I'm performing an update on a DB that is inserting a 15 digit number into 270,000,000 rows of a single column. I think the space required should be around 4GB but it is still running and the transaction log has just hit 180GB.
Transactions have to store a lot of information just in case the changes need to be rolled back.
There needs to be a sequential value to know which order the records were updated/inserted. It needs to store the original value for the column (some RDBMSs might even store the whole row!). It needs a unique identifier to tie the data back to the row's location.
It has to store so much data because if something catastrophic happens -- like the database crashing -- it needs to be able to return to a consistent state.
Yes, 15 digits * 270 mil may come out to 4 GB, but that completely ignores all of the very important metadata required.
If this is a one-off update that doesn't need to be repeated, it may be faster to simply recreate the table with the column updated. Compared to inserts/updates/deletes, table creates from selects require almost no transaction logging.
Probably, all pages split due to the significant amount of data added (4/180 = 2.2%; might not seem significant but probably pushes many pages over the edge).
Rebuild the clustered index with a fillfactor (probably 90 is enough). Then, you will not have any page splits when updating.
If this does not help we need to dig deeper.
In any case there will be significant log growth and it will be bigger than 4GB for sure. 180 sounds too much. That sounds like whole pages are stored.
Related
I have an SQL request that is take more than 10 seconds to load at peak hours on my server.
UPDATE "events"
SET "metas" = 732899,
"count" = "count" + 1,
"timestamp" = 1633450429
WHERE "hash" = 'my_counter_453751'
Do you see any ways I can optimize this request?
I've tried to change my server but it doesn't change anything.
Usually, this request is almost instant, but when I have lots of users connected on my server this request takes more than 10 seconds and I don't understand why.
Any advice would help!
UPDATE "events" SET ... WHERE "hash" = 'my_counter_453751'
For this to work efficiently, you need an index on hash (if at all possible, it would be somewhat better to retrieve an integer-type primary index).
You also need as few other indexes as possible, because an index on metas, for example, too would be updated if you changed that column, and that takes time.
The fact that under load the update time goes up in that way, though, is suspicious. One of the few things that could explain this is disk thrashing. With many users, the events table gets evicted from memory and requires reloading. With too many indexes, and even more if there is no index on hash at all, this can be calamitous.
So I would also review the memory assigned to the RDBMS server, and the size of the events table. You could trim it down, or benefit from sharding. Or you could split a historical table into several tables, one per month - a poor man's sharding. This complicates retrieving information from that table, but accelerates writes.
I have also reaped huge benefits from dirty tricks such as writing these updates to a different, smaller table (or even to a temporary file). So, none of my hundred simultaneous clients has ever to do anything to the huge table; they all access the tiny one. Then a periodic cron job would run every minute or so, and perform all the updates together, loading the huge table in memory only once - and not locking or interfering in any way with the other threads, then remove the processed records from the tiny table. Maybe some such strategy can be doable for you too.
For a historic log table, you could write to a daily log and then pour the daily log into the large table late every night.
I have a table with 281,433 records in it, ranging from March 2010 to the current date (Sept 2014). It's a transaction table which consists of records that determine stock which is currently in and out of the warehouse.
When making picks from the warehouse, the system needs to look over every transaction from a particular customer that was ever made (based on the AccountListID field, which determines the customer, a customer might on average have about 300 records in the table). This happens 2-3 times per request from the particular .NET application when a picking run is done.
There are times when the database seemingly locks out. Some requests complete no bother, within about 3 seconds. Others hang for 'up to 4 minutes' according to the end users.
My guess is with 4-5 requests at the same time all looking at this one transaction table things are getting locked up.
I'm thinking about partitioning this table so that the primary transaction table only contains record from the last 2 years. The end user has agreed that any records past this date are unnecessary.
But I can't just delete them, they're used elsewhere in the system. I have indexes already in place and they make a massive difference (going from >30 seconds to <2, on the accountlistid field). It seems partitioning is the next step.
1) Am I going down the right route as a solution to my 'locking' problem?
2) When moving a set of records (e.g. records where the field DateTimeCheckedIn is more than 2 years old) is this a manual process or does partitioning automatically do this?
Partitioning shouldn't be necessary on a table with fewer than 300,000 rows, unless each record is really big. If a record is occupying more than 4k bytes, then you have 300,000 pages (2,400,000,000 bytes) and that is getting larger.
Indexes are usually the solution for something like this. Taking more than a second to return 300 records in an indexed database seems like a long time (unless the records are really big and the network overhead adds to the time). Your table and index should both fit into memory. Check your memory configuration.
The next question is about the application code. If it uses cursors, then these might be the culprit by locking rows under certain circumstances. For read-only cursors, "FAST_FORWARD" or "FORWARD READ_ONLY" should be fast. It is possible that if the application code is locking all the historical records, then you might get contention. After all, this would occur when two records (for different) customers are on the same data page. The solution is to not lock the historical records as you read them. Or, to avoid using cursors all together.
