There is a Java Swing application which uses an Informix database. I have user rights granted for the Swing application (i.e. no source code), and read only access to a mirror of the database.
Sometimes I need to find a database column, which is backing a GUI element (TextBox, TableField, Label...). What would be best approach to find out which database column and table is holding the data shown e.g. in a TextBox?
My general approach is to capture the state of the database. Commit a change using the GUI and then capture the state of the database again. Then I need to examine the difference. I've already tried:
Use the nrows field of systables: Didn't work, because the number in nrows does not seem to be a realtime representation of the row count.
Create a script with SELECT COUNT(*) ... for all tables: didn't work because too many tables (> 5000). Also tried to optimize by removing empty tables, but there are still too many left.
Is there a simple solution that I'm missing?
Please look at the Change Data Capture API and check if this suits your needs
There probably isn't a simple solution.
You probably need to build yourself a map of the database, or a data dictionary for it. It sounds as though you can eliminate many of the tables from consideration since they're empty — at least for a preliminary pass. If you're dealing with information in a text box, the chances are it is some sort of character data; you can analyze which (non-empty) tables which contain longer character strings, and they'd be the primary targets of your searches. If the schema is badly designed with lots of VARCHAR(255) columns even though the columns normally only hold short strings, life is more difficult. Over time, you can begin to classify tables and columns so that you end up knowing where to look for parts of the application.
One problem to beware of: the tabid in informix.systables isn't necessarily as stable as you'd like. Your data dictionary needs to record its own dd_tabid for the table it describes, and can store the last known tabid from informix.systables, but it needs to be ready to find a new tabid value on occasion. You should probably only mark data in your dictionary for logical deletion.
To some extent, this assumes you can create a database in which to record this information. If you can't create an Informix database, you may have to use something else (MySQL, or SQLite, perhaps) to store the data dictionary. Alternatively, go to your DBA team and ask them for the information. Unless you're trying something self-evidently untoward, they're likely to help (but politics can get in the way — I've no idea how collegial your teams are).
Related
We have a scenario where we want to frequently change the tag of a (single) measurement value.
Our goal is to create a database which is storing prognosis values. But it should never loose data and track changes to already written data, like changes or overwriting.
Our current plan is to have an additional field "write_ts", which indicates at which point in time the measurement value was inserted or changed, and a tag "version" which is updated with each change.
Furthermore the version '0' should always contain the latest value.
name: temperature
-----------------
time write_ts (val) current_mA (val) version (tag) machine (tag)
2015-10-21T19:28:08Z 1445506564 25 0 injection_molding_1
So let's assume I have an updated prognosis value for this example value.
So, I do:
SELECT curr_measurement
INSERT curr_measurement with new tag (version = 1)
DROP curr_mesurement
//then
INSERT new_measurement with version = 0
Now my question:
If I loose the connection in between for whatever reason in between the SELECT, INSERT, DROP:
I would get double records.
(Or if I do SELECT, DROP, INSERT: I loose data)
Is there any method to prevent that?
Transactions don't exist in InfluxDB
InfluxDB is a time-series database, not a relational database. Its main use case is not one where users are editing old data.
In a relational database that supports transactions, you are protecting yourself against UPDATE and similar operations. Data comes in, existing data gets changed, you need to reliably read these updates.
The main use case in time-series databases is a lot of raw data coming in, followed by some filtering or transforming to other measurements or databases. Picture a one-way data stream. In this scenario, there isn't much need for transactions, because old data isn't getting updated much.
How you can use InfluxDB
In cases like yours, where there is additional data being calculated based on live data, it's common to place this new data in its own measurement rather than as a new field in a "live data" measurement.
As for version tracking and reliably getting updates:
1) Does the version number tell you anything the write_ts number doesn't? Consider not using it, if it's simply a proxy for write_ts. If version only ever increases, it might be duplicating the info given by write_ts, minus the usefulness of knowing when the change was made. If version is expected to decrease from time to time, then it makes sense to keep it.
2) Similarly, if you're keeping old records: does write_ts tell you anything that the time value doesn't?
3) Logging. Do you need to over-write (update) values? Or can you get what you need by adding new lines, increasing write_ts or version as appropriate. The latter is a more "InfluxDB-ish" approach.
