Informix: Limitation on Number of Items in IN Clause? - informix

Is there a limitation to the number of items that can go into an IN clause in an Informix query (like the 1000 item limit in Oracle)?
We have a "large" (perhaps 2000) list of item numbers being passed through a web service for selection, so there isn't really any context available beyond the list of items.

The upper limit is imposed by the space that will be taken to create the IN list and the 64 KiB limit on statements. You can typically get to several thousand smallish (6-7 digit) integers without much problem at the syntactic level.
However, you may find that the performance is not as good as creating a temporary table, inserting the several thousand values into that, and then writing the main query to join with that temporary table.

Related

Performance Issue with neo4j

There is DataSet at my Notebook’s Virtual Machine:
2 million unique Customers [:VISITED] 40000 unique Merchants.
Every [:VISIT] has properties: amount (double) and dt (date).
Every Customer has property “pty_id” (Integer).
And every Merchant has mcht_id (String) property.
One Customer may visit one Merchant for more than one time. And of course, one Customer may visit many Merchants. So there are 43 978 539 relationships in my graph between Customers and Merchants.
I have created Indexes:
CREATE INDEX on :Customer(pty_id)
CREATE INDEX  on :Merchant(mcht_id)
Parameters of my VM are:
Oracle (RedHat) Linux 7 with 2 core i7, 2 GB RAM
Parameters of my Neo4j 3.5.7 config:
- dbms.memory.heap.max_size=1024m
- dbms.memory.pagecache.size=512m
My task is:
Get top 10 Customers ordered by total_amount who spent their money at NOT specified Merchant(M) but visit that Merchants which have been visited by Customers who visit this specified Merchant(M)
My Solution is:
Let’s M will have mcht_id = "0000000DA5"
Then the CYPHER query will be:
MATCH
(c:Customer)-[r:VISITED]->(mm:Merchant)<-[:VISITED]-(cc:Customer)-[:VISITED]->(m:Merchant {mcht_id: "0000000DA5"})
WHERE
NOT (c)-[:VISITED]->(m)
WITH
DISTINCT c as uc
MATCH
(uc:Customer)-[rr:VISITED]->()
RETURN
uc.pty_id
,round(100*sum(rr.amount))/100 as v_amt
ORDER BY v_amt DESC
LIMIT 10;
Result is OK. I receive my answer:
uc.pty_id - v_amt: 1433798 - 348925.94; 739510 - 339169.83; 374933 -
327962.95 and so on.
The problem is that this result I have received after 437613 ms! It’s about 7 minutes!!! My estimated time for this query was about 10-20 seconds….
My Question is: What am I doing wrong???
There's a few things to improve here.
First, for graph-wide queries in a graph with millions of nodes and 50 million relationships, 1G of heap and 512M of pagecache is far too low. We usually recommend around 8-10G of heap minimum for medium to large graphs (this is your "scratch space" memory as a query executes), and to try to get as much of the graph size as possible in pagecache if you can to minimize cache misses as you traverse the graph. Neo4j likes memory. Memory is relatively cheap. You can use neo4j-admin memrec to get a recommendation of how to configure your memory settings, but in general you need to run this on a machine with more memory.
And if we're talking about hardware recommendations, usage of SSDs is highly recommended, for when you do need to hit the disk.
As for the query itself, notice in the query plan you posted that your DISTINCT operation drops the number of rows from the neighborhood of 26-35 million to only 153k rows, that's significant. Your most expensive step here (WHERE
NOT (c)-[:VISITED]->(m)) is the Expand(Into) operation on the right side of the plan, with nearly 1 billion db hits. This is happening too early in the query - you should be doing this AFTER your DISTINCT operation, so it operates on only 153k rows instead of 35 million.
You can also improve upon this so you don't even have to hit the graph to do that step of the filtering. Instead of using that WHERE NOT <pattern> approach, you can pre-match to the customers who visited the first merchant, gather them into a list, and keep them around, and instead of using negation of the pattern (where it has to actually expand out all :VISITED relationships of those customers and see if any was the original merchant), we instead do a list membership check, and ensure they aren't one of the 1k or so customers who visited the original merchant. That will happen in memory, since we already collected that list, so it shouldn't hit the graph. In any case you should do DISTINCT before this check.
In your RETURN you're performing an aggregation with respect to a node's unique property, so you're paying the cost of projecting that property across 4 million rows BEFORE the cardinality drops from the aggregation to 153k rows, meaning you're projecting out that property redundantly across a great many duplicate :Customer nodes before they become distinct from the aggregation. That's redundant and expensive property access you can avoid by aggregating with respect to the node instead, and then do your property access after the aggregation, and also after your sort and limit, so you only have to project out 10 properties.
So putting that all together, try this out:
MATCH
(cc:Customer)-[:VISITED]->(m:Merchant {mcht_id: "0000000DA5"})
WITH m, collect(DISTINCT cc) as visitors
UNWIND visitors as cc
MATCH (uc:Customer)-[:VISITED]->(mm:Merchant)<-[:VISITED]-(cc)
WHERE
mm <> m
WITH
DISTINCT visitors, uc
WHERE NOT uc IN visitors
MATCH
(uc:Customer)-[rr:VISITED]->()
WITH
uc, round(100*sum(rr.amount))/100 as v_amt
ORDER BY v_amt DESC
LIMIT 10
RETURN uc.pty_id, v_amt;
EDIT
Okay, let's try something else. I suspect that what we're encountering here is a great deal of duplicates during expansion (many visitors may have visited the same merchants). Cypher won't eliminate duplicates during traversal unless you explicitly ask for it (as it may need this info for doing aggregations such as counting of occurrences), and this query is highly dependent on getting distinct nodes during expansion.
If you can install APOC Procedures, we can make use of some expansion procs which let us change how Cypher expands, only visiting each distinct node once across all paths. That may improve the timing here. At the least it will show us if the slowdown we're seeing is related to deduplication of nodes during expansion, or if it's something else.
MATCH (m:Merchant {mcht_id: "0000000DA5"})
CALL apoc.path.expandConfig(m, {uniqueness:'NODE_GLOBAL', relationshipFilter:'VISITED', minLevel:3, maxLevel:3}) YIELD path
WITH last(nodes(path)) as uc
MATCH
(uc:Customer)-[rr:VISITED]->()
WITH
uc
,round(100*sum(rr.amount))/100 as v_amt
ORDER BY v_amt DESC
LIMIT 10
RETURN uc.pty_id, v_amt;
While this is a more complicated approach, one neat thing is that with NODE_GLOBAL uniqueness (ensuring we only visit each node once across all expanded paths) and bfs expansion, we don't need to include WHERE NOT (c)-[:VISITED]->(m) since this will naturally be ruled out; we would have already visited every visitor of m, and since they've already been visited, we cannot visit them again, so none of them will appear in the final result set at 3 hops.
Give this a try and run it a couple times to get that into pagecache (or as much as possible...with 512MB pagecache you may not be able to get all of the traversed structure into memory).
I have tested all optimised query on Neo4j and on Oracle. Results are:
Oracle - 2.197 sec
Neo4j - 5.326 sec
You can see details here: http://homme.io/41163#run
And there is more complimentared for Neo4j case at http://homme.io/41721.

