On our live/production database I'm trying to add a trigger to a table, but have been unsuccessful. I have tried a few times, but it has taken more than 30 minutes for the create trigger statement to complete and I've cancelled it.
The table is one that gets read/written to often by a couple different processes. I have disabled the scheduled jobs that update the table and attempted at times when there is less activity on the table, but I'm not able to stop everything that accesses the table.
I do not believe there is a problem with the create trigger statement itself. The create trigger statement was successful and quick in a test environment, and the trigger works correctly when rows are inserted/updated to the table. Although when I created the trigger on the test database there was no load on the table and it had considerably less rows, which is different than on the live/production database (100 vs. 13,000,000+).
Here is the create trigger statement that I'm trying to run
CREATE TRIGGER [OnItem_Updated]
ON [Item]
AFTER UPDATE
AS
BEGIN
SET NOCOUNT ON;
IF update(State)
BEGIN
/* do some stuff including for each row updated call a stored
procedure that increments a value in table based on the
UserId of the updated row */
END
END
Can there be issues with creating a trigger on a table while rows are being updated or if it has many rows?
In SQLServer triggers are created enabled by default. Is it possible to create the trigger disabled by default?
Any other ideas?
The problem may not be in the table itself, but in the system tables that have to be updated in order to create the trigger. If you're doing any other kind of DDL as part of your normal processes they could be holding it up.
Use sp_who to find out where the block is coming from then investigate from there.
I believe the CREATE Trigger will attempt to put a lock on the entire table.
If you have a lots of activity on that table it might have to wait a long time and you could be creating a deadlock.
For any schema changes you should really get everyone of the database.
That said it is tempting to put in "small" changes with active connections. You should take a look at the locks / connections to see where the lock contention is.
That's odd. An AFTER UPDATE trigger shouldn't need to check existing rows in the table. I suppose it's possible that you aren't able to obtain a lock on the table to add the trigger.
You might try creating a trigger that basically does nothing. If you can't create that, then it's a locking issue. If you can, then you could disable that trigger, add your intended code to the body, and enable it. (I do not believe you can disable a trigger during creation.)
Part of the problem may also be the trigger itself. Could your trigger accidentally be updating all rows of the table? There is a big differnce between 100 rows in a test database and 13,000,000. It is a very bad idea to develop code against such a small set when you have such a large dataset as you can have no way to predict performance. SQL that works fine for 100 records can completely lock up a system with millions for hours. You really want to know that in dev, not when you promote to prod.
Calling a stored proc in a trigger is usually a very bad choice. It also means that you have to loop through records which is an even worse choice in a trigger. Triggers must alawys account for multiple record inserts/updates or deletes. If someone inserts 100,000 rows (not unlikely if you have 13,000,000 records), then looping through a record based stored proc could take hours, lock the entire table and cause all users to want to hunt down the developer and kill (or at least maim) him because they cannot get their work done.
I would not even consider putting this trigger on prod until you test against a record set simliar in size to prod.
My friend Dennis wrote this article that illustrates why testing a small volumn of information when you have a large volumn of information can create difficulties on prd that you didn't notice on dev:
http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/DataMgmt/?blog=3&title=your-testbed-has-to-have-the-same-volume&disp=single&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1#c1210
Run DISABLE TRIGGER triggername ON tablename before altering the trigger, then reenable it with ENABLE TRIGGER triggername ON tablename
Related
I have a table set up in my sql server that keeps track of inventory items (in another database) that have changed. This table is fed by several different triggers. Every 15 minutes a scheduled task runs a batch file that executes a number of different queries that send updates on the items flagged in this table to update several ecommerce websites. The last query in the batch file resets the flags.
As you can imagine there is potential to lose changes if an item is flagged while this batch file is running. I have worked around this by replaying the last 25 hours of updates every 24 hours, just in case this scenario happened. It works, but IMO is kind of clumsy.
What I would like to do is delay any writes to this table until my script finishes, and resets the flags on all the rows that were flagged when the script started. Then allow all of these delayed writes to happen.
I've looked into doing this with table hints (TABLOCK) but this seems to be limited to one query--unless I'm misunderstanding what I have read, which is certainly possible. I have several that run in succession. TIA.
