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
Related
I need some suggestions of what works well for caching an updatable news feed.
Please, no "Fanboy" answers either please - not looking for subjective opinions of what the "best" system, just seeking some suggestions of technologies that will fit the requirements below. So please, share what you have used in the real world, even if you prefer some other solution.
I have a rails based news feed (Neo4j database), and while performance is good, I would like to cache it so that servers don't get bogged down serving live feeds.
REQUIREMENTS:
EASY FRAGMENT UPDATES: I'd like to easily update parts of a user's newsfeed the
cache based upon specific triggers, for example, when a user edits
their status update - I don't want to regenerate the user's entire
news feed in the cache, rather I just want to update that one
"fragment", or section if you will, of the particular user's feed. And I don't want to jump through hoops to try and do so.
DELETION: If someone deletes an activity, I just want to remove that activity
from their news feed before the system eventually refreshes the entire feed for that user.
EASY RETRIEVAL: I'd like to retrieve the cache in such a way that the rails
controller/models can easily read them and hand them off to views without
any modification of the views.
PERSISTENCE: If I need to reboot the cache, it should load up the
cache from disk. Which means it should save cached entries to disk.
SPEED: Given that it must be able to be update fragments of cached
news feeds, there is going to be a performance hit of some sort. But
I need speed..
What cache technologies provide such capabilities? Will Redis, MongoDB, Memcached fit these requirements? What other options are there? (CouchDB, Tokyo File cabinet, etc)..
In the spirit Stack Overflow, I'm not asking for subjective opinions on what you like better and why, I'm just asking for possible candidate systems that you may have actually used in production to accomplish caching and updating a cached news feed (or anything similar).
Since it is mainly an opinion-based topic, this answer will be subjective. But I will try anyway to remain factual.
The first point to notice is your requirements tend to be mutually exclusive. As we said in France, you want the butter, the money for the butter, and the wife of the farmer (ok, this is probably a lousy translation).
For example, to support easy fragment updates and proper deletion, you will need some kind of data structures in the cache. I have zero knowledge about Rails, but I guess it will have impact on the data access patterns, and the definitions of controllers/models. In other words, it will add complexity to data retrieval. You need speed, but at the same time, you also require persistency, and also non-trivial data access patterns. Well, you cannot get everything at the same time, you will have to make choices, and prioritize these requirements.
My second point is a cache is only useful when there is a significant difference in term of performance between the cache and the underlying storage engine. Since you already use a NoSQL engine which is rather efficient (Neo4j), you need to consider only engines which are truly designed for raw performance (i.e. low-latency stores): memcached, redis, couchbase, aerospike, to name well-established open-source products. If you feel a bit more adventurous, you can also consider other projects like tarantool or hyperdex.
There are a number of commercial products as well, but I'm not sure they provide a Ruby client (TIBCO ActiveSpaces, Gigaspaces, Red-Hat Infinispan, etc ...)
Other NoSQL engines (MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB, etc ...) have other interesting properties, but they will not beat these solutions at raw performance for a mixed r/w workload. Here, I'm only talking about raw performance (i.e. low latency at high throughput), not scalability.
Actually, memcached can be excluded because it does not support persistency. I would say you can probably implement what you want with Redis, Couchbase or Aerospike, but Aerospike 3 does not seem to have yet an officially supported Ruby client.
Supporting multiple data accesses paths (i.e. consistent indexing data structure) will be easier with Redis and Aerospike than Couchbase. High-availability will be easier with Couchbase or Aerospike than with Redis. Implementing a cache behavior will be easier with Redis and Couchbase than with Aerospike.
Some general advices:
make sure you really have a performance or a scalability issue with Neo4j before adding the complexity of an extra layer. Complexity is like toothpaste: once it is out of the tube, you cannot put it back.
data access patterns should be listed at design time, and must be backed by corresponding data structures in the chosen engine.
the hardware footprint must be considered as well. If you have only a couple of boxes, pick a lightweight solution like Redis.
with persistency, you need to consider also HA. What happens if the caching layer is lost? Actually, I would say that for a cache, HA may be more important than persistency.
