long running queries: observing partial results? - sql

As part of a data analysis project, I will be issuing some long running queries on a mysql database. My future course of action is contingent on the results I obtain along the way. It would be useful for me to be able to view partial results generated by a SELECT statement that is still running.
Is there a way to do this? Or am I stuck with waiting until the query completes to view results which were generated in the very first seconds it ran?
Thank you for any help : )

In general case the partial result cannot be produced. For example, if you have an aggregate function with GROUP BY clause, then all data should be analysed, before the 1st row is returned. LIMIT clause will not help you, because it is applied after the output is computed. Maybe you can give a concrete data and SQL query?

One thing you may consider is sampling your tables down. This is good practice in data analysis in general to get your iteration speed up when you're writing code.
For example, if you have table create privelages and you have some mega-huge table X with key unique_id and some data data_value
If unique_id is numeric, in nearly any database
create table sample_table as
select unique_id, data_value
from X
where mod(unique_id, <some_large_prime_number_like_1013>) = 1
will give you a random sample of data to work your queries out, and you can inner join your sample_table against the other tables to improve speed of testing / query results. Thanks to the sampling your query results should be roughly representative of what you will get. Note, the number you're modding with has to be prime otherwise it won't give a correct sample. The example above will shrink your table down to about 0.1% of the original size (.0987% to be exact).
Most databases also have better sampling and random number methods than just using mod. Check the documentaion to see what's available for your version.
Hope that helps,
McPeterson

It depends on what your query is doing. If it needs to have the whole result set before producing output - such as might happen for queries with group by or order by or having clauses, then there is nothing to be done.
If, however, the reason for the delay is client-side buffering (which is the default mode), then that can be adjusted using "mysql-use-result" as an attribute of the database handler rather than the default "mysql-store-result". This is true for the Perl and Java interfaces: I think in the C interface, you have to use an unbuffered version of the function that executes the query.

Related

Improve performance of deducting values of same table in SQL

for a metering project I use a simple SQL table in the following format
ID
Timestamp: dat_Time
Metervalue: int_Counts
Meterpoint: fk_MetPoint
While this works nicely in general I have not found an efficient solution for one specific problem: There is one Meterpoint which is a submeter of another Meterpoint. I'd be interested in the Delta of those two Meterpoints to get the remaining consumption. As the registration of counts is done by one device I get datapoints for the various Meterpoints at the same Timestamp.
I think I found a solution applying a subquery which appears to be not very efficient.
SELECT
A.dat_Time,
(A.int_Counts- (SELECT B.int_Counts FROM tbl_Metering AS B WHERE B.fk_MetPoint=2 AND B.dat_Time=A.dat_Time)) AS Delta
FROM tbl_Metering AS A
WHERE fk_MetPoint=1
How could I improve this query?
Thanks in advance
You can try using a window function instead:
SELECT m.dat_Time,
(m.int_counts - m.int_counts_2) as delta
FROM (SELECT m.*,
MAX(CASE WHEN fk.MetPoint = 2 THEN int_counts END) OVER (PARTITION BY dat_time) as int_counts_2
FROM tbl_Metering m
) m
WHERE fk_MetPoint = 1
From a query point of view, you should as a minimum change to a set-based approach instead of an inline sub-query for each row, using a group by as a minimum but it is a good candidate for a windowing query, just as suggested by the "Great" Gordon Linoff
However if this is a metering project, then we are going to expect a high volume of records, if not now, certainly over time.
I would recommend you look into altering the input such that delta is stored as it's own first class column, this moves much of the performance hit to the write process which presumably will only ever occur once for each record, where as your select will be executed many times.
This can be performed using an INSTEAD OF trigger or you could write it into the business logic, in a recent IoT project we computed or stored these additional properties with each inserted reading to greatly simplify many types of aggregate and analysis queries:
Id of the Previous sequential reading
Timestamp of the Previous sequential reading
Value Delta
Time Delta
Number of readings between this and the previous reading
The last one sounds close to your scenario, we were deliberately batching multiple sequential readings into a single record.
You could also process the received data into a separate table that includes this level of aggregation information, so as not to pollute the raw feed and to allow you to re-process it on demand.
You could redirect your analysis queries to this second table, which is now effectively a data warehouse of sorts.