Alex
Could you modify your script into a stored procedure that extracts all the data into a temporary table using a select statement that applies a lock to the production table. You could then drop your lock on the main table and do all your processing in the temporary table (or permanent table built for the purpose) away from the live system. It will be a lot slower and put more load on your SQL box but speed shouldn't be an issue if you have a point in time snapshot of it.
If that option is not applicable then maybe you could play with wrapping the whole thing in a transaction and putting a table lock on your production table with the first select statement.
Good luck mate
We use a DB2 database. Some datawarehouse tables are TRUNCATEd and reloaded every day. We run into deadlock issues when another process is running an INSERT statement against that same table.
Scenario
TRUNCATE is executed on a table.
At the same time another process INSERTS some data in the same table.(The process is based on a trigger and can start at any time )
is there a work around?
What we have thought so far is to prioritize the truncate and then go thruogh with the insert. Is there any way to iplement this. Any help would be appreciated.
You should request a table lock before you execute the truncate.
If you do this you can't get a deadlock -- the table lock won't be granted before the insert finishes and once you have the lock another insert can't occur.
Update from comment:
You can use the LOCK TABLE command. The details depend on your situation but you should be able too get away with SHARED mode. This will allow reads but not inserts (this is the issue you are having I believe.)
It is possible this won't fix your problem. That probably means your insert statement is to complicated -- maybe it is reading from a bunch of other tables or from a federated table. If this is the case, re-architect your solution to include a staging table (first insert into the staging table .. slowly.. then insert into the target table from the staging table).
Problem statement
I have a view for recursively collecting and aggregating infos from 3 different large to very large tables. This view itself needs quite a time to execute but is needed in many select statements and is executed quite often.
The resulting view, however, is very small (a few dozend results in 2 columns).
All updating actions typically start a transaction, execute many thousand INSERTs and then commit the transaction. This does not occur very frequently, but if something is written to the database it is usually a large amount of data.
What I tried
As the view is small, does not change frequently and is read often, I thought of creating an indexed view. However, sadly you can not create an indexed view with CTEs or even recursive CTEs.
To 'emulate' a indexed or materialized view, I thought about writing a trigger that executes the view and stores the results into a table every time one of the base tables get modified. However, I guess this would take forever if a large amout of entries are UPDATEed or INSERTed and the trigger runs for each INSERT/UPDATE statement on those tables, even if they are inside a single transaction.
Actual question
Is it possible to write a trigger that runs once before commiting and after the last insert/update statement of a transaction has finished and only if any of the statements has changed any of the three tables?
No, there's no direct way to make a trigger that runs right before the end of a transaction. DML Triggers run once per triggering DML statement (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE), and there's no other kind of trigger related to data modification.
Indirectly, you could have all of your INSERT's insert into a temporary table and then INSERT them all together from the #temp table into the real table, resulting in one trigger firing for that table. But if you are writing to multiple tables, you would still have the same problem.
The SOP (Standard Operating Practice) way to address this is to have a stored procedure handle everything up front instead of a Trigger trying to catch everything on the back-side.
If data consistency is important, then I'd recommend that you follow the SOP approach based in a stored procedure that I mentioned above. Here's a hi-level outline of this approach:
Use a stored procedure that dumps all of the changes into #temp tables first,
then start a transaction,
then make the changes, moving data/changes from your #temp table(s) into your actual tables,
then do the follow-up work you wanted in a trigger. If these are consistency checks, then if they fail, you should rollback the transaction.
Otherwise, it then commits the transaction.
This is almost always how something like this is done correctly.
If your view is small and queried frequently and your underline tables are rarely changed, you don't need a "view". Instead you need a summary table with the same result of the view and updated by your triggers on each underline table.
A trigger is triggered every time you have data modification (insert, delete and update) but one modification will only trigger once, whether it updates one record or one million rows. You don't need worry about the size of update. Instead the frequency of updating is your concern.
If your have a procedure periodically insert large number of rows, or updates large number of rows one by one, you can change the procedure and disable the triggers before the update so the summary table will be updated only before the end of procedure, where you can call the same "sum" procedure and enable those triggers.
If you HAVE TO keep the "summary" up-to-date all the time, even during large number of transactions (i doubt it's very helpful or practical, if your view is slow to execute), you can disable those triggers, do some calculation by yourself after each transaction, update the summary table after each transaction, in your procedure.