Limit the growth of ETS storage

I'm considering using Erlang's ETS as a cache for user searches in a new Elixir project. Based on user input, the system will do lookups using an expensive third-party API.
In order to avoid making duplicate calls for the same user input, I intend to put a cache layer in front of the external API, and ETS seems like a good option for this. However, since there is no limit to the variations of user input, I'm concerned that the storage space required for the ETS table will grow without bound.
In my reading about ETS, I haven't seen anyone else discuss concern about the size of tables in ETS. Is that because this would be an abnormal use case for ETS?
At first blush, my preference would be to limit the number of entries in the ETS table, and reject (i.e. delete) the oldest entries once the limit is reached…
Is there a common strategy for dealing with unbounded number of entries in ETS?
I use ETS tables in production like a 'smart invalidated cache' with a redis API (also it have master-master replication like a SQL WAL log).
The biggest sizes is ~ 200-300Mb and they have more than 1million items. There are no any problems for last 2 years. I know about limits ERL_MAX_ETS_TABLES but havn't any information about sizes.
I have special 'smart indexes' for this tables. ETS select/match/etc is slow because this methods passing all the elements in the table.
use the ets:tab2list(TableId) function to convert the ETS table to a common list. After doing that, you are able to check the size of the list with the, well known BIF length(List).
Last but not least, you are now able to set a buffer (just check the size of the list with pattern matching, if, or case expression

How does one perform a "range query"?

