Best practice to store List<T> in StackExchange.Redis - redis

I am trying to find best practice(efficient) way of storing set of List objects against ReportingDate key.
List could be serailised as Xml/DataContract or ProtoBuf....
And given some of the data could be big (for that slice of key):
I was wondering if there is any of getting data from redis cache in IEnum/streamed fashion? Atm we using ProtoBuf.NET to have file based cache. And we retrieve data into mem in streamed fashion (we also have an option of selecting what props/fields we want in that T object as ProtoBuf allows us to do it)
Is there any way can force (after some inactivity) certain part of the data to be offloaded from mem and back into file if it is not being used. But load it up again if it is called
Tnx

It sounds like you want a sorted set - see https://redis.io/topics/data-types#sorted-sets. You would use the date as the value, perhaps in epoch time (since it needs to be a number). SE.Redis supports all the operations you would expect to get ranges of values (either positional ranges - the first 20 records, etc; or absolute ranges bases on the value - all items between two dates expressed in the same unit). Look at the methods starting " SortedSet...".
The value can be binary, so protobuf-net is fine (you would serialize the value for each date separately). Just pass a byte[] as the value. You need to handle serialization separately to the redis library.
As for swapping data out: no. Redis has date-based expiration, but doesn't have hot and cold storage. It is either there, or it isn't. You could use scheduled tasks to purge or move data based on date ranges, again using any of the Z* (redis) or SortedSet* (SE.Redis) methods.
For the complete list of Z* operations, see: https://redis.io/commands#sorted_set. They should all be available in SE.Redis.

Related

How to know the configured size of the Chronicle Map?

We use Chronicle Map as a persisted storage. As we have new data arriving all the time, we continue to put new data into the map. Thus we cannot predict the correct value for net.openhft.chronicle.map.ChronicleMapBuilder#entries(long). Chronicle 3 will not break when we put more data than expected, but will degrade performance. So we would like to recreate this map with new configuration from time to time.
Now it the real question: given a Chronicle Map file, how can we know which configuration was used for that file? Then we can compare it with actual amount of data (source of this knowledge is irrelevant here) and recreate a map if needed.
entries() is a high-level config, that is not stored internally. What is stored internally is the number of segments, expected number of entries per segment, and the number of "chunks" allocated in the segment's entry space. They are configured via ChronicleMapBuilder.actualSegments(), entriesPerSegment() and actualChunksPerSegmentTier() respectively. However, there is no way at the moment to query the last two numbers from the created ChronicleMap, so it doesn't help much. (You can query the number of segments via ChronicleMap.segments().)
You can contribute to Chronicle-Map by adding getters to ChronicleMap to expose those configurations. Or, you need to store the number of entries separately, e. g. in a file along with the ChronicleMap persisted file.

What Redis data type fit the most for following example

I have following scenario:
Fetch array of numbers (from REDIS) conditionally
For each number do some async stuff (fetch something from DB based on number)
For each thing in result set from DB do another async stuff
Periodically repeat 1. 2. 3. because new numbers will be constantly added to REDIS structure.Those numbers represent unix timestamp in milliseconds so out of the box those numbers will always be sorted in time of addition
Conditionally means fetch those unix timestamp from REDIS that are less or equal to current unix timestamp in milliseconds(Date.now())
Question is what REDIS data type fit the most for this use case having in mind that this code will be scaled up to N instances, so N instances will share access to single REDIS instance. To equally share the load each instance will read for example first(oldest) 5 numbers from REDIS. Numbers are unique (adding same number should fail silently) so REDIS SET seems like a good choice but reading M first elements from REDIS set seems impossible.
To prevent two different instance of the code to read same numbers REDIS read operation should be atomic, it should read the numbers and delete them. If any async operation fail on specific number (steps 2. and 3.), numbers should be added again to REDIS to be handled again. They should be re-added back to the head not to the end to be handled again as soon as possible. As far as i know SADD would push it to the tail.
SMEMBERS key would read everything, it looks like a hammer to me. I would need to include some application logic to get first five than to check what is less or equal to Date.now() and then to delete those and to wrap somehow everything in single transaction. Besides that set cardinality can be huge.
SSCAN sounds interesting but i don't have any clue how it works in "scaled" environment like described above. Besides that, per REDIS docs: The SCAN family of commands only offer limited guarantees about the returned elements since the collection that we incrementally iterate can change during the iteration process. Like described above collection will be changed frequently
A more appropriate data structure would be the Sorted Set - members have a float score that is very suitable for storing a timestamp and you can perform range searches (i.e. anything less or equal a given value).
The relevant starting points are the ZADD, ZRANGEBYSCORE and ZREMRANGEBYSCORE commands.
To ensure the atomicity when reading and removing members, you can choose between the the following options: Redis transactions, Redis Lua script and in the next version (v4) a Redis module.
Transactions
Using transactions simply means doing the following code running on your instances:
MULTI
ZRANGEBYSCORE <keyname> -inf <now-timestamp>
ZREMRANGEBYSCORE <keyname> -inf <now-timestamp>
EXEC
Where <keyname> is your key's name and <now-timestamp> is the current time.
Lua script
A Lua script can be cached and runs embedded in the server, so in some cases it is a preferable approach. It is definitely the best approach for short snippets of atomic logic if you need flow control (remember that a MULTI transaction returns the values only after execution). Such a script would look as follows:
local r = redis.call('ZRANGEBYSCORE', KEYS[1], '-inf', ARGV[1])
redis.call('ZREMRANGEBYSCORE', KEYS[1], '-inf', ARGV[1])
return r
To run this, first cache it using SCRIPT LOAD and then call it with EVALSHA like so:
EVALSHA <script-sha> 1 <key-name> <now-timestamp>
Where <script-sha> is the sha1 of the script returned by SCRIPT LOAD.
Redis modules
In the near future, once v4 is GA you'll be able to write and use modules. Once this becomes a reality, you'll be able to use this module we've made that provides the ZPOP command and could be extended to cover this use case as well.

