C# Linq to SQL: will multiple reads/writes cause prolonged locking? - linq-to-sql

Suppose
I create a Linq to SQL DataContext
I read one record using this DataContext
I spend ten seconds to think
I change the record and submit the changes using this DataContext.
Are the table locked during these ten seconds?

No, they would not be locked when you 'spend ten seconds to think', otherwise this would be sort of checking out rows/tables. Of course, this means that some other process could also read and write changes in those ten seconds, which could lead to concurrency issues for you.

Related

Will a MySQL SELECT statement interrupt INSERT statement?

I have a mysql table that keep gaining new records every 5 seconds.
The questions are
can I run query on this set of data that may takes more than 5 seconds?
if SELECT statement takes more than 5s, will it affect the scheduled INSERT statement?
what happen when INSERT statement invoked while SELECT is still running, will SELECT get the newly inserted records?
I'll go over your questions and some of the comments you added later.
can I run query on this set of data that may takes more than 5 seconds?
Can you? Yes. Should you? It depends. In a MySQL configuration I set up, any query taking longer than 3 seconds was considered slow and logged accordingly. In addition, you need to keep in mind the frequency of the queries you intend to run.
For example, if you try to run a 10 second query every 3 seconds, you can probably see how things won't end well. If you run a 10 second query every few hours or so, then it becomes more tolerable for the system.
That being said, slow queries can often benefit from optimizations, such as not scanning the entire table (i.e. search using primary keys), and using the explain keyword to get the database's query planner to tell you how it intends to work on that internally (e.g. is it using PKs, FKs, indices, or is it scanning all table rows?, etc).
if SELECT statement takes more than 5s, will it affect the scheduled INSERT statement?
"Affect" in what way? If you mean "prevent insert from actually inserting until the select has completed", that depends on the storage engine. For example, MyISAM and InnoDB are different, and that includes locking policies. For example, MyISAM tends to lock entire tables while InnoDB tends to lock specific rows. InnoDB is also ACID-compliant, which means it can provide certain integrity guarantees. You should read the docs on this for more details.
what happen when INSERT statement invoked while SELECT is still running, will SELECT get the newly inserted records?
Part of "what happens" is determined by how the specific storage engine behaves. Regardless of what happens, the database is designed to answer application queries in a way that's consistent.
As an example, if the select statement were to lock an entire table, then the insert statement would have to wait until the select has completed and the lock has been released, meaning that the app would see the results prior to the insert's update.
I understand that locking database can prevent messing up the SELECT statement.
It can also put a potentially unacceptable performance bottleneck, especially if, as you say, the system is inserting lots of rows every 5 seconds, and depending on the frequency with which you're running your queries, and how efficiently they've been built, etc.
what is the good practice to do when I need the data for calculations while those data will be updated within short period?
My recommendation is to simply accept the fact that the calculations are based on a snapshot of the data at the specific point in time the calculation was requested and to let the database do its job of ensuring the consistency and integrity of said data. When the app requests data, it should trust that the database has done its best to provide the most up-to-date piece of consistent information (i.e. not providing a row where some columns have been updated, but others yet haven't).
With new rows coming in at the frequency you mentioned, reasonable users will understand that the results they're seeing are based on data available at the time of request.
All of your questions are related to locking of table.
Your all questions depend on the way database is configured.
Read : http://www.mysqltutorial.org/mysql-table-locking/
Perform Select Statement While insert statement working
If you want to perform a select statement during insert SQL is performing, you should check by open new connection and close connection every time. i.e If I want to insert lots of records, and want to know that last record has inserted by selecting query. I must have to open connection and close connection in for loop or while loop.
# send a request to store data
insert statement working // take a long time
# select statement in while loop.
while true:
cnx.open()
select statement
cnx.close
//break while loop if you get the result

Doctrine query optimizations

I have created a query using doctrine query builder which inserts almost 65000 rows(including all 3 tables) to 3 different tables at a time when something is performed.And for this complete process to finish it takes almost 2-3 mins to execute .
What i have done is persist records in loops and then flush finally.
So is there any ways that will minimize my execution time and inserts data within seconds.
No, unfortunately Doctrine doesn't support grouping inserts into a single statement. If you need to do bulk inserts, one possibility is doing a $em->flush() and $em->clear() after every 100th or so row, see the manual's recommendation:
https://doctrine-orm.readthedocs.org/en/latest/reference/batch-processing.html

MySQL: How many UPDATES per second can an average box support?

