have to worry about re-numbering the records. This also gives you the ability to go back and see the records that would have been deleted and you do not lose the history.
If you really want to delete the records and renumber them then you can perform this task the following way:
create a new table
Insert your original data into your new table using the new numbers
drop your old table
rename your new table with the corrected numbers
As you can see there would be a lot of steps involved in re-numbering the records. You are creating much more work this way when you could just perform an UPDATE of the bit flag.
You would change your DELETE query to something similar to this:
UPDATE ItemVoid
SET InActive = 1
FROM ItemVoid
JOIN ItemTicket
on ItemVoid.item_ticket_id = ItemTicket.item_ticket_id
WHERE ItemTicket.ID IN (select ID from results)
The bit flag is much easier and that would be the method that I would recommend.
The function that you are looking for is a window function. In standard SQL (SQL Server, MySQL), the function is row_number(). You use it as follows:
select row_number() over (partition by <col>)
from <table>
In order to use this in your case, you would delete the rows from the table, then use a with statement to recalculate the row numbers, and then assign them using an update. For transactional integrity, you might wrap the delete and update into a single transaction.
Oracle supports similar functionality, but the syntax is a bit different. Oracle calls these functions analytic functions and they support a richer set of operations on them.
I would strongly caution you from using cursors, since these have lousy performance. Of course, this will not work on an identity column, since such a column cannot be modified.