Aggregates on large databases: best platform? - sql

Question

I have a postgres database with several million rows, which drives a web app. The data is static: users don't write to it.
I would like to be able to offer users query-able aggregates (e.g. the sum of all rows with a certain foreign key value), but the size of the database now means it takes 10-15 minutes to calculate such aggregates.
Should I:
start pre-calculating aggregates in the database (since the data is static)
move away from postgres and use something else?
The only problem with 1. is that I don't necessarily know which aggregates users will want, and it will obviously increase the size of the database even further.
If there was a better solution than postgres for such problems, then I'd be very grateful for any suggestions.

Answer 1

You are trying to solve an OLAP (On-Line Analytical Process) data base structure problem with an OLTP (On-Line Transactional Process) database structure.
You should build another set of tables that store just the aggregates and update these tables in the middle of the night. That way your customers can query the aggregate set of tables and it won't interfere with the on-line transation proceessing system at all.
The only caveate is the aggregate data will always be one day behind.

Answer 2

Yes
Possibly. Presumably there are a whole heap of things you would need to consider before changing your RDBMS. If you moved to SQL Server, you would use Indexed views to accomplish this: Improving Performance with SQL Server 2008 Indexed Views

Answer 3

If you store the aggregates in an intermediate Object (something like MyAggragatedResult), you could consider a caching proxy:
class ResultsProxy {
calculateResult(param1, param2) {
.. retrieve from cache
.. if not found, calculate and store in cache
}
}
There are quite a few caching frameworks for java, and most like for other languages/environments such as .Net as well. These solution can take care of invalidation (how long should a result be stored in memory), and memory-management (remove old cache items when reaching memory limit, etc.).

Answer 4

If you have a set of commonly-queried aggregates, it might be best to create an aggregate table that is maintained by triggers (or an observer pattern tied to your OR/M).
Example: say you're writing an accounting system. You keep all the debits and credits in a General Ledger table (GL). Such a table can quickly accumulate tens of millions of rows in a busy organization. To find the balance of a particular account on the balance sheet as of a given day, you would normally have to calculate the sum of all debits and credits to that account up to that date, a calculation that could take several seconds even with a properly indexed table. Calculating all figures of a balance sheet could take minutes.
Instead, you could define an account_balance table. For each account and dates or date ranges of interest (usually each month's end), you maintain a balance figure by using a trigger on the GL table to update balances by adding each delta individually to all applicable balances. This spreads the cost of aggregating these figures over each individual persistence to the database, which will likely reduce it to a negligible performance hit when saving, and will decrease the cost of getting the data from a massive linear operation to a near-constant one.

Answer 5

For that data volume you shouldn't have to move off Postgres.
I'd look to tuning first - 10-15 minutes seems pretty excessive for 'a few million rows'. This ought to be just a few seconds. Note that the out-of-the box config settings for Postgres don't (or at least didn't) allocate much disk buffer memory. You might look at that also.
More complex solutions involve implementing some sort of data mart or an OLAP front-end such as Mondrian over the database. The latter does pre-calculate aggregates and caches them.

Answer 6

If you have a set of common aggregates you can calculate it before hand (like, well, once a week) in a separate table and/or columns and users get it fast.
But I'd seeking the tuning way too - revise your indexing strategy. As your database is read only, you don't need to worry about index updating overhead.
Revise your database configuration, maybe you can squeeze some performance of it - normally default configurations are targeted to easy the life of first-time users and become short-sighted fastly with large databases.
Maybe even some denormalization can speed up things after you revised your indexing and database configuration - and falls in the situation that you need even more performance, but try it as a last resort.

Answer 7

Oracle supports a concept called Query Rewrite. The idea is this:
When you want a lookup (WHERE ID = val) to go faster, you add an index. You don't have to tell the optimizer to use the index - it just does. You don't have to change the query to read FROM the index... you hit the same table as you always did but now instead of reading every block in the table, it reads a few index blocks and knows where to go in the table.
Imagine if you could add something like that for aggregation. Something that the optimizer would just 'use' without being told to change. Let's say you have a table called DAILY_SALES for the last ten years. Some sales managers want monthly sales, some want quarterly, some want yearly.
You could maintain a bunch of extra tables that hold those aggregations and then you'd tell the users to change their query to use a different table. In Oracle, you'd build those as materialized views. You do no work except defining the MV and an MV Log on the source table. Then if a user queries DAILY_SALES for a sum by month, ORACLE will change your query to use an appropriate level of aggregation. The key is WITHOUT changing the query at all.
Maybe other DB's support that... but this is clearly what you are looking for.