Best data structure to store temperature readings over time

I used to work with SQL like MySQL, Postgres or MSSQL.
Now I want to play with Redis. I'm working on a little home project, that I think is the best choice for starting using Redis.
I have a machine that reads temperature (indoor and outdoor) and humidity. I need to store the readings into Redis. Can you help me to understand the best data structure to do so?
Other than this data I need to store the time (ex. unix timestamp) of the temperature reading for use plotting a graphic.
I installed Redis read the documentation, so I understand the commands and data types.
Since this is your first Redis project and it's a home project, I'd be careful about being to careful. Here's a couple ways to consider designing it (NOTE: I only dug deep into REDIS this past weekend so hopefully others will weigh in).
IDEA 1:
Four ordered sets
KEY for sets are "indoor_temps", "outdoor_temps", "indoor_humidity", "outdoor_humidity"
VALUES are the temperatures / humidities
SCORE is the date stored as EPOCH
IDEA 2:
Four types of keys (best shown by example)
datetime_key = /year:2014/month:07/day:12/hour:07/minute:32/second:54
type_keys = [indoor_temps, outdoor_temps, indoor_humidity, outdoor_humidity]
keys are of form type + "/" + datetime_key
values are the temp and humidity itself
You probably want to implement some initial design and then work with the data immediately - graph it, do stats, etc. Whatever you plan to do with it. That will expose flaws and if they are major, flush the database and try again. These designs should really only take ~1 hour to implement since the only thing you're really changing is a few Redis commands and some string manipulation to convert the data to keys.
I like Tony's suggestions, but I'll also throw out another possibility.
4 lists
keys are "indoor_temps", "outdoor_temps", "indoor_humidity", "outdoor_humidity"
values are of the form < timestamp >_< reading > ie.( "1403197981_27.2" )
Push items onto the front of the list using LPUSH. Get a set of readings using LRANGE. The list will always be ordered by the time of the reading. Obviously split the value on "_" to get your time and reading...
In all honesty, this will give the same properties as Tony's first example, with slightly worse lookup performance, but better memory usage. I'm guessing for this project you'll be neither memory, nor CPU constrained, so the choice is probably not an issue. That said, if you expect to be saving 100's of thousands or more readings, I would suggest the list unless you want to consume a large portion of your system's memory.
Also, it's a good idea to call EXPIRE on your entries with some reasonable TTL that encompasses the length of time you want to save the readings for. If your plan is to have them live in perpetuity then you may want to look at backing them up to a disk DB over time, and just use Redis as a quick lookup cache for recent readings.
Thank to all answer, I choose this strucure:
4 lists: tempIN, tempOut, humidIN and humidOUT
values are: [value]:[timestamp]. For example: "25.4:1403615247"
As suggested from wallacer i want to backup old entries out from Redis.
For main frontend i need only last two days of sample.
For example i can create Redis RDB file snapshot and "trim" the live lists. This solution is not convenient in the event that, in the future you want to recover old values​​.
Do you have any tips on what kind of procedure to adopt to store the data? Maybe use of SQLIte DB?

Redis Sorted Set ... store data in "member"?