4) Reading values. You can read all values as they change with updates. If a client app only needs to know the latest value of something that's being updated (and the time it was updated), querying becomes something like:
SELECT LAST(write_ts), current_mA, machine FROM temperature
You could also try grouping the machine values together:
SELECT LAST(*) FROM temperature GROUP BY machine
So what happens instead of transactions?
In InfluxDB, inserting a point with the same tag keys and timestamp over-writes any existing data with the same field keys, and adds new field keys. So when duplicate entries are written, the last write "wins".
So instead of the traditional SELECT, UPDATE approach, it's more like SELECT A, then calculate on A, and put the results in B, possibly with a new timestamp INSERT B.
Personally, I've found InfluxDB excellent for its ability to accept streams of data from all directions, and its simple protocol and schema-free storage means that new data sources are almost trivial to add. But if my use case has old data being regularly updated, I use a relational database.
Hope that clear up the differences.
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.
I am doing some maintenance on a database for an application that uses the Bold for Delphi object persistence framework. This database has been been in production for several years and several of the tables have grown quite large. One of them is the BOLD_CLOCKLOG which has something to do with Bold's transaction management.
I want to trim this table (it is up to 1.2GB, with entries from Jan 2006).
Can anyone confirm the system does not need this old information?
From the bolds documentation:
BOLD_CLOCKLOG
To be able to map the transaction numbers used in the TimeStamp columns to the corresponding physical time (such as 2001-01-01 12:34) the persistence mapper will store a log with timestamps and times. Normally, this log is written for each database operation, but if the traffic to the database is very intensive, it is possible to restrict how often this log is written by setting the property ClockLogGranularity. The event OnGetCurrentTime should also be implemented to ensure that all clients have the same time.The usage of this table can be controlled with the tagged value: Model.UseClockLog
So I believe this is used for versioning Boldobjects, see Object Versioning Extension in bolds documentation. If your application don't need this you can drop this in the database.
In our Bold application we don't use that feature. Why don't simply test to turn off Bold_ClockLog in the model, drop that big table and try to use your application. I'm pretty sure if something is wrong then it say so at once.
I can also mention that we have an own custom objecthistoy. It is simply big string (as TStringList.DelimetedText) in a ObjectHistory class that have Time, user and a note about action. This suits our need better that Bolds builtin objecthistory. The disadvantage is of course that we need to add calls in the code when logging to history is done.
Bold_ClockLog is an optional table, it's purpose is to store mapping between integer timestamps and corresponding DateTime values.
This allows you to find out datetime of the last modification to any object.
If you don't need this feature feel free to empty the table, it won't cause any problems.
In addition to Bold_ClockLog, the Bold_XFiles is another optional table that tends to grow large. But unlike the Bold_ClockLog the Bold_XFiles can not be emptied.
Both of these tables can be turned on/off in the model tag values.
I am using Ruby on Rails and have a situation that I am wondering if is appropriate for using some sort of Key Value Store instead of MySQL. I have users that have_many lists and each list has_many words. Some lists have hundreds of words and I want users to be able to copy a list. This is a heavy MySQL task b/c it is going to have to create these hundreds of word objects at one time.
As an alternative, I am considering using some sort of key value store where the key would just be the word. A list of words could be stored in a text field in mysql. Each list could be a new key value db? It seems like it would be faster to copy a key value db this way rather than have to go through the database. It also seems like this might be faster in general. Thoughts?
The general way to solve this using a relational database would be to have a list table, a word table, and a table-words table relating the two. You are correct that there would be some overhead, but don't overestimate it; because table structure is defined, there is very little actual storage overhead for each record, and records can be inserted very quickly.
If you want very fast copies, you could allow lists to be copied-on-write. Meaning a single list could be referred to by multiple users, or multiple times by the same user. You only actually duplicate the list when the user tries to add, remove, or change an entry. Of course, this is premature optimization, start simple and only add complications like this if you find they are necessary.
You could use a key-value store as you suggest. I would avoid trying to build one on top of a MySQL text field in less you have a very good reason, it will make any sort of searching by key very slow, as it would require string searching. A key-value data store like CouchDB or Tokyo Cabinet could do this very well, but it would most likely take up more space (as each record has to have it's own structure defined and each word has to be recorded separately in each list). The only dimension of performance I would think would be better is if you need massively scalable reads and writes, but that's only relevant for the largest of systems.
I would use MySQL naively, and only make changes such as this if you need the performance and can prove that this method will actually be faster.
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.