I've recently taken over support of a system which uses Advantage Database Server as its back end. For some background, I have years of database experience but have never used ADS until now, so my question is purely about how to implement a standard pattern in this specific DBMS.
There's a stored procedure which has been previously developed which manages an ID column in this manner:
#ID = (SELECT ISNULL(MAX(ID), 0) FROM ExampleTable);
#ID = #ID + 1;
INSERT INTO Example_Table (ID, OtherStuff)
VALUES (#ID, 'Things');
--Do some other stuff.
UPDATE ExampleTable
SET AnotherColumn = 'FOO'
WHERE ID = #ID;
My problem is that I now need to run this stored procedure multiple times in parallel. As you can imagine, when I do this, the same ID value is getting grabbed multiple times.
What I need is a way to consistently create a unique value which I can be sure will be unique even if I run the stored procedure multiple times at the same moment. In SQL Server I could create an IDENTITY column called ID, and then do the following:
INSERT INTO ExampleTable (OtherStuff)
VALUES ('Things');
SET #ID = SCOPE_IDENTITY();
ADS has autoinc which seems similar, but I can't find anything conclusively telling me how to return the value of the newly created value in a way that I can be 100% sure will be correct under concurrent usage. The ADS Developer's Guide actually warns me against using autoinc, and the online help files offer functions which seem to retrieve the last generated autoinc ID (which isn't what I want - I want the one created by the previous statement, not the last one created across all sessions). The help files also list these functions with a caveat that they might not work correctly in situations involving concurrency.
How can I implement this in ADS? Should I use autoinc, some other built-in method that I'm unaware of, or do I genuinely need to do as the developer's guide suggests, and generate my unique identifiers before trying to insert into the table in the first place? If I should use autoinc, how can I obtain the value that has just been inserted into the table?
You use LastAutoInc(STATEMENT) with autoinc.
From the documentation (under Advantage SQL->Supported SQL Grammar->Supported Scalar Functions->Miscellaneous):
LASTAUTOINC(CONNECTION|STATEMENT)
Returns the last used autoinc value from an insert or append. Specifying CONNECTION will return the last used value for the entire connection. Specifying STATEMENT returns the last used value for only the current SQL statement. If no autoinc value has been updated yet, a NULL value is returned.
Note: Triggers that operate on tables with autoinc fields may affect the last autoinc value.
Note: SQL script triggers run on their own SQL statement. Therefore, calling LASTAUTOINC(STATEMENT) inside a SQL script trigger would return the lastautoinc value used by the trigger's SQL statement, not the original SQL statement which caused the trigger to fire. To obtain the last original SQL statement's lastautoinc value, use LASTAUTOINC(CONNECTION) instead.
Example: SELECT LASTAUTOINC(STATEMENT) FROM System.Iota
Another option is to use GUIDs.
(I wasn't sure but you may have already been alluding to this when you say "or do I genuinely need to do as the developer's guide suggests, and generate my unique identifiers before trying to insert into the table in the first place." - apologies if so, but still this info might be useful for others :) )
The use of GUIDs as a surrogate key allows either the application or the database to create a unique identifier, with a guarantee of no clashes.
Advantage 12 has built-in support for a GUID datatype:
GUID and 64-bit Integer Field Types
Advantage server and clients now support GUID and Long Integer (64-bit) data types in all table formats. The 64-bit integer type can be used to store integer values between -9,223,372,036,854,775,807 and 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 with no loss of precision. The GUID (Global Unique Identifier) field type is a 16-byte data structure. A new scalar function NewID() is available in the expression engine and SQL engine to generate new GUID. See ADT Field Types and Specifications and DBF Field Types and Specifications for more information.
http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-68484
For earlier versions, you could store the GUIDs as a char(36). (Think about your performance requirements here of course.) You will then need to do some conversion back and forth in your application layer between GUIDs and strings. If you're using some intermediary data access layer, e.g. NHibernate or Entity Framework, you should be able to at least localise the conversions to one place.
