Are stored procedures in Cosmos DB automatically retried on conflict? - stored-procedures

Stored procedures in Cosmos DB are transactional and run under isolation snapshop with optimistic concurrency control. That means that write conflicts can occur, but they are detected so the transaction is rolled back.
If such a conflict occurs, does Cosmos DB automatically retry the stored procedure, or does the client receive an exception (maybe a HTTP 412 precondition failure?) and need to implement the retry logic itself?

I tried running 100 instances of a stored procedures in parallel that would produce a write conflict by reading the a document (without setting _etag), waiting for a while and then incrementing an integer property within that document (again without setting _etag).
In all trials so far, no errors occurred, and the result was as if the 100 runs were run sequentially. So the preliminary answer is: yes, Cosmos DB automatically retries running an SP on write conflicts (or perhaps enforces transactional isolation by some other means like locking), so clients hopefully don't need to worry about aborted SPs due to conflicts.
It would be great to hear from a Cosmos DB engineer how this is achieved: retry, locking or something different?

You're correct in that this isn't properly documented anywhere. Here's how OCC check can be done in a stored procedure:
function storedProcedureWithEtag(newItem)
{
var context = getContext();
var collection = context.getCollection();
var response = context.getResponse();
if (!newItem) {
throw 'Missing item';
}
// update the item to set changed time
newItem.ChangedTime = (new Date()).toISOString();
var etagForOcc = newItem._etag;
var upsertAccecpted = collection.upsertDocument(
collection.getSelfLink(),
newItem,
{ etag: etagForOcc }, // <-- Pass in the etag
function (err2, feed2, options2) {
if (err2) throw err2;
response.setBody(newItem);
}
);
if (!upsertAccecpted) {
throw "Unable to upsert item. Id: " + newItem.id;
}
}
Credit: https://peter.intheazuresky.com/2016/12/22/documentdb-optimistic-concurrency-in-a-stored-procedure/

SDK does not retry on a 412, 412 failures are related to Optimistic Concurrency and in those cases, you are controlling the ETag that you are passing. It is expected that the user handles the 412 by reading the newest version of the document, obtains the newer ETag, and retries the operation with the updated value.
Example for V3 SDK
Example for V2 SDK

Related

How to parallelize HTTP requests within an Apache Beam step?

I have an Apache Beam pipeline running on Google Dataflow whose job is rather simple:
It reads individual JSON objects from Pub/Sub
Parses them
And sends them via HTTP to some API
This API requires me to send the items in batches of 75. So I built a DoFn that accumulates events in a list and publish them via this API once they I get 75. This results to be too slow, so I thought instead of executing those HTTP requests in different threads using a thread pool.
The implementation of what I have right now looks like this:
private class WriteFn : DoFn<TheEvent, Void>() {
#Transient var api: TheApi
#Transient var currentBatch: MutableList<TheEvent>
#Transient var executor: ExecutorService
#Setup
fun setup() {
api = buildApi()
executor = Executors.newCachedThreadPool()
}
#StartBundle
fun startBundle() {
currentBatch = mutableListOf()
}
#ProcessElement
fun processElement(processContext: ProcessContext) {
val record = processContext.element()
currentBatch.add(record)
if (currentBatch.size >= 75) {
flush()
}
}
private fun flush() {
val payloadTrack = currentBatch.toList()
executor.submit {
api.sendToApi(payloadTrack)
}
currentBatch.clear()
}
#FinishBundle
fun finishBundle() {
if (currentBatch.isNotEmpty()) {
flush()
}
}
#Teardown
fun teardown() {
executor.shutdown()
executor.awaitTermination(30, TimeUnit.SECONDS)
}
}
This seems to work "fine" in the sense that data is making it to the API. But I don't know if this is the right approach and I have the sense that this is very slow.
The reason I think it's slow is that when load testing (by sending a few million events to Pub/Sub), it takes it up to 8 times more time for the pipeline to forward those messages to the API (which has response times of under 8ms) than for my laptop to feed them into Pub/Sub.
Is there any problem with my implementation? Is this the way I should be doing this?
Also... am I required to wait for all the requests to finish in my #FinishBundle method (i.e. by getting the futures returned by the executor and waiting on them)?
You have two interrelated questions here:
Are you doing this right / do you need to change anything?
Do you need to wait in #FinishBundle?
The second answer: yes. But actually you need to flush more thoroughly, as will become clear.
Once your #FinishBundle method succeeds, a Beam runner will assume the bundle has completed successfully. But your #FinishBundle only sends the requests - it does not ensure they have succeeded. So you could lose data that way if the requests subsequently fail. Your #FinishBundle method should actually be blocking and waiting for confirmation of success from the TheApi. Incidentally, all of the above should be idempotent, since after finishing the bundle, an earthquake could strike and cause a retry ;-)
So to answer the first question: should you change anything? Just the above. The practice of batching requests this way can work as long as you are sure the results are committed before the bundle is committed.
You may find that doing so will cause your pipeline to slow down, because #FinishBundle happens more frequently than #Setup. To batch up requests across bundles you need to use the lower-level features of state and timers. I wrote up a contrived version of your use case at https://beam.apache.org/blog/2017/08/28/timely-processing.html. I would be quite interested in how this works for you.
It may simply be that the extremely low latency you are expecting, in the low millisecond range, is not available when there is a durable shuffle in your pipeline.