We've got a constant stream of simple updates to a single MySQL table (storing user activity information). Let's say we group these into batch updates each second.
I want a ballpark idea of when mysql on a typical 4-core 8GB box will start having an issue keeping up with the updates coming in each second. E.g. how many rows of updates can I make # 1 per second?
This is a thought exercise to decide if I should get going with MySQL in the early days of our applications release (simplify development), or if MySQL's likely to bomb so soon as to make it not worth even venturing down that path.
The only way you can get a decent figure is through benchmarking your specific use case. There are just too many variables and there is no way around that.
It shouldn't take too long either if you just knock a bash script or a small demo app and hammer it with jmeter, then that can give you a good idea.
I used jmeter when trying to benchmark a similar use case. The difference was I was looking for write throughput for number of INSERTS. The most useful thing that came out when I was playing was the 'innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit' param. If you are using INNODB and don't need ACID compliance for your use case, then changing it to 0. This makes a huge difference to INSERT throughput and will likely do the same in your UPDATE use case. Although note that with this setting, changes only get flushed to disk once per second, so if your server gets a power cut or something, you could lose a seconds worth of data.
On my Quad Core 8GB Machine for my use case:
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1 resulted in 80 INSERTS per second
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=0 resulted in 2000 INSERTS per second
These figures will probably bear no relevance to your use case - which is why you need to benchmark it yourself.
A lot of it depends on the quality of the code which you use to push to the DB.
If you write your batch to insert a single value per INSERT request (i.e.,
INSERT INTO table (field) VALUES (value_1);
INSERT INTO table (field) VALUES (value_2);
...
INSERT INTO table (field) VALUES (value_n);
, your performance will crash and burn.
If you insert multiple values using a single INSERT (i.e.
INSERT INTO table (field) values (value_1),(value_2)...(value_n);
, you'll find that you could easily insert many records per second
As an example, I wrote a quick app which needed to add the details of a request for an LDAP account to a holding DB. Inserting one field at a time (i.e., LDAP_field, LDAP_value), execution of the whole script took 10's of seconds. When I concatenated the values into a single INSERT request, execution time of the script went down to about 2 seconds from start to finish. This included the overhead of starting and committing a transaction
Hope this helps
Its not easy to give a general answer to this question. The numbers you ask for rely heavily not only on the hardware of your database server, MySQL itself, but also on server/client configuration, network and - equally important - on your database/table design too.
Generally speaking, with a naked MySQL setup on a state-of-the-art server and update statements using unique keys, I don't have issues below 200 update-statementsp er second if I fire them from localhost, at least that's what I get on my six year old winxp test enviroment. A naked installation on a new system will scale this way higher. If you think way bigger, one server isn't the way to go. MySQL can be tweaked and scaled out in some ways, therefore many companies rely heavily on it.
Just some basics:
If the fields you want to update have huge index files, the update
statements are alot slower since each statement has to write not only
data, but also index informations.
If your update statement cannot
use an index, it might take longer for the server to allocate the
required fields it has to update.
Slow memory and/or slow harddisks
might also slow down overall server performance.
Slow network
connection slows down communication between client and server.
There are whole books written about it, so I'll stop here and advise some further reading, if you're interested!