If some part of your logic is in a stored procedure, you should be able to use the newid() or newidstring() function, depending on the type of the backing column:
INSERT INTO Example_Table (newid(), OtherStuff)
Related
I need to implement a combobox, which is bound to a TpFIBDataSet (descendant of TDataSet). I've done this several times before. It's not a big thing if it contains only predefined values.
This time, I'd like to have a combobox that accepts custom values entered by the user, also giving the ability to the user to select some predefined value. Newly entered values shall be inserted into some table of the database just before the record the combobox's field belongs to is posted.
The main problem seems to me, that predefined values are internally represented as integer IDs (the combobox I use is TwwDBComboBox from Roy Woll's InfoPower package, as it implements maplist functionality) because the field is a foreign key, while custom values may be nearly everything (only restricted by a mask).
How can I distinguish between an integer ID and integer user-input, for example?
See the set properties of the combobox:
AComboBox.Style := csDropDown;
AComboBox.MapList := True;
I don't request a solution as take this piece of code and be happy. I'm rather looking for some advice by others who might have or had a similar problem.
How can I distinguish between an integer ID and integer user-input, for example?
You go back to the database. Either query directly select count(*) from table where id = ComboBoxId.
Or use the Locate method of the dataset.
Or keep a cache handy in a MyList: TList<Integer> and do a MyList.BinarySearch to see if the item is already in the DB.
Obviously the cache will only work if the DB is single-user, because otherwise you will not be able to keep it up-to-date.
If it is not in the DB, you run the insert query.
After it's inserted you run the default combobox behavior, because now the values is sure to be in the DB.
I am scanning an SQLite database looking for all matches and using
OneFound:=False;
if tbl1.FieldByName('Name').AsString = 'jones' then
begin
OneFound:=True;
tbl1.Next;
end;
if OneFound then // Do something
or should I be using
if not(OneFound) then OneFound:=True;
Is it faster to just assign "True" to OneFound no matter how many times it is assigned or should I do the comparison and only change OneFuond the first time?
I know a better way would be to use FTS3, but for now I have to scan the database and the question is more on the approach to setting OneFound as many times as a match is encountered or using the compare-approach and setting it just once.
Thanks
Your question is, which is faster:
if not(OneFound) then OneFound:=True;
or
OneFound := True;
The answer is probably that the second is faster. Conditional statements involve branches which risks branch mis-prediction.
However, that line of code is trivial compared to what is around it. Running across a database one row at a time is going to be outrageously expensive. I bet that you will not be able to measure the difference between the two options because the handling of that little Boolean is simply swamped by the rest of the code. In which case choose the more readable and simpler version.
But if you care about the performance of this code you should be asking the database to do the work, as you yourself state. Write a query to perform the work.
It would be better to change your SQL statement so that the work is done in the database. If you want to know whether there is a tuple which contains the value 'jones' in the field 'name', then a quicker query would be
with tquery.create (nil) do
begin
sql.add ('select name from tbl1 where name = :p1 limit 1');
sql.params[0].asstring:= 'jones';
open;
onefound:= not isempty;
close;
free
end;
Your syntax may vary regarding the 'limit' clause but the idea is to return only one tuple from the database which matches the 'where' statement - it doesn't matter which one.
I used a parameter to avoid problems delimiting the value.
1. Search one field
If you want to search one particular field content, using an INDEX and a SELECT will be the fastest.
SELECT * FROM MYTABLE WHERE NAME='Jones';
Do not forget to create an INDEX on the column, first!
2. Fast reading
But if you want to search within a field, or within several fields, you may have to read and check the whole content. In this case, what will be slow will be calling FieldByName() for each data row: you should better use a local TField variable.
Or forget about TDataSet, and switch to direct access to SQLite3. In fact, using DB.pas and TDataSet requires a lot of data marshalling, so is slower than a direct access.
See e.g. DiSQLite3 or our DB classes, which are very fast, but a bit of higher level. Or you can use our ORM on top of those classes. Our classes are able to read more than 500,000 rows per second from a SQLite3 database, including JSON marshalling into objects fields.
3. FTS3/FTS4
But, as you guessed, the fastest would be indeed to use the FTS3/FTS4 feature of SQlite3.