Finally, you need also to define the exact cache semantic you want (update behavior, invalidation behavior, cache miss management, TTL policy if any, etc ...). The 3 NoSQL engines I have listed provide some tools to help the implementation of the various strategies, but none of them will support an off-the-shelf strategy. This will require some coding to implement it.
I was looking on the scalability of Neo4j, and read a document written by David Montag in January 2013.
Concerning the sharding aspect, he said the 1st release of 2014 would come with a first solution.
Does anyone know if it was done or its status if not?
Thanks!
Disclosure: I'm working as VP Product for Neo Technology, the sponsor of the Neo4j open source graph database.
Now that we've just released Neo4j 2.0 (actually 2.0.1 today!) we are embarking on a 2.1 release that is mostly oriented around (even more) performance & scalability. This will increase the upper limits of the graph to an effectively unlimited number of entities, and improve various other things.
Let me set some context first, and then answer your question.
As you probably saw from the paper, Neo4j's current horizontal-scaling architecture allows read scaling, with writes all going to master and fanning out. This gets you effectively unlimited read scaling, and into the tens of thousands of writes per second.
Practically speaking, there are production Neo4j customers (including Snap Interactive and Glassdoor) with around a billion people in their social graph... in all cases behind an active and heavily-hit web site, being handled by comparatively quite modest Neo4j clusters (no more than 5 instances). So that's one key feature: the Neo4j of today an incredible computational density, and so we regularly see fairly small clusters handling a substantially large production workload... with very fast response times.
More on the current architecture can be found here: www.neotechnology.com/neo4j-scales-for-the-enterprise/
And a list of customers (which includes companies like Wal-Mart and eBay) can be found here: neotechnology.com/customers/ One of the world's largest parcel delivery carriers uses Neo4j to route all of their packages, in real time, with peaks of 3000 routing operations per second, and zero downtime. (This arguably is the world's largest and most mission-critical use of a graph database and of a NOSQL database; though unfortunately I can't say who it is.)
So in one sense the tl;dr is that if you're not yet as big as Wal-Mart or eBay, then you're probably ok. That oversimplifies it only a bit. There is the 1% of cases where you have sustained transactional write workloads into the 100s of thousands per second. However even in those cases it's often not the right thing to load all of that data into the real-time graph. We usually advise people to do some aggregation or filtering, and bring only the more important things into the graph. Intuit gave a good talk about this. They filter a billion B2B transactions into a much smaller number of aggregate monthly transaction relationships with aggregated counts and currency amounts by direction.
Enter sharding... Sharding has gained a lot of popularity these days. This is largely thanks to the other three categories of NOSQL, where joins are an anti-pattern. Most queries involve reading or writing just a single piece of discrete data. Just as joining is an anti-pattern for key-value stores and document databases, sharding is an anti-pattern for graph databases. What I mean by that is... the very best performance will occur when all of your data is available in memory on a single instance, because hopping back and forth all over the network whenever you're reading and writing will slow things significantly down, unless you've been really really smart about how you distribute your data... and even then. Our approach has been twofold:
Do as many smart things as possible in order to support extremely high read & write volumes without having to resort to sharding. This gets you the best and most predictable latency and efficiency. In other words: if we can be good enough to support your requirement without sharding, that will always be the best approach. The link above describes some of these tricks, including the deployment pattern that lets you shard your data in memory without having to shard it on disk (a trick we call cache-sharding). There are other tricks along similar lines, and more coming down the pike...
Add a secondary architecture pattern into Neo4j that does support sharding. Why do this if sharding is best avoided? As more people find more uses for graphs, and data volumes continue to increase, we think eventually it will be an important and inevitable thing. This would allow you to run all of Facebook for example, in one Neo4j cluster (a pretty huge one)... not just the social part of the graph, which we can handle today. We've already done a lot of work on this, and have an architecture developed that we believe balances the many considerations. This is a multi-year effort, and while we could very easily release a version of Neo4j that shards naively (that would no doubt be really popular), we probably won't do that. We want to do it right, which amounts to rocket science.
TL;DR With 2018 is days away neo4j still does not support sharding as it is typically considered.