I don't think partitioning will be necessary here. You can probably fix this with a well-placed index: I'm thinking a single index covering (in order) company, part number, and quantity. Or, if it's an old server, possibly just add ram. Finally, since this is reading a lot of older data for transactions, where individual transactions themselves are likely never (or at most very rarely) updated once written, you might do better with a READ UNCOMMITTED isolation level for this query.
We have a very large table that was partitioned into monthly tables. We have no autovacuum parameters set in the postgresql.conf file, so it's on by default with default parameters.
The past months tables table_201404, table_201403 do not get written to or updated/deleted once they are passed, they are only read from for historical data. Why is it that we are noticing autovacuum processes running on these tables? Is it because they are part of a main partition and PostgreSQL is seeing those tables as one?
We are toying with the idea of setting autovacuum_enabled to off for these past tables, but I wanted to consult the wisdom of Stackoverflow first.
Thanks all...
Even read-only tables need to be vacuumed for wrap-around once every 2 billion transactions, and under the default settings are vacuumed for wrap-around once every 150 million transactions.
The transaction IDs stored with each row are 32 bits, so they wrap around eventually. To prevent this from causing problems, any very old transactionID has to be replaced with a magic value meaning "Older than all other IDs". So the table has to be scanned to do that replacement. If the table never changes, eventually every transaction ID will be replaced with the magic value and conceptually that table no longer needs to be scanned. But that fact is not stored anywhere, so the table still needs to be scanned every now then so that the system can observe that they are all still OK. Fortunately the scan is done in sequentially and only needs to read, not write, so it should be fairly efficient.
It is possible that the whole thing will be redone in 9.5 so that tables like that would no longer need to be scanned.
I have a large table (~170 million rows, 2 nvarchar and 7 int columns) in SQL Server 2005 that is constantly being inserted into. Everything works ok with it from a performance perspective, but every once in a while I have to update a set of rows in the table which causes problems. It works fine if I update a small set of data, but if I have to update a set of 40,000 records or so it takes around 3 minutes and blocks on the table which causes problems since the inserts start failing.
If I just run a select to get back the data that needs to be updated I get back the 40k records in about 2 seconds. It's just the updates that take forever. This is reflected in the execution plan for the update where the clustered index update takes up 90% of the cost and the index seek and top operator to get the rows take up 10% of the cost. The column I'm updating is not part of any index key, so it's not like it reorganizing anything.
Does anyone have any ideas on how this could be sped up? My thought now is to write a service that will just see when these updates have to happen, pull back the records that have to be updated, and then loop through and update them one by one. This will satisfy my business needs but it's another module to maintain and I would love if I could fix this from just a DBA side of things.
Thanks for any thoughts!
Actually it might reorganise pages if you update the nvarchar columns.
Depending on what the update does to these columns they might cause the record to grow bigger than the space reserved for it before the update.
(See explanation now nvarchar is stored at http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mssql/physical-database-design-consideration.html.)
So say a record has a string of 20 characters saved in the nvarchar - this takes 20*2+2(2 for the pointer) bytes in space. This is written at the initial insert into your table (based on the index structure). SQL Server will only use as much space as your nvarchar really takes.
Now comes the update and inserts a string of 40 characters. And oops, the space for the record within your leaf structure of your index is suddenly too small. So off goes the record to a different physical place with a pointer in the old place pointing to the actual place of the updated record.
This then causes your index to go stale and because the whole physical structure requires changing you see a lot of index work going on behind the scenes. Very likely causing an exclusive table lock escalation.
Not sure how best to deal with this. Personally if possible I take an exclusive table lock, drop the index, do the updates, reindex. Because your updates sometimes cause the index to go stale this might be the fastest option. However this requires a maintenance window.
You should batch up your update into several updates (say 10000 at a time, TEST!) rather than one large one of 40k rows.
This way you will avoid a table lock, SQL Server will only take out 5000 locks (page or row) before esclating to a table lock and even this is not very predictable (memory pressure etc). Smaller updates made in this fasion will at least avoid concurrency issues you are experiencing.
You can batch the updates using a service or firehose cursor.
Read this for more info:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms184286.aspx
Hope this helps
Robert
The mos brute-force (and simplest) way is to have a basic service, as you mentioned. That has the advantage of being able to scale with the load on the server and/or the data load.
For example, if you have a set of updates that must happen ASAP, then you could turn up the batch size. Conversely, for less important updates, you could have the update "server" slow down if each update is taking "too long" to relieve some of the pressure on the DB.
This sort of "heartbeat" process is rather common in systems and can be very powerful in the right situations.