How to get a count of the number of times a sql statement has executed in X hours?

I'm using oracle db. I want to be able to count the number of times that a SQL statement was executed in X hours. For instance, how many times has the statement Select * From ExampleTable been executed in the past 5 hours?
I tried looking in V$SQL, V$SQLSTATS, V$SQLAREA, but they only keep a record of a statement's total amount of executions. They don't store what times the individual executions occurred. Is there any view I missed, or something else that does keep track of each individual statement execution + timestamp so that I can query by which have occurred X hours ago? Thanks for the help.
The views in the Active Workload Repository store historical SQL execution information, specifically the view DBA_HIST_SQLSTAT.
The view is not perfect; it contains a summary of the top SQL statements. This is almost perfect information for performance tuning - in practice, sampling will catch any performance problem. But if you're looking for a perfect record of every SQL execution, as far as I know the only way to get that information is through tracing, which is buggy and slow.
Hopefully this query is good enough:
select begin_interval_time, end_interval_time, executions_delta, dba_hist_sqlstat.*
from dba_hist_sqlstat
join dba_hist_snapshot
on dba_hist_sqlstat.snap_id = dba_hist_snapshot.snap_id
and dba_hist_sqlstat.instance_number = dba_hist_snapshot.instance_number
order by begin_interval_time desc, sql_id;
Apologies for putting this in an answer instead of a comment (I don't have the required reputation), but I think you may be out of luck. Here is an AskTOM asking basically the same question: AskTOM. Tom says unless you are using ASH that just isn't something the database is designed to do.

How to count rows of finished BigQuery job using node.js client library

I would like to get the row count of job that was run using:
bigquery.startQuery(options)
The naive way of doing this, would be to stream the result (e.g. using):
job.getQueryResultsStream()
And count one by one. This obviously isn't very efficient, especially for large results. Another way I thought of is using the metadata of the job:
job.on('complete', function(metadata) {...}
Where I could kind of "reverse engineer" the response, to get the query plan, and see the number of written rows in the last step. I could find that in:
statistics.query.queryPlan[statistics.query.queryPlan.length - 1].recordsWritten
While a sample of different queries convinced me that this might work, it feels like a "hack", and it's difficult to say how robust it will be. Seems like I might need to handle different cases (failed queries, etc.)
EDIT: Another option suggested below is "SELECT COUNT"ing the temp table created by the original query (available in the job metadata). While this absolutely is a straightforward way to get the result I'm looking for, it has the disadvantage of requiring another roundtrip to query the BigQuery service, which costs several seconds. It is a 0 "bytes billed" query (counting a full table uses table metadata only), but it seems redundant when the job "knows" how many rows it has written to the output.
Is there a straightforward and "correct" way to get this count from the job object, without a roundtrip to BQ service? Perhaps a field I missed / misinterpreted, or a function in the job object that returns this?
Any job has destination table - even when you do not explicitly set it - result is still saved in so-called anonymous table that you can in turn query to get the count of output rows. So below simple extra query will work (note - names are just as an example)
SELECT COUNT(1)
FROM `yourProject._0511743a77ca76c1b55482d7cb1f8e91ac5c7b36.anon17286defe54b5c07ba6810a71abfdba6388ac4e0`
The actual destination table to use - can be retrieved from configuration.query.destinationTable property of job
job.on('complete', function(metadata) {
console.log(metadata.statistics.query.numDmlAffectedRows)
}

Is SELECT TOP always the fastest way to get a preview of a query you want on SQL?