Details Neo4j still requires all data to fit on a single node. The node contents can be replicated within a cluster - but actual sharding is not part of the picture.
When neo4j talks of sharding they are referring to caching portions of the database in memory: different slices are cached on different replicated nodes. That differs from say mysql sharding in which each node contains only a portion of the total data.
Here is a summary of their "take" on scalability: their product term is "High Availability" https://neo4j.com/blog/neo4j-scalability-infographic/
. Note that High Availability should not be the same as Scalability: so they do not actually support the latter in the traditional understanding of the term.
I have a website backed by a relational database comprised of the usual e-commerce related tables (Order, OrderItem, ShoppingCart, CreditCard, Payment, Customer, Address, etc...).
The stored proc. which returns order history is painfully slow due to the amount of data + the numerous joins which must occur, and depending on the search parameters it sometimes times out (despite the indexing that is in place).
The DB schema is pretty well normalized and I believe I can achieve better performance by moving toward something like a data warehouse. DW projects aren't trivial and then there's the issue of keeping the data in sync so I was wondering if anyone knows of a shortcut. Perhaps an out-of the box solution that will create the DW schema and keep the data in sync (via triggers perhaps). I've heard of Lucene but it seems geared more toward text searches and document management. Does anyone have other suggestions?
How big is your database?
There's not really any shortcuts, but dimensional modelling is really NOT that hard. You first determine a grain and then need to identify your facts and the dimensions associated with the facts. Then you divide the dimensions into tables which allow you to have the dimensions only grow slowly over time. The choice of dimensions is completely practical and based on the data behavior.
I recommend you have a look at Kimball's books.
For a database of a few GB, it's certainly possible to update a reporting database from scratch several times a day (no history, just repopulating from a 3NF for a different model of the same data). There are certain realtime data warehousing techniques which just apply changes continuously throughout the day.
So while DW projects might not be trivial, the denormalization techniques are very approachable and usable without necessarily building a complete time-invariant data warehouse.
Materialized Views are what you might use in Oracle. They give you the "keeping the data in sync" feature you are looking for combined with fast access of aggregate data. Since you didn't mention any specifics (platform, server specs, number of rows, number of hits/second, etc) of your platform, I can't really help much more than that.
Of course, we are assuming you've already checked that all your SQL is written properly and optimally, that your indexing is correct, that you are properly using caching in all levels of your app, that your DB server has enough RAM, fast hard drives, etc.
Also, have you considered denormalizing your schema, just enough to serve up your most common queries faster? that's better than implementing an entire data warehouse, which might not even be what you want anyway. Usually a data warehouse is for reporting purposes, not for serving interactive apps.
Given that database is generally the least scalable component (of a web application), are there any situations where one would put logic in procedures/triggers over keeping it in his favorite programming language (ruby...) or her favorite web framework (...rails!).
Server-side logic is often much faster, even with procedural approach.
You can fine-tune your grant options and hide the data you don't want to show
All queries in one places are more convenient than if they were scattered all around the code.
And here's a (very subjective) article in my blog on the reason I prefer stored procedures:
Schema Junk
BTW, triggers (as opposed to functions / stored procedures / packages) I generally dislike.
They are completely other story.
You're keeping the processing in the database, along with the data.
If you process on the server side, then you have to transfer the data out to a server process across the network, process it, and (optionally) send it back. You have the network bandwidth/latency issues, plus memory overheads.
To clarify - if I have 10m rows of data, my two extreme scenarios are to a) pull those 10m rows across the network and process on the server side, or b) process in place in the database using the server and language (SQL) optimised for this purpose. Note that this is a generalisation and not a hard-and-fast rule, but it's the one I follow for most scenarios.
When many heterogeneous applications and various other systems need to access your single database and be sure through their operations data stays consistent without integrity conflicts. So you put your logic into triggers and stored procedures that will offer an interface to external clients.
Maybe not for most web-based systems, but certainly for enterprise databases. Stored procedures and the like allow you much greater control over security and performance, as well as offering a bit of encapsulation for the database itself. You can change the schema all you want as long as the stored procedure interface remains the same.