Updating large quantities of data in a production database

I have a large quantity of data in a production database that I want to update with batches of data while the data in the table is still available for end user use. The updates could be insertion of new rows or updates of existing rows. The specific table is approximately 50M rows, and the updates will be between 100k - 1M rows per "batch". What I would like to do is insert replace with a low priority.. In other words, I want the database to kind of slowly do the batch import without impacting performance of other queries that are occurring concurrently to the same disk spindles. To complicate this, the update data is heavily indexed. 8 b-tree indexes across multiple columns to facilitate various lookup that adds quite a bit of overhead to the import.
I've thought about batching the inserts down into 1-2k record blocks, then having the external script that loads the data just pause for a couple seconds between each insert, but that's really kind of hokey IMHO. Plus, during a 1M record batch, I really don't want to add 500-1000 2second pauses to add 20-40 minutes of extra load time if its not needed. Anyone have ideas on a better way to do this?
I've dealt with a similar scenario using InnoDB and hundreds of millions of rows. Batching with a throttling mechanism is the way to go if you want to minimize risk to end users. I'd experiment with different pause times and see what works for you. With small batches you have the benefit that you can adjust accordingly. You might find that you don't need any pause if you run this all sequentially. If your end users are using more connections then they'll naturally get more resources.
If you're using MyISAM there's a LOW_PRIORITY option for UPDATE. If you're using InnoDB with replication be sure to check that it's not getting too far behind because of the extra load. Apparently it runs in a single thread and that turned out to be the bottleneck for us. Consequently we programmed our throttling mechanism to just check how far behind replication was and pause as needed.
An INSERT DELAYED might be what you need. From the linked documentation:
Each time that delayed_insert_limit rows are written, the handler checks whether any SELECT statements are still pending. If so, it permits these to execute before continuing.
Check this link: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/server-status-variables.html What I would do is write a script that will execute your batch updates when MySQL is showing Threads_running or Connections under a certain number. Hopefully you have some sort of test server where you can determine what a good number threshold might be for either of those server variables. There are plenty of other of server status variables to look at in there also. Maybe control the executions by the Innodb_data_pending_writes number? Let us know what works for you, its an interesting question!

Fork MySQL INSERT INTO (InnoDB)

I'm trying to insert about 500 million rows of garbage data into a database for testing. Right now I have a PHP script looping through a few SELECT/INSERT statements each inside a TRANSACTION -- clearly this isn't the best solution. The tables are InnoDB (row-level locking).
I'm wondering if I (properly) fork the process, will this speed up the INSERT process? At the rate it's going, it will take 140 hours to complete. I'm concerned about two things:
If INSERT statements must acquire a write lock, then will it render forking useless, since multiple processes can't write to the same table at the same time?
I'm using SELECT...LAST_INSERT_ID() (inside a TRANSACTION). Will this logic break when multiple processes are INSERTing into the database? I could create a new database connection for each fork, so I hope this would avoid the problem.
How many processes should I be using? The queries themselves are simple, and I have a regular dual-core dev box with 2GB RAM. I set up my InnoDB to use 8 threads (innodb_thread_concurrency=8), but I'm not sure if I should be using 8 processes or if this is even a correct way to think about matching.
Thanks for your help!
The MySQL documentation has a discussion on efficient insertion of a large number of records. It seems that the clear winner is usage of the LOAD DATA INFILE command, followed by inserts that insert multiple values lists.
1) yes, there will be lock contention, but innodb is designed to handle multiple threads trying to insert. sure, they won't simultaneously insert, but it will handle serializing the inserts for you. just make sure you specifically close your transactions and you do it ASAP. this will ensure you get the best possible insert performance.
2) no, this logic will not break provided you have 1 connection per thread, since last_insert_id() is connection specific.
3) this is one of those things that you just need to benchmark to figure out. actually, i would make the program self-adjust. run 100 inserts with 8 threads and record the execution times. then try again with half as many and twice as many. whichever one is faster, then benchmark more thread count values around that number.
in general, you should always just go ahead and benchmark this kind of stuff to see which is faster. in the amount of time it takes you to think about it and write it up, you could probably already have preliminary numbers.