I have the following query that I've ran:
SELECT TOP 100 certs.CertId, COUNT(cluster.BGTJobId) C
FROM [CentralDB_US_33].[dbo].[JobSkillClusterIndex] cluster
INNER JOIN [Eagle].[raw].[certs] certs
ON certs.BGTJobId = cluster.BGTJobId
GROUP BY cluster.skillClusterId, certs.CertId
Ultimately, I want to get the full results and not just the top 100, but for previewing purposes, is this the fastest way to go?
Since you've mentioned this is for preview purposes, so I'm assuming you just want data out of the query and you want it to run FAST regardless of the data it returns, and seeing that you mentioned that the query takes 14 minutes to execute, a quick 'hack-fix' would be to use something like below:
SELECT
certs.CertId
, COUNT(cluster.BGTJobId)
FROM
(SELECT TOP 100
certs.CertId
FROM [Eagle].[raw].[certs] certs) certs
INNER JOIN [CentralDB_US_33].[dbo].[JobSkillClusterIndex] cluster
ON certs.BGTJobId = cluster.BGTJobId
GROUP BY cluster.skillClusterId, certs.CertId
Aggregating data (in your case COUNT) is a very expensive operation and should be done only at the last part of the query on as little data as possible. That is why, for "preview" purposes I have selected onyl the first 100 certificates and made the COUNT on that data.
However, because you mentioned that the query takes 14 minutes to run, the problems are elsewhere and usually this is due to design (query design, index design or even table design).
You should ask yourself if you really want to go over all of the data in the tables and get all of the matching rows from both tables, and aren't you possibly missing a WHERE clause?
If you do decide that there is a WHERE clause needed, are there any indexes to help filtering the data based on the conditions of your WHERE clause (and even the join columns - certs.BGTJobId and cluster.BGTJobId?
Yes top select query is fastest for preview purposes that why its also shown in management studio GUI right click. But if you are running custom query just check that where clause / grouping etc are done is part of the clustered index.

Efficient way to compute accumulating value in sqlite3

I have an sqlite3 table that tells when I gain/lose points in a game. Sample/query result:
SELECT time,p2 FROM events WHERE p1='barrycarter' AND action='points'
ORDER BY time;
1280622305|-22
1280625580|-9
1280627919|20
1280688964|21
1280694395|-11
1280698006|28
1280705461|-14
1280706788|-13
[etc]
I now want my running point total. Given that I start w/ 1000 points,
here's one way to do it.
SELECT DISTINCT(time), (SELECT
1000+SUM(p2) FROM events e WHERE p1='barrycarter' AND action='points'
AND e.time <= e2.time) AS points FROM events e2 WHERE p1='barrycarter'
AND action='points' ORDER BY time
but this is highly inefficient. What's a better way to write this?
MySQL has #variables so you can do things like:
SELECT time, #tot := #tot+points ...
but I'm using sqlite3 and the above isn't ANSI standard SQL anyway.
More info on the db if anyone needs it: http://ccgames.db.94y.info/
EDIT: Thanks for the answers! My dilemma: I let anyone run any
single SELECT query on "http://ccgames.db.94y.info/". I want to give
them useful access to my data, but not to the point of allowing
scripting or allowing multiple queries with state. So I need a single
SQL query that can do accumulation. See also:
Existing solution to share database data usefully but safely?
SQLite is meant to be a small embedded database. Given that definition, it is not unreasonable to find many limitations with it. The task at hand is not solvable using SQLite alone, or it will be terribly slow as you have found. The query you have written is a triangular cross join that will not scale, or rather, will scale badly.
The most efficient way to tackle the problem is through the program that is making use of SQLite, e.g. if you were using Web SQL in HTML5, you can easily accumulate in JavaScript.
There is a discussion about this problem in the sqlite mailing list.
Your 2 options are:
Iterate through all the rows with a cursor and calculate the running sum on the client.
Store sums instead of, or as well as storing points. (if you only store sums you can get the points by doing sum(n) - sum(n-1) which is fast).