Its wired that your analyzer is saying it take time to update the clustered Index . Did the size of the data change when you update ? Seems like the varchar is driving the data to be re-organized which might need updates to index pointers(As KMB as already pointed out) . In that case you might want to increase the % free sizes on the data and the index pages so that the data and the index pages can grow without relinking/reallocation . Since update is an IO intensive operation ( unlike read , which can be buffered ) the performance also depends on several factors
1) Are your tables partitioned by data 2) Does the entire table lies in the same SAN disk ( Or is the SAN striped well ?) 3) How verbose is the transaction logging . Can the buffer size of the transaction loggin increased to support larger writes to the log to suport massive inserts ?
Its also important which API/Language are you using? e.g JDBC support a batch update feature which makes the updates a little bit efficient if you are doing multiple updates .
Let’s say you have a table with about 5 million records and a nvarchar(max) column populated with large text data. You want to set this column to NULL if SomeOtherColumn = 1 in the fastest possible way.
The brute force UPDATE does not work very well here because it will create large implicit transaction and take forever.
Doing updates in small batches of 50K records at a time works but it’s still taking 47 hours to complete on beefy 32 core/64GB server.
Is there any way to do this update faster? Are there any magic query hints / table options that sacrifices something else (like concurrency) in exchange for speed?
NOTE: Creating temp table or temp column is not an option because this nvarchar(max) column involves lots of data and so consumes lots of space!
PS: Yes, SomeOtherColumn is already indexed.
From everything I can see it does not look like your problems are related to indexes.
The key seems to be in the fact that your nvarchar(max) field contains "lots" of data. Think about what SQL has to do in order to perform this update.
Since the column you are updating is likely more than 8000 characters it is stored off-page, which implies additional effort in reading this column when it is not NULL.
When you run a batch of 50000 updates SQL has to place this in an implicit transaction in order to make it possible to roll back in case of any problems. In order to roll back it has to store the original value of the column in the transaction log.
Assuming (for simplicity sake) that each column contains on average 10,000 bytes of data, that means 50,000 rows will contain around 500MB of data, which has to be stored temporarily (in simple recovery mode) or permanently (in full recovery mode).
There is no way to disable the logs as it will compromise the database integrity.
I ran a quick test on my dog slow desktop, and running batches of even 10,000 becomes prohibitively slow, but bringing the size down to 1000 rows, which implies a temporary log size of around 10MB, worked just nicely.
I loaded a table with 350,000 rows and marked 50,000 of them for update. This completed in around 4 minutes, and since it scales linearly you should be able to update your entire 5Million rows on my dog slow desktop in around 6 hours on my 1 processor 2GB desktop, so I would expect something much better on your beefy server backed by SAN or something.
You may want to run your update statement as a select, selecting only the primary key and the large nvarchar column, and ensure this runs as fast as you expect.
Of course the bottleneck may be other users locking things or contention on your storage or memory on the server, but since you did not mention other users I will assume you have the DB in single user mode for this.
As an optimization you should ensure that the transaction logs are on a different physical disk /disk group than the data to minimize seek times.
Hopefully you already dropped any indexes on the column you are setting to null, including full text indexes. As said before, turning off transactions and the log file temporarily would do the trick. Backing up your data will usually truncate your log files too.
You could set the database recovery mode to Simple to reduce logging, BUT do not do this without considering the full implications for a production environment.
What indexes are in place on the table? Given that batch updates of approx. 50,000 rows take so long, I would say you require an index.
Have you tried placing an index or statistics on someOtherColumn?
This really helped me. I went from 2 hours to 20 minutes with this.
/* I'm using database recovery mode to Simple */
/* Update table statistics */
set transaction isolation level read uncommitted
/* Your 50k update, just to have a measures of the time it will take */
set transaction isolation level READ COMMITTED
In my experience, working in MSSQL 2005, moving everyday (automatically) 4 Million 46-byte-records (no nvarchar(max) though) from one table in a database to another table in a different database takes around 20 minutes in a QuadCore 8GB, 2Ghz server and it doesn't hurt application performance. By moving I mean INSERT INTO SELECT and then DELETE. The CPU usage never goes over 30 %, even when the table being deleted has 28M records and it constantly makes around 4K insert per minute but no updates. Well, that's my case, it may vary depending on your server load.
READ UNCOMMITTED
"Specifies that statements (your updates) can read rows that have been modified by other transactions but not yet committed." In my case, the records are readonly.
I don't know what rg-tsql means but here you'll find info about transaction isolation levels in MSSQL.
Try indexing 'SomeOtherColumn'...50K records should update in a snap. If there is already an index in place see if the index needs to be reorganized and that statistics have been collected for it.
If you are running a production environment with not enough space to duplicate all your tables, I believe that you are looking for trouble sooner or later.
If you provide some info about the number of rows with SomeOtherColumn=1, perhaps we can think another way, but I suggest:
0) Backup your table
1) Index the flag column
2) Set the table option to "no log tranctions" ... if posible
3) write a stored procedure to run the updates