Long distance OSM routing, how to work with all that data? - asp.net-mvc

I am trying to build my own routing system which utilizes OSMSharp, and will eventually have a full website front end deployed to Azure. However, I think I have a serious problem if I want to find a route over a long distance (e.g. NY -> CA). It looks like the routers in OSMSharp just accept a Stream of osm data, however even the binary format (.osm.pbf) will be roughly 10gb of data. Which seems like a huge performance concern.
Either, I need to hold that huge file in memory, and who knows how much Azure is going to charge me for that, or how well OSMSharp/the CLR is going to handle it; or it needs to be broken up and stored in a DB for on-the-fly loading.
Can anyone give any insight into how this is usually handled? Am I way out of my league for a personal project? Maybe I should support just one US State?

Directly processing a pbf file will be very inefficient because it just contains raw data. This file format is not optimized for running queries on it. You need to pre-process this file, calculate a routing graph, drop uninteresting data and then store it in some kind of database or a similar efficient format.
For really long distances consider using contraction hierarchies. They are used by many popular OSM routers, such as graphhopper and OSRM.
It also helps to take a look at the various different online routers and offline routers for OSM in order to get some ideas.

Related

What kind of Database/Architecture should be used on server for large scale image recognition?

I am currently trying to develop a mobile application for finding of similar images in large scale. I am using Microsoft SQL to store entries of each image and SQL store procedures to classify it,I am also using LSH for partitioning of data. But somehow I doubt that this is not the technology or way big companies are doing it. Can you suggest some effective combination which can be implemented on server side of my application to classify large scale database image.
Not sure you're going to get a good answer here because the question is so wide open.
Without really deep details it's hard to say, but if I were going Azure I'd try to use Table Storage if I could.
Should be cheaper and faster than SQL, but only works for very narrow use cases. This could be one, but hard to say. No stored procs, but you could use Web Jobs to batch process.
One possible line up would be Mobile Services to process images coming in from mobile devices: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/services/mobile-services/, then Web Jobs for batch processing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/websites-webjobs-resources/, and Table Storage for persistance: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/tables/.
Without much, much greater detail I'd be hard pressed to give you a better recommendation.

Geodata Querying Optimisations

I am planning to write a Node.js-powered RESTful web service that I will use for a mobile application which provides some sort of location based features. The most basic use case is going to look something like this:
the user can create a resource by sending a request to the web service containing the resource's name and the user's current location (latitude and longitude)
the web service will store the metadata about this resource internally in some sort of collection
the user can query the web service for a list of resources within 5km of his current location
One of the first problems that came up in my mind was scalability. Let's suppose that at some point in the future the server will hold metadata for 1 million resources. When a user will query for nearby results, looping through 1 million entries to compute the distance will take forever.
There are many services out there that have the same flow, so I thought implementing something like this is not going to take me a lot of time. I might have been wrong.
I am now two days into researching proven methods and algorithms. By now I have read everything I could put my hands on about QuadTrees, Geohases, databases with spatial indexing support, formulas and so on. However, I still can't get the whole picture of how everything is going to work.
I was hoping that maybe someone who has worked on something similar could share his insight on what approach might be the most suitable considering this use case and the technologies that I am planning to use. Also, a short description of how it can be implemented would help me a lot!
For those who are also looking for more information on this topic out of curiosity, my answer might not provide much clearance. However, some answers in here might help you understand how you could achieve proximity searches using Geohashes.
My approach, after doing a little research on Redis, will be not to overcomplicate things and just use the tools that are already out there. It has out of the box support for spatial indexing and will most probably meet all my persistance requirements for this project.
Apparently MongoDB also comes with built-in support for geodata. In fact, even RDBMS like MySQL or SQLite do come with such capabilities.