In (almost) every situation you would keep the processing that is part of the database in the database. Application code cannot substitute for triggers, you won't get very far before you have updated the database and failed to fire the application's equivalent of the triggers (the first time you use the DBMS's management console, for instance).
Let the database do the database work and let the application to the application's work. If you have a specific performance problem with the database, and that performance problem can be addressed by moving processing from the database, in that case you might want to consider doing so.
But worrying about database performance without a database performance problem existing (which is what you seem to be doing here) is both silly and, sadly, apparently a pre-occupation of many Stackoverlow posters.
Least scalable? SQL???
Look up, "federating."
If the database is shared, having logic in the database is better in order to control everything that happens. If it's not it might just make the system overly complicated.
If you have multiple applications that talk to your database, stored procedures and triggers can enforce correctness more pervasively. Accordingly, if correctness is more important than convenience, putting logic in the database is sensible.
Scalability may be a red herring, though. Sometimes it's easier to express the behavior you want in the domain layer of an OO language, but it can be actually more expensive than doing the idiomatic SQL way.
The security mechanism at a previous company was first built in the service layer, then pushed to the db side. The motivation was actually due to some limitations in a data access framework we were using. The solution turned out to be a bit buggy because our security model was complicated, but the upside was that bugs only had to be fixed in the database; we didn't have to worry about different clients following different rules.
Triggers mean 3rd-party apps can modify the database without creating logical inconsistencies.
If you do that, you are tying your business logic to your model. If you code all your business logic in T-SQL, you aren't going to have a lot of fun if later you need to use Oracle or what have you as your database server. Actually, I'm not sure I understand this question exactly. How do you think this would improve scalability? It really shouldn't.
Personally, I'm really not a fan of triggers, particularly in a database dedicated to a single application. I hate trying to track down why some data is inconsistent, to find it's down to a poorly written trigger (and they can be tricky to get exactly correct).
Security is another advantage of using stored procs. You do not have to set the security at the table level if you don't use dynamic code (Including ithe stored proc). This means your users cannot do anything unless they have a proc to to it. This is one way of reducing the possibility of fraud.
Further procs are easier to performance tune than most application code and even better, when one needs to change, that is all you have to put on production, not recomplie the whole application.
Data integrity must be maintained at the database level. That means constraints, defaults values, foreign keys, possibly triggers (if you have very complex rules or ones involving multiple tables). If you do not do this at the database level, you will eventually have integrity issues. Peolpe will write a quick fix for a problem and run the code in the query window and the required rules are missed creating a larger problem. A millino new records will have to be imported through an ETL program that doesn't access the application because going through the application code would take too long running one record at a time.
If you think you are building an application where scalibility will be an issue, you need to hire a database professional and follow his or her suggestions for design based on performance. Databases can scale to terrabytes of data but only if they are originally designed by someone is a specialist in this kind of thing. When you wait until the while application is runnning slower than dirt and you havea new large client coming on board, it is too late. Database design must consider performance from the beginning as it is very hard to redesign when you already have millions of records.
A good way to reduce scalability of your data tier is to interact with it on a procedural basis. (Fetch row..process... update a row, repeat)
This can be done within a stored procedure by use of cursors or within an application (fetch a row, process, update a row) .. The result (poor performance) is the same.
When people say they want to do processing in their application it sometimes implies a procedural interaction.
Sometimes its necessary to treat data procedurally however from my experience developers with limited database experience will tend to design systems in a way that do not leverage the strenght of the platform because they are not comfortable thinking in terms of set based solutions. This can lead to severe performance issues.
For example to add 1 to a count field of all rows in a table the following is all thats needed:
UPDATE table SET cnt = cnt + 1
The procedural treatment of the same is likely to be orders of magnitude slower in execution and developers can easily overlook concurrency issues that make their process inconsistant. For example this kind of code is inconsistant given the avaliable read isolation levels of many RDMBS platforms.
SELECT id,cnt FROM table
...
foreach row
...
UPDATE table SET cnt = row.cnt+1 WHERE id=row.id
...
I think just in terms of abstraction and ease of servicing a running environment utilizing stored procedures can be a useful tool.
Procedure plan cache and reduced number of network round trips in high latency environments can also have significant performance advantages.