You can think of FTS4/FTS4 as a "meta-index" or a "full-text index" on supplied blob of text. Just like google is able to find a word in millions of web pages: it does not use a regular database, but full-text indexing.
In short, you create a virtual FTS3/FTS4 table in your database, then you insert in this table the whole text of your main records in the FTS TEXT field, forcing the ID field to be the one of the original data row.
Then, you will query for some words on your FTS3/FTS4 table, which will give you the matching IDs, much faster than a regular scan.
Note that our ORM has dedicated TSQLRecordFTS3 / TSQLRecordFTS4 kind of classes for direct FTS process.
Is there an equivalent to an identity Seed in SimpleDB?
If the answer is no, how do you handle creating something like a customer number or order number that will prevent the creation duplicate numbers?
My experience is mainly from SQL Server in which I would either create a primary key with an identity seed or use transactions in a stored procedure to increment the number.
Thanks for your help!
You can create unique keys using conditional writes. Just do a PutAttributes with the next customer number you want to use and the data you want to store. You can't add a condition for the actual item name, but you can use an attribute that always exists, (like creation date or user group).
Set the conditions:
Expected.1.Name=creation_date
Expected.1.Exists=false
The call will succeed only if there is no creation_date in an item with that item name. If you always write the creation_date, then you get the effect of optimistic locking on the new item name. Of course you can use any attribute you want, so long you always include it in that first conditional put.
The performance of the conditional write is the same as a normal write in most situations but when SimpleDB is under heavy load or high internal network latencies, these calls will take longer, compared to normal writes. During rare failure scenarios inside SimpleDB, the conditional writes will fail completely for a period of time.
If you can't tolerate this, you will have to code some sort of alternate way to get your unique keys during outages. A different SimpleDB region could be used for key generation only, since SimpleDB will still accept the normal writes (non-conditional PutAttributes) during outages.
If you don't already have something unique that will work, using a GUID for the Item is probably the typical solution.
In my present Rails application, I am resolving scheduling conflicts by sorting the models by the "created_at" field. However, I realized that when inserting multiple models from a form that allows this, all of the created_at times are exactly the same!
This is more a question of best programming practices: Can your application rely on your ID column in your database to increment greater and greater with each INSERT to get their order of creation? To put it another way, can I sort a group of rows I pull out of my database by their ID column and be assured this is an accurate sort based on creation order? And is this a good practice in my application?
The generated identification numbers will be unique.
Regardless of whether you use Sequences, like in PostgreSQL and Oracle or if you use another mechanism like auto-increment of MySQL.
However, Sequences are most often acquired in bulks of, for example 20 numbers.
So with PostgreSQL you can not determine which field was inserted first. There might even be gaps in the id's of inserted records.
Therefore you shouldn't use a generated id field for a task like that in order to not rely on database implementation details.
Generating a created or updated field during command execution is much better for sorting by creation-, or update-time later on.
For example:
INSERT INTO A (data, created) VALUES (smething, DATE())
UPDATE A SET data=something, updated=DATE()
That depends on your database vendor.
MySQL I believe absolutely orders auto increment keys. SQL Server I don't know for sure that it does or not but I believe that it does.
Where you'll run into problems is with databases that don't support this functionality, most notably Oracle that uses sequences, which are roughly but not absolutely ordered.
An alternative might be to go for created time and then ID.
I believe the answer to your question is yes...if I read between the lines, I think you are concerned that the system may re-use ID's numbers that are 'missing' in the sequence, and therefore if you had used 1,2,3,5,6,7 as ID numbers, in all the implementations I know of, the next ID number will always be 8 (or possibly higher), but I don't know of any DB that would try and figure out that record Id #4 is missing, so attempt to re-use that ID number.
Though I am most familiar with SQL Server, I don't know why any vendor who try and fill the gaps in a sequence - think of the overhead of keeping that list of unused ID's, as opposed to just always keeping track of the last I number used, and adding 1.
I'd say you could safely rely on the next ID assigned number always being higher than the last - not just unique.
Yes the id will be unique and no, you can not and should not rely on it for sorting - it is there to guarantee row uniqueness only. The best approach is, as emktas indicated, to use a separate "updated" or "created" field for just this information.