I am learning Redis and using an existing app (e.g. converting pieces of it) for practice.
I'm really struggling to understand first IF and then (if applicable) HOW to use Redis in one particular use-case ... apologies if this is super basic, but I'm so new that I'm not even sure if I'm asking correctly :/
Scenario:
Images are received by a server and info like time_taken and resolution is saved in a database entry. Images are then associated (e.g. "belong_to") with one Event ... all very straight-forward for a RDBS.
I'd like to use a Redis to maintain a list of the 50 most-recently-uploaded image objects for each Event, to be delivered to the client when requested. I'm thinking that a Sorted Set might be appropriate, but here are my concerns:
First, I'm not sure if a Sorted Set can/should be used in this associative manner? Can it reference other objects in Redis? Or is there just a better way to do this altogether?
Secondly, I need the ability to delete elements that are greater than X minutes old. I know about the EXPIRE command for keys, but I can't use this because not all images need to expire at the same periodicity, etc.
This second part seems more like a query on a field, which makes me think that Redis cannot be used ... but then I've read that I could maybe use the Sorted Set score to store a timestamp and find "older than X" in that way.
Can someone provide come clarity on these two issues? Thank you very much!
UPDATE
Knowing that the amount of data I need to store for each image is small and will be delivered to the client's browser, can is there anything wrong with storing it in the member "field" of a sorted set?
For example Sorted Set => event:14:pictures <time_taken> "{id:3,url:/images/3.png,lat:22.8573}"
This saves the data I need and creates a rapidly-updatable list of the last X pictures for a given event with the ability to, if needed, identify pictures that are greater than X minutes old ...
First, I'm not sure if a Sorted Set can/should be used in this
associative manner? Can it reference other objects in Redis?
Why do you need to reference other objects? An event may have n image objects, each with a time_taken and image data; a sorted set is perfect for this. The image_id is the key, the score is time_taken, and the member is the image data as json/xml, whatever; you're good to go there.
Secondly, I need the ability to delete elements that are greater than
X minutes old
If you want to delete elements greater than X minutes old, use ZREMRANGEBYSCORE:
ZREMRANGEBYSCORE event:14:pictures -inf (currentTime - X minutes)
-inf is just another way of saying the oldest member without knowing the oldest members time, but for the top range you need to calculate it based on current time before using this command ( the above is just an example)

Caching of Map applications in Hadoop MapReduce?

Looking at the combination of MapReduce and HBase from a data-flow perspective, my problem seems to fit. I have a large set of documents which I want to Map, Combine and Reduce. My previous SQL implementation was to split the task into batch operations, cumulatively storing what would be the result of the Map into table and then performing the equivalent of a reduce. This had the benefit that at any point during execution (or between executions), I had the results of the Map at that point in time.
As I understand it, running this job as a MapReduce would require all of the Map functions to run each time.
My Map functions (and indeed any function) always gives the same output for a given input. There is simply no point in re-calculating output if I don't have to. My input (a set of documents) will be continually growing and I will run my MapReduce operation periodically over the data. Between executions I should only really have to calculate the Map functions for newly added documents.
My data will probably be HBase -> MapReduce -> HBase. Given that Hadoop is a whole ecosystem, it may be able to know that a given function has been applied to a row with a given identity. I'm assuming immutable entries in the HBase table. Does / can Hadoop take account of this?
I'm made aware from the documentation (especially the Cloudera videos) that re-calculation (of potentially redundant data) can be quicker than persisting and retrieving for the class of problem that Hadoop is being used for.
Any comments / answers?
If you're looking to avoid running the Map step each time, break it out as its own step (either by using the IdentityReducer or setting the number of reducers for the job to 0) and run later steps using the output of your map step.
Whether this is actually faster than recomputing from the raw data each time depends on the volume and shape of the input data vs. the output data, how complicated your map step is, etc.
Note that running your mapper on new data sets won't append to previous runs - but you can get around this by using a dated output folder. This is to say that you could store the output of mapping your first batch of files in my_mapper_output/20091101, and the next week's batch in my_mapper_output/20091108, etc. If you want to reduce over the whole set, you should be able to pass in my_mapper_output as the input folder, and catch all of the output sets.
Why not apply your SQL workflow in a different environment? Meaning, add a "processed" column to your input table. When time comes to run a summary, run a pipeline that goes something like:
map (map_function) on (input table filtered by !processed); store into map_outputs either in hbase or simply hdfs.
map (reduce function) on (map_outputs); store into hbase.
You can make life a little easier, assuming you are storing your data in Hbase sorted by insertion date, if you record somewhere timestamps of successful summary runs, and open the filter on inputs that are dated later than last successful summary -- you'll save some significant scanning time.
Here's an interesting presentation that shows how one company architected their workflow (although they do not use Hbase):
http://www.scribd.com/doc/20971412/Hadoop-World-Production-Deep-Dive-with-High-Availability