Parallel SQL queries

How does one run SQL queries with different column dimensions in parallel using dask? Below was my attempt:
from dask.delayed import delayed
from dask.diagnostics import ProgressBar
import dask
ProgressBar().register()
con = cx_Oracle.connect(user="BLAH",password="BLAH",dsn = "BLAH")
#delayed
def loadsql(sql):
return pd.read_sql_query(sql,con)
results = [loadsql(x) for x in sql_to_run]
dask.compute(results)
df1=results[0]
df2=results[1]
df3=results[2]
df4=results[3]
df5=results[4]
df6=results[5]
However this results in the following error being thrown:
DatabaseError: Execution failed on sql: "SQL QUERY"
ORA-01013: user requested cancel of current operation
unable to rollback
and then shortly thereafter another error comes up:
MultipleInstanceError: Multiple incompatible subclass instances of TerminalInteractiveShell are being created.
sql_to_run is a list of different sql queries
Any suggestions or pointers?? Thanks!
Update 9.7.18
Think this is more a case of me not reading documentation close enough. Indeed the con being outside the loadsql function was causing the problem. The below is the code change that seems to be working as intended now.
def loadsql(sql):
con = cx_Oracle.connect(user="BLAH",password="BLAH",dsn = "BLAH")
result = pd.read_sql_query(sql,con)
con.close()
return result
values = [delayed(loadsql)(x) for x in sql_to_run]
#MultiProcessing version
import dask.multiprocessing
results = dask.compute(*values, scheduler='processes')
#My sample queries took 56.2 seconds
#MultiThreaded version
import dask.threaded
results = dask.compute(*values, scheduler='threads')
#My sample queries took 51.5 seconds
My guess is, that the oracle client is not thread-safe. You could try running with processes instead (by using the multiprocessing scheduler, or the distributed one), if the conn object serialises - this may be unlikely. More likely to work, would be to create the connection within loadsql, so it gets remade for each call, and the different connections hopefully don't interfere with one-another.

Transaction Block has wrong Return [duplicate]

I have a problem with transactions. The data in the transaction is always null and the update handler is called only singe once. The documentation says :
To accomplish this, you pass transaction() an update function which is
used to transform the current value into a new value. If another
client writes to the location before your new value is successfully
written, your update function will be called again with the new
current value, and the write will be retried. This will happen
repeatedly until your write succeeds without conflict or you abort the
transaction by not returning a value from your update function
Now I know that there is no other client accessing the location right now. Secondly if I read the documentation correctly the updateCounters function should be called multiple times should it fail to retrieve and update data.
The other thing - if I take out the condition if (counters === null) the execution will fail as counters is null but on a subsequent attempt the transaction finishes fine - retrieves data and does the update.
simple once - set on this location work just fine but it is not safe.
Please what do I miss?
here is the code
self.myRef.child('counters')
.transaction(function updateCounters(counters){
if (counters === null) {
return;
}
else {
console.log('in transaction counters:', counters);
counters.comments = counters.comments + 1;
return counters;
}
}, function(error, committed, ss){
if (error) {
console.log('transaction aborted');
// TODO error handling
} else if (!committed){
console.log('counters are null - why?');
} else {
console.log('counter increased',ss.val());
}
}, true);
here is the data in the location
counters:{
comments: 1,
alerts: 3,
...
}
By returning undefined in your if( ... === null ) block, you are aborting the transaction. Thus it never sends an attempt to the server, never realizes the locally cached value is not the same as remote, and never retries with the updated value (the actual value from the server).
This is confirmed by the fact that committed is false and the error is null in your success function, which occurs if the transaction is aborted.
Transactions work as follows:
pass the locally cached value into the processing function, if you have never fetched this data from the server, then the locally cached value is null (the most likely remote value for that path)
get the return value from the processing function, if that value is undefined abort the transaction, otherwise, create a hash of the current value (null) and pass that and the new value (returned by processing function) to the server
if the local hash matches the server's current hash, the change is applied and the server returns a success result
if the server transaction is not applied, server returns the new value, client then calls the processing function again with the updated value from the server until successful
when ultimately successful, and unrecoverable error occurs, or the transaction is aborted (by returning undefined from the processing function) then the success method is called with the results.
So to make this work, obviously you can't abort the transaction on the first returned value.
One workaround to accomplish the same result--although it is coupled and not as performant or appropriate as just using the transactions as designed--would be to wrap the transaction in a once('value', ...) callback, which would ensure it's cached locally before running the transaction.

