High traffic table, optimal indexes? - mysql

Question

I have a monitoring table with the following structure:
CREATE TABLE `monitor_data` (
`monitor_id` INT(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
`monitor_data_time` INT(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
`monitor_data_value` INT(10) NULL DEFAULT NULL,
INDEX `monitor_id_data_time` (`monitor_id`, `monitor_data_time`),
INDEX `monitor_data_time` (`monitor_data_time`)
)
COLLATE='utf8_general_ci'
ENGINE=InnoDB;
This is a very high traffic table with potentially thousands of rows every minute. Each row belongs to a monitor and contains a value and time (unix_timestamp)
I have three issues:
1.
Suddenly, after a number of months in dev, the table suddenly became very slow. Queries that previously was done under a second could now take up to a minute. I'm using standard settings in my.cnf since this is a dev machine, but the behavior was indeed very strange to me.
2.
I'm not sure that I have optimal indexes. A "normal" query looks like this:
SELECT DISTINCT(md.monitor_data_time), monitor_data_value
FROM monitor_data md
WHERE md.monitor_id = 165
AND md.monitor_data_time >= 1484076760
AND md.monitor_data_time <= 1487271199
ORDER BY md.monitor_data_time ASC;
A EXPLAIN on the query above looks like this:
id;select_type;table;type;possible_keys;key;key_len;ref;rows;Extra
1;SIMPLE;md;range;monitor_id_data_time,monitor_data_time;monitor_id_data_time;8;\N;149799;Using index condition; Using temporary; Using filesort
What do you think about the indexes?
3.
If I leave out the DISTINCT in the query above, I actually get duplicate rows even though there aren't any duplicate rows in the table. Any explanation to this behavior?
Any input is greatly appreciated!
UPDATE 1:
New suggestion on table structure:
CREATE TABLE `monitor_data_test` (
`monitor_id` INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
`monitor_data_time` INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
`monitor_data_value` INT UNSIGNED NULL DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`monitor_data_time`, `monitor_id`),
INDEX `monitor_data_time` (`monitor_data_time`)
) COLLATE='utf8_general_ci' ENGINE=InnoDB;

Answer 1

SELECT DISTINCT(md.monitor_data_time), monitor_data_value
is the same as
SELECT DISTINCT md.monitor_data_time, monitor_data_value
That is, the pair is distinct. It does not dedup just the time. Is that what you want?
If you are trying to de-dup just the time, then do something like
SELECT time, AVG(value)
...
GROUP BY time;
For optimal performance of
WHERE md.monitor_id = 165
AND md.monitor_data_time >= 14840767604 ...
you need
PRIMARY KEY (monitor_id, monitor_data_time)
and it must be in that order. The opposite order is much less useful. The guiding principle is: Start with the '=', then move on to the 'range'. More discussion here.
Do you have 4 billion monitor_id values? INT takes 4 bytes; consider using a smaller datatype.
Do you have other queries that need optimizing? It is better to design the index(es) after gather all the important queries.
Why PK
In InnoDB, the PRIMARY KEY is "clustered" with the data. That is, the data is an ordered list of triples: (id, time, value) stored in a B+Tree. Locating id = 165 AND time = 1484076760 is a basic operation of a BTree. And it is very fast. Then scanning forward (that's the "+" part of "B+Tree") until time = 1487271199 is a very fast operation of "next row" in this ordered list. Furthermore, since value is right there with the id and time, there is no extra effort to get the values.
You can't scan the requested rows any faster. But it requires PRIMARY KEY. (OK, UNIQUE(id, time) would be 'promoted' to be the PK, but let's not confuse the issue.)
Contrast... Given an index (time, id), it would do the scan over the dates fine, but it would have to skip over any entries where id != 165 But it would have to read all those rows to discover they do not apply. A lot more effort.
Since it is unclear what you intended by DISTINCT, I can't continue this detailed discussion of how that plays out. Suffice it to say: The possible rows have been found; now some kind of secondary pass is needed to do the DISTINCT. (It may not even need to do a sort.)

Answer 2

What do you think about the indexes?
The index on (monitor_id,monitor_data_time) seems appropriate for the query. That's suited to an index range scan operation, very quickly eliminating boatloads of rows that need to be examined.
Better would be a covering index that also includes the monitor_data_value column. Then the query could be satisfied entirely from the index, without a need to lookup pages from the data table to get monitor_data_value.
And even better would be having the InnoDB cluster key be the PRIMARY KEY or UNIQUE KEY on the columns, rather than incurring the overhead of the synthetic row identifier that InnoDB creates when an appropriate index isn't defined.
If I wasn't allowing duplicate (monitor_id, monitor_data_time) tuples, then I'd define the table with a UNIQUE index on those non-nullable columns.
CREATE TABLE `monitor_data`
( `monitor_id` INT(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL
, `monitor_data_time` INT(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL
, `monitor_data_value` INT(10) NULL DEFAULT NULL
, UNIQUE KEY `monitor_id_data_time` (`monitor_id`, `monitor_data_time`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB
or equivalent, specify PRIMARY in place of UNIQUE and remove the identifier
CREATE TABLE `monitor_data`
( `monitor_id` INT(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL
, `monitor_data_time` INT(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL
, `monitor_data_value` INT(10) NULL DEFAULT NULL
, PRIMARY KEY (`monitor_id`, `monitor_data_time`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB
Any explanation to this behavior?
If the query (shown in the question) returns a different number of rows with the DISTINCT keyword, then there must be duplicate (monitor_id,monitor_data_time,monitor_data_value) tuples in the table. There's nothing in the table definition that guarantees us that there aren't duplicates.
There are a couple of other possible explanations, but those explanations are all related to rows being added/changed/removed, and the queries seeing different snapshots, transaction isolation levels, yada, yada. If the data isn't changing, then there are duplicate rows.
A PRIMARY KEY constraint (or UNIQUE KEY constraint non-nullable columns) would guarantee us uniqueness.
Note that DISTINCT is a keyword in the SELECT list. It's not a function. The DISTINCT keyword applies to all expressions in the SELECT list. The parens around md.monitor_date_time are superfluous.
Leaving the DISTINCT keyword out would eliminate the need for the "Using filesort" operation. And that can be expensive for large sets, particularly when the set is too large to sort in memory, and the sort has to spill to disk.
It would be much more efficient to have guaranteed uniqueness, omit the DISTINCT keyword, and return rows in order by the index, preferably the cluster key.
Also, the secondary index monitor_data_time doesn't benefit this query. (There may be other queries that can make effective use of the index, though one suspects that those queries would also make effective use of a composite index that had monitor_data_time as the leading column.