Google cloud dataflow supports what I would call a "full outer join" SQL like statement through their "CoGroupByKey"method. However, is there any way to implement in dataflow what would be in SQL a "range join"? For example, if I had a table called "people" in which there was a floating point field called "age". And let's say I wanted all the pairs of people in which their ages were within say five years from each other. I could write the following statement:
select p1.name, p1.age, p2.name, p2.age
from people p1, people p2
where p1.age between (p2.age - 5.0) and (p2.age + 5.0);
I couldn't determine if there was a way to accomplish this in dataflow. (Again, if I wanted a strict equality, that I could use a CoGroupByKey, but in this case it's not a strict equality condition).
For my particular use case, the "people" table is not too large – maybe 500,000 rows and approximately 50 megs of RAM required. So, I could, I think, simply run a asList() method to create a single object that sits in a single computer's RAM and then just sort the people object by age and then write some sort of routine that "walks through the list from the low stage to the highest age" and while walking through the list outputs those people whose ages are less than 10 years from each other. This would work, but it would be single threaded etc. I was wondering if there was a "better" way of doing it using the dataflow architecture. (And other developers may need to find a "dataflow" way of doing this operation if the object that they were dealing with dies not fit nicely into memory of one single computer, e.g. a people table of maybe 1 billion rows etc.)
The trick to making this work efficiently at scale is to partition your data into sets of potential matches. In your case, you could assign each person to two different keys, age rounded up to multiple of 5, and age rounded down to multiple of 5. Then, do a GroupByKey on these buckets, and emit all the pairs within each bucket that are actually close enough in age. You'll need to eliminate duplicates, since it's possible for two records to both end up in the same two buckets.
With this solution, the entire data does not need to fit in memory, just each subset of the data.

When would I use a linked List vs a Stack in C++

I know that in a linked list you dont need preallocated memory and the insertion and deletion method is really easy to do and the only thing I really know about stack is the push and pop method.
Linked lists are good for inserting and removing elements at random positions. In a stack, we only append to or remove from the end.
Linked List vs Array(Stack)
Both Arrays and Linked List can be used to store linear data of similar types, but they both have some advantages and disadvantages over each other.
Following are the points in favour of Linked Lists.
(1) The size of the arrays is fixed: So we must know the upper limit on the number of elements in advance. Also, generally, the allocated memory is equal to the upper limit irrespective of the usage, and in practical uses, upper limit is rarely reached.
(2) Inserting a new element in an array of elements is expensive, because room has to be created for the new elements and to create room existing elements have to shifted.
For example, suppose we maintain a sorted list of IDs in an array id[].
id[] = [1000, 1010, 1050, 2000, 2040, …..].
And if we want to insert a new ID 1005, then to maintain the sorted order, we have to move all the elements after 1000 (excluding 1000).
Deletion is also expensive with arrays until unless some special techniques are used. For example, to delete 1010 in id[], everything after 1010 has to be moved.
So Linked list provides following two advantages over arrays
1) Dynamic size
2) Ease of insertion/deletion
Linked lists have following drawbacks:
1) Random access is not allowed. We have to access elements sequentially starting from the first node. So we cannot do binary search with linked lists.
2) Extra memory space for a pointer is required with each element of the list.
3) Arrays have better cache locality that can make a pretty big difference in performance.

Reducers stopped working at 66.68% while running HIVE Join query

Trying to join 6 tables which are having 5 million rows approximately in each table. Trying to join on account number which is sorted in ascending order on all tables. Map tasks are successfully finished and reducers stopped working at 66.68%. Tried options like increasing number of reducers and also tried other options set hive.auto.convert.join = true; and set hive.hashtable.max.memory.usage = 0.9; and set hive.smalltable.filesize = 25000000L; but the result is same. Tried with small number of records (like 5000 rows) and the query works really well.
Please suggest what can be done here to make it work.
Reducers at 66% start doing the actual reduce (0-33% is shuffle, 33-66% is sort). In a join with hive, the reducer is performing a Cartesian product between the two data sets.
I'm going to guess that there is at least one foreign key that is appearing frequently in all of the data sets. Watch for NULL and default values.
For example, in a join, imagine the key "abc" appears ten times in each of the six tables (10^6). That's a million output records for that one key. If "abc" appears 1000 times in one table, 1000 in another, 1000 in another, then twice in the other three tables, you get 8 billion records (1000^3 * 2^3). You can see how this gets out of hand. I'm guessing there is at least one key that is resulting in a massive number of output records.
This is general good practice to avoid in RDBMS outside of Hive as well. Doing multiple inner joins between many-to-many relationships can get you in a lot of trouble.
For debugging this now, and in the future, you could use the JobTracker to find and examine the logs for the Reducer(s) in question. You can then instrument the reduce operation to get a better handle as to what's going on. be careful you don't blow it up with logging of course!
Try looking at the number of records input to the reduce operation for example.

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