Query timeout in Neo4j 3.0.6

It looks like previously working approach is deprecated now:
unsupported.dbms.executiontime_limit.enabled=true
unsupported.dbms.executiontime_limit.time=1s
According to the documentation new variables are responsible for timeouts handling:
dbms.transaction.timeout
dbms.transaction_timeout
At the same time the new variables look related to the transactions.
The new timeout variables look not working. They were set in the neo4j.conf as follows:
dbms.transaction_timeout=5s
dbms.transaction.timeout=5s
Slow cypher query isn't terminated.
Then the Neo4j plugin was added to model a slow query with transaction:
#Procedure("test.slowQuery")
public Stream<Res> slowQuery(#Name("delay") Number Delay )
{
ArrayList<Res> res = new ArrayList<>();
try ( Transaction tx = db.beginTx() ){
Thread.sleep(Delay.intValue(), 0);
tx.success();
} catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println(e);
}
return res.stream();
}
The function served by the plugin is executed with neoism Golang package. And the timeout isn't triggered as well.
The timeout is only honored if your procedure code invokes either operations on the graph like reading nodes and rels or explicitly checks if the current transaction is marked as terminate.
For the later, see https://github.com/neo4j-contrib/neo4j-apoc-procedures/blob/master/src/main/java/apoc/util/Utils.java#L41-L51 as example.
According to the documentation the transaction guard is interested in orphaned transactions only.
The server guards against orphaned transactions by using a timeout. If there are no requests for a given transaction within the timeout period, the server will roll it back. You can configure the timeout in the server configuration, by setting dbms.transaction_timeout to the number of seconds before timeout. The default timeout is 60 seconds.
I've not found a way how to trigger timeout for a query which isn't orphaned with a native functionality.
#StefanArmbruster pointed a good direction. The timeout triggering functionality can be got with creating a wrapper function in Neo4j plugin like it is made in apoc.

Timeout for Futures in Akka

We have a server that processes portfolio and securities (inside it) in different actors. For portfolio with smaller number of securities (<20) this works fine. When i increase the number of security count to 1000, encountered following issues:
akka.dispatch.FutureTimeoutException: Futures timed out after [5000] milliseconds
I could bypass this error by increasing timeout inside akka config, is that the right thing to do? In akka versions earlier than 1.2 i could set self.timeout inside the actor but that is deprecated.
The other issue I faced (intermittently) is that the entire server hangs while joining in futures.map code inside my portfolio actor:
//fork out for each security
val listOfFutures = new ListBuffer[Future[Security]]()
for (security <- portfolio.getSecurities.toList) {
val securityProcessor = actorOf[SecurityProcessor].start()
listOfFutures += (securityProcessor ? security) map {
_.asInstanceOf[Security]
}
}
EventHandler.info(this,"joining results from security processors")
//join for each security
val futures = Future.sequence(listOfFutures.toList)
futures.map {
listOfSecurities =>
portfolioResponse = MergeHelper.merge(portfolio, listOfSecurities)
}.get
You do not state which version of Akka you're on, and given my limited time with the crystal ball I'll assume that you're on 1.2.
You can specify a Timeout when you call ask/?
(Also, your code is a bit convoluted, but that I have already solved in your other question.)
Cheers,
√

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