How to do some reporting with Rails (with a dedicated DB)

In a Rails app, I am wondering how to build a reporting solution. I heard that I should use a separated database for reporting purposes but knowing that I will need to store a huge amount of data, I have a lot of questions :
What kind of DBMS should I choose?
When should I store data in the reporting database?
Should the database schema of the production db and reporting db be identical?
I am storing basic data (information about users, about result of operations) and I will need for example to run a report to know how many user failed an operation during the previous month.
In now that it is a vague question, but any hint would be highly appreciated.
Thanks!
Work Backwards
Start from what the end-users want for reporting or how they want to/should visualize data. Once you have some concepts in mind, then start working backwards to how to achieve those goals. Starting with the assumption that it should be a replicated copy in an RBDMS excludes several reasonable possibilities.
Making a Real-time Interface
If users are looking to aggregate values (counts, averages, etc.) on the fly (per web request), it would be worthwhile looking into replicating the master down to a reporting database if the SQL performance is acceptable (and stays acceptable if you were to double the input data). SQL engines usually do a great job aggregation and scale pretty far. This would also give you the capability to join data results together and return complex results as the users request it.
Just remember, replication isn't easy or without it's own set of problems.
This'll start to show signs of weakness in the hundreds of millions of rows range with normalized data, in my experience. At some point, inserts fight with selects on the same table enough that both become exceptionally slow (remember, replication is still a stream of inserts). Alternatively, indexes become so large that storage I/O is required for rekeying, so overall table performance diminishes.
Batching
On the other hand, if reporting falls under the scheme of sending standardized reports out with little interaction, I wouldn't necessarily recommend backing to an RBDMS. In this case, results are combined, aggregated, joined, etc. once. Paying the overhead of RBDMS indexing and storage bloat isn't worth it.
Batch engines like Hadoop will scale horizontally (many smaller machines instead of a few huge machines) so processing larger volumes of data is economical.
Batch to RBDMS or K/V Store
This is also a useful path if a lot of computation is needed to make the records more meaningful to a reporting engine. Alternatively, records could be denormalized before storing them in the reporting storage engine. The denormalized or simple results would then be shipped to a key/value store or RBDMS to make reporting easier and achieve higher performance at the cost of latency, compute, and possibly storage.
Personal Advice
Don't over-design it to start with. The decisions you make on the initial implementation will probably all change at some point. However, design it with the current and near-term problems in mind. Also, benchmarks done by others are not terribly useful if your usage model isn't exactly the same as theirs; benchmark your usage model.
I would recommend to to use some pre-build reporting services than to manually write out if you need a large set of reports.
You might want to look at Tableau http://www.tableausoftware.com/ and other available.
Database .. Yes it should be a separate seems safer , plus reporting is generally for old and consolidated data.. you live data might be too large to perform analysis on.
Database type -- > have to choose based on the reporting services used , though I think mongo is not supported by any of the reporting services , mysql is preferred.
If there are only one or two reports you could just build them on rails