It is also true that trying to be too clever or work very complex problems in the RDBMS's half-baked procedural language can easily become a recipe for disaster.
"Given that database is generally the least scalable component (of a web application), are there any situations where one would put logic in procedures/triggers over keeping it in his favorite programming language (ruby...) or her favorite web framework (...rails!)."
What makes you think that "scalability" is the only relevant concern in a system design ? I agree with rexem where he commented that it is very obvious that you are "not" biased ...
Databases are sets of assertions of fact. Those sets become more valuable if they can also be guaranteed to conform to certain integrity rules. Those guarantees are not worth a dime if it is the applications that are expected to enforce such integrity. Triggers and sprocs are the only way SQL systems have to allow such guarantees to be offered by the DBMS itself.
That aspect outweighs "scalability" anytime, anywhere, anyhow.
I am looking for a backend solution for an application written in Ruby on Rails or Merb to handle data with several billions of records. I have a feeling that I'm supposed to go with a distributed model and at the moment I looked at
HBase with Hadoop
Couchdb
Problems with HBase solution as I see it -- ruby support is not very strong, and Couchdb did not reach 1.0 version yet.
Do you have suggestion what would you use for such a big amount of data?
Data will require rather fast imports sometimes of 30-40Mb at once, but imports will come in chunks. So ~95% of the time data will be read only.
Depending on your actual data usage, MySQL or Postgres should be able to handle a couple of billion records on the right hardware. If you have a particular high volume of requests, both of these databases can be replicated across multiple servers (and read replication is quite easy to setup (compared to multiple master/write replication).
The big advantage of using a RDBMS with Rails or Merb is you gain access to all of the excellent tool support for accessing these types of databases.
My advice is to actually profile your data in a couple of these systems and take it from there.
There's a number of different solutions people have used. In my experience it really depends more on your usage patterns related to that data and not the sheer number of rows per table.
For example, "How many inserts/updates per second are occurring." Questions like these will play into your decision of what back-end database solution you'll choose.
Take Google for example: There didn't really exist a storage/search solution that satisfied their needs, so they created their own based on a Map/Reduce model.
A word of warning about HBase and other projects of that nature (don't know anything about CouchDB -- I think it's not really a db at all, just a key-value store):
Hbase is not tuned for speed; it's tuned for scalability. If response speed is at all an issue, run some proofs of concept before you commit to this path.
Hbase does not support joins. If you are using ActiveRecord and have more than one relation.. well you can see where this is going.
The Hive project, also built on top of Hadoop, does support joins; so does Pig (but it's not really sql). Point 1 applies to both. They are meant for heavy data processing tasks, not the type of processing you are likely to be doing with Rails.
If you want scalability for a web app, basically the only strategy that works is partitioning your data and doing as much as possible to ensure the partitions are isolated (don't need to talk to each other). This is a little tricky with Rails, as it assumes by default that there is one central database. There may have been improvements on that front since I looked at the issue about a year and a half ago. If you can partition your data, you can scale horizontally fairly wide. A single MySQL machine can deal with a few million rows (PostgreSQL can probably scale to a larger number of rows but might work a little slower).
Another strategy that works is having a master-slave set up, where all writes are done by the master, and reads are shared among the slaves (and possibly the master). Obviously this has to be done fairly carefully! Assuming a high read/write ratio, this can scale pretty well.
If your organization has deep pockets, check out what Vertica, AsterData, and Greenplum have to offer.
The backend will depend on the data and how the data will be accessed.
But for the ORM, I'd most likely use DataMapper and write a custom DataObjects adapter to get to whatever backend you choose.
I'm not sure what CouchDB not being at 1.0 has to do with it. I'd recommend doing some testing with it (just generate a billion random documents) and see if it'll hold up. I'd say it will, despite not having a specific version number.
CouchDB will help you a lot when it comes to partitioning/sharding your data and like, seems like it might fit with your project -- especially if your data format might change in the future (adding or removing fields) since CouchDB databases have no schema.
There are plenty of optimizations in CouchDB for read-heavy apps as well and, based on my experience with it, is where it really shines.