I have a number of tables that get updated through my app which return a lot of data or are difficult to query for changes. To get around this problem, I have created a "LastUpdated" table with a single row and have a trigger on these complex tables which just sets GetDate() against the appropriate column in the LastUpdated table:
CREATE TRIGGER [dbo].[trg_ListItem_LastUpdated] ON [dbo].[tblListItem]
FOR INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE
AS
UPDATE LastUpdated SET ListItems = GetDate()
GO
This way, the clients only have to query this table for the last updated value and then can decided whether or not they need to refresh their data from the complex tables. The complex tables are using snapshot isolation to prevent dirty reads.
In busy systems, around once a day we are getting errors writing or updating data in the complex tables due to update conflicts in "LastUpdated". Because this occurs in the statement executed by the trigger, the affected complex table fails to save data. The following error is logged:
Snapshot isolation transaction aborted due to update conflict. You
cannot use snapshot isolation to access table 'dbo.tblLastUpdated'
directly or indirectly in database 'devDB' to update, delete, or
insert the row that has been modified or deleted by another
transaction. Retry the transaction or change the isolation level for
the update/delete statement.
What should I be doing here in the trigger to prevent this failure? Can I use some kind of query hints on the trigger to avoid this - or can I just ignore errors in the trigger? Updating the data in LastUpdated is not critical, but saving the data correctly into the complex tables is.
This is probably something very simple that I have overlooked or am not aware of. As always, thanks for any info.
I would say that you should look into using Change Tracking (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc280462%28v=sql.100%29.aspx), which is lightweight builtin SQL Server functionality that you can use to monitor the fact that a table has changed, as opposed to logging each individual change (which you can also do with Change Data Capture). It needs Snapshot Isolation, which you are already using.
Because your trigger is running in your parent transaction, and your snapshot has become out of date, your whole transaction would need to start again. If this is a complex workload, maintaining this last updated data in this way would be costly.
Short answer - don't do that! Making the updated transactions dependent on one single shared row makes it prone to deadlocks and and update conflicts whole gammut of nasty things.
You can either use views to determine last update, e.g.:
SELECT
t.name
,user_seeks
,user_scans
,user_lookups
,user_updates
,last_user_seek
,last_user_scan
,last_user_lookup
,last_user_update
FROM sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats i JOIN sys.tables t
ON (t.object_id = i.object_id)
WHERE database_id = db_id()
Or, if you really insist on the solution with LastUpdate, you can implement it's update from the trigger in an autonomous transactions. Even though SQL Server doesn't support autonomous transactions, it could done using liked servers: How to create an autonomous transaction in SQL Server 2008
The schema needs to change. If you have to keep your update table, make a row for every table. That would greatly reduce your locks because each table could update their very own row and not competing for the sole row in a table.
LastUpdated
table_name (varchar(whatever)) pk
modified_date (datetime)
New Trigger for tblListItem
CREATE TRIGGER [dbo].[trg_ListItem_LastUpdated] ON [dbo].[tblListItem]
FOR INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE
AS
UPDATE LastUpdated SET modified_date = GetDate() WHERE table_name = 'tblListItem'
GO
Another option that I use a lot is having a modified_date column in every table. Then people know exactly which records to update/insert to sync with your data rather than dropping and reloading everything in the table each time one record changes or is inserted.
Alternatively, you can update the log table inside the same transaction which you use to update your complex tables inside your application & avoid the trigger altogether.
Update
You can also opt for inserting a new row instead of updating the same row in LastUpdated table. You can then query max timestamp for latest update. However, with this approach your LastUpdated table would grow each day which you need to take care of if volume of transactions is high.
I have an existing table with 15 million rows in it. I want to add an identity column and make it primary key. The problem is this table is always moving (inserts, updates, deletes). Is it possible to add the identity column with this? Or I have to stop the backgroud processes (it is a tedious task) which updates this table?
Thanks
Vikram
Given that you have 15 million rows it might take some non-trivial amount of time to execute the ALTER TABLE statement.
Since SQL Server doesn't provide table hints for ALTER TABLE its pretty safe to assume that SQL Server takes a table lock when it executes an ALTER TABLE statement.
During this time no other process will be allowed to Select, insert, update, or delete so you don't have to worry about a race condition with some other process.
If the process takes long enough your other processes will experience timeout errors. Depending on how the processes are written this is either a bad thing or a non-issue, but you'll need to figure that out. If it were me I would turn them off.