Free data warehousing systems--specifically, for data storage

I am building out some reporting stuff for our website (a decent sized site that gets several million pageviews a day), and am wondering if there are any good free/open source data warehousing systems out there.
Specifically, I am looking for only something to store the data--I plan to build a custom front end/UI to it so that it shows the information we care about. However, I don't want to have to build a customized database for this, and while I'm pretty sure an SQL database would not work here, I'm not sure what to use exactly. Any pointers to helpful articles would also be appreciated.
Edit: I should mention--one DB I have looked at briefly was MongoDB. It seems like it might work, but their "Use Cases" specifically mention data warehousing as "Less Well Suited": http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Use+Cases . Also, it doesn't seem to be specifically targeted towards data warehousing.
http://www.hypertable.org/ might be what you are looking for is (and I'm going by your descriptions above here) something to store large amounts of logged data with normalization. i.e. a visitor log.
Hypertable is based on google's bigTable project.
see http://code.google.com/p/hypertable/wiki/PerformanceTestAOLQueryLog for benchmarks
you lose the relational capabilities of SQL based dbs but you gain a lot in performance. you could easily use hypertable to store millions of rows per hour (hard drive space withstanding).
hope that helps
I may not understand the problem correctly -- however, if you find some time to (re)visit Kimball’s “The Data Warehouse Toolkit”, you will find that all it takes for a basic DW is a plain-vanilla SQL database, in other words you could build a decent DW with MySQL using MyISAM for the storage engine. The question is only in desired granularity of information – what you want to keep and for how long. If your reports are mostly periodic, and you implement a report storage or cache, than you don’t need to store pre-calculated aggregations (no need for cubes). In other words, Kimball star with cached reporting can provide decent performance in many cases.
You could also look at the community edition of “Pentaho BI Suite” (open source) to get a quick start with ETL, analytics and reporting -- and experiment a bit to evaluate the performance before diving into custom development.
Although this may not be what you were expecting, it may be worth considering.
Pentaho Mondrian
Open source
Uses standard relational database
MDX (think pivot table)
ETL ( via Kettle )
I use this.
In addition to Mike's answer of hypertable, you may want to take a look at Apache's Hadoop project:
http://hadoop.apache.org/
They provide a number of tools which may be useful for your application, including HBase, another implementation of the BigTable concept. I'd imagine for reporting, you might find their mapreduce implementation useful as well.
It all depends on the data and how you plan to access it. MonetDB is a column-oriented database engine from the most revolutionary team on database technologies. They just got VLDB's 10-year best paper award. The DB is open source and there are plenty of reviews online praising them.
Perhaps you should have a look at TPC and see which of their test problem datasets match best your case and work from there.
Also consider the need for concurrency, it adds a big overhead for any kind of approach and sometimes is not really required. For example, you can pre-digest some summary or index data and only have that protected for high concurrency. Profiling your data queries is the following step.
About SQL, I don't like it either but I don't think it's smart ruling out an engine just because of the front-end language.
I see a similar problem and thinking of using plain MyISAM with http://www.jitterbit.com/ as data access layer. Jitterbit (or another free tool alike) seems very nice for this sort of transformations.
Hope this helps a bit.
A lot of people just use Mysql or Postgres :)

Suitable data storage backend for Erlang application when data doesn't fit memory

I'm researching possible options how to organize data storage for an Erlang application. The data it supposed to use is basically a huge collection of binary blobs indexed by short string ids. Each blob is under 10 Kb but there are many of them. I'd expect that in total they would have size up to 200 Gb so obviously it cannot fit into memory. The typical operation on this data is either reading a blob by its id or updating a blob by its id or adding a new one. At each given period of day only a subset of ids is being used so the data storage access performance might benefit from in-memory cache. Speaking about performance - it is quite critical. The target is to have around 500 reads and 500 updates per second on commodity hardware (say on EC2 VM).
Any suggestions what to use here? As I understand dets is out of question as it is limited to 2G (or was it 4G?). Mnesia probably out of question too; my impression is that it was mainly designed for cases when data fits memory. I'm considering trying EDTK's Berkeley DB driver for the task. Would it work in the above scenario? Does anybody have experience using it in the production in the similar conditions?
tcerl came out of facing the same size limit. I'm not using Erlang these days but it sounds like what you're looking for.
Have you looked at what CouchDB is doing? It might not be quite what you are after as a drop in product, but there is lots of erlang code in there for storing data. There is also some talk of providing a native erlang interface instead of the REST api.
Is there any reason why you can't just use a file system, treating filename as your string id and file contents as a binary blob? You can choose one (filesystem) that fits your performance requirements, and you should get caching basically for free, provided by your OS.
Mnesia can store data on disk just fine. There's also dets (disk based term storage) which is roughly analogous to Berkeley DB. It's in the standard lib: http://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/stdlib/index.html
I would recommend Apache CouchDB.
It's a great fit for Erlang, and from the sound of it (you mention ID-based blobs and don't mention any relational requirements) you're looking for a document-oriented database.
Since the interface is REST, you can very simply add a commodity HTTP cache in front of it if you need caching.
The documentation for CouchDB is of a very high quality.
It also has built-in Map-Reduce :)

Resources