For setting the creation time, you can just use a default value like this
CREATE TABLE foo (
id INTEGER UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT NOT NULL;
created TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT NOW();
updated TIMESTAMP;
PRIMARY KEY(id);
) engine=InnoDB; ## whatever :P
Now, that takes care of creation time. with update time I would suggest an AFTER UPDATE trigger like this one (of course you can do it in a separate query, but the trigger, in my opinion, is a better solution - more transparent):
DELIMITER $$
CREATE TRIGGER foo_a_upd AFTER UPDATE ON foo
FOR EACH ROW BEGIN
SET NEW.updated = NOW();
END;
$$
DELIMITER ;
And that should do it.
EDIT:
Woe is me. Foolishly I've not specified, that this is for mysql, there might be some differences in the function names (namely, 'NOW') and other subtle itty-bitty.
One caveat to EJB's answer:
SQL does not give any guarantee of ordering if you don't specify an order by column. E.g. if you delete some early rows, then insert 'em, the new ones may end up living in the same place in the db the old ones did (albeit with new IDs), and that's what it may use as its default sort.
FWIW, I typically use order by ID as an effective version of order by created_at. It's cheaper in that it doesn't require adding an index to a datetime field (which is bigger and therefore slower than a simple integer primary key index), guaranteed to be different, and I don't really care if a few rows that were added at about the same time sort in some slightly different order.
This is probably DB engine depended. I would check how your DB implements sequences and if there are no documented problems then I would decide to rely on ID.
E.g. Postgresql sequence is OK unless you play with the sequence cache parameters.
There is a possibility that other programmer will manually create or copy records from different DB with wrong ID column. However I would simplify the problem. Do not bother with low probability cases where someone will manually destroy data integrity. You cannot protect against everything.
My advice is to rely on sequence generated IDs and move your project forward.
In theory yes the highest id number is the last created. Remember though that databases do have the ability to temporaily turn off the insert of the autogenerated value , insert some records manaully and then turn it back on. These inserts are no typically used on a production system but can happen occasionally when moving a large chunk of data from another system.
Let's say I have 'myStoredProcedure' that takes in an Id as a parameter, and returns a table of information.
Is it possible to write a SQL statement similar to this?
SELECT
MyColumn
FROM
Table-ify('myStoredProcedure ' + #MyId) AS [MyTable]
I get the feeling that it's not, but it would be very beneficial in a scenario I have with legacy code & linked server tables
Thanks!
You can use a table value function in this way.
Here is a few tricks...
No it is not - at least not in any official or documented way - unless you change your stored procedure to a TVF.
But however there are ways (read) hacks to do it. All of them basically involved a linked server and using OpenQuery - for example seehere. Do however note that it is quite fragile as you need to hardcode the name of the server - so it can be problematic if you have multiple sql server instances with different name.
Here is a pretty good summary of the ways of sharing data between stored procedures http://www.sommarskog.se/share_data.html.
Basically it depends what you want to do. The most common ways are creating the temporary table prior to calling the stored procedure and having it fill it, or having one permanent table that the stored procedure dumps the data into which also contains the process id.
Table Valued functions have been mentioned, but there are a number of restrictions when you create a function as opposed to a stored procedure, so they may or may not be right for you. The link provides a good guide to what is available.
SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 change the options a bit. SQL Server 2005+ make working with XML much easier. So XML can be passed as an output variable and pretty easily "shredded" into a table using the XML functions nodes and value. I believe SQL 2008 allows table variables to be passed into stored procedures (although read only). Since you cited SQL 2000 the 2005+ enhancements don't apply to you, but I mentioned them for completeness.
Most likely you'll go with a table valued function, or creating the temporary table prior to calling the stored procedure and then having it populate that.
While working on the project, I used the following to insert the results of xp_readerrorlog (afaik, returns a table) into a temporary table created ahead of time.
INSERT INTO [tempdb].[dbo].[ErrorLogsTMP]
EXEC master.dbo.xp_readerrorlog
From the temporary table, select the columns you want.