Table Insert Rate Slows AsTable Size Increases - sql-server-2008

Parsing some data and inserting it into 3 tables from .NET. Using Table Valued Parameters to pass the data as some inserts are 600,000 rows. Passing objects (not DataTables) and they are passed by reference (nature of TVP). Got 100:1 gain over straight value insert as insert value is limited to 1000 rows at a time. In the stored procedure the insert to the actual table from the TVP is sorted by the clustered index. These tables have no index other than the clustered index. The SP takes a TABLOCK as these are write once tables and one data loader. Fill Factor 100. No increase in data or transaction log size - it is sized for the total data load. Finally to the question. In the last 4 hours have inserted 200 million rows. The insert response time has dropped in 1/2. If the fill factor is 100 and I am inserting sorted by clustered index then why the drop in response? What can I do fix this?
I did not get TVP until I used it - it is like a reverse DataReader.
I would like to thank you for your help and apologize for an incorrect problem statement. For each parse (in this case I am parsing 200,000) the insert is sorted by the clustered index. However for only 1 of the 3 tables is the next parse as a whole in clustered index order. After parsing 70,000 the good table has a scan density of 99% but the other two tables are severely fragmented with a scan density of 12%.
Set a fill factor of 50 on the two fragmented tables and re-indexed. Now I am getting about 1/3 the max speed. I will just need to stop the process and re-index every few hours.
What I ended up doing is changing the clustered index to match insert order. Created a unique index on what used to be the clustered. I disable the unique, index insert the data, and then rebuild the unique index. With that scenario I get a 300:1 performance on a 10 hour run. That is not an extra 0 - three hundred to one. And that is not fudging - compared to starting with the index ordered and a fill factor or 30. Even with the extra index my table size is smaller as I can have both fill factors at 100.
I use #temp on some queries so I can get the rows in an order only known to the query. I converted the #temp to a TVP and gained 1/2 second (about the time it take to create and delete a #temp).

Per OP converting comment to answer...
In addition to auto-stats as #SqlACID mentions, constraint checking could get more expensive as the table fills up. If I'm going to seriously load a table I usually plan to disable or drop indexes and constraints, and re-create them after, if speed is my ultimate goal. This may mean deleting rows after the fact if the constraint is violated, or doing better validation on the bulk data up front when possible.

Related

Duplicate table fields vs indexing only

I have a huge and very busy table (few thousands INSERT / second). The table stores loginlogs, it has a bigint ID which is not generated by MySQL but rather by pseudorandom generator on MySQL client.
Simply put, the table has loginlog_id, client_id, tons,of,other,columns,with,details,about,session....
I have few indexes on this table such as PRIMARY_KEY(loginlog_id) and INDEX(client_id)
In some other part of our system I need to fetch client_id based on loginlog_id. This does not happen that often (just few hundreds SELECT client_id FROM loginlogs WHERE loginlog_id=XXXXXX / second). Table loginlogs is read by various other scripts now and then, and always various columns are needed. But the most frequent call to read is for sure the above mentioned get client_id by loginlog_id.
My question is: should I create another table loginlogs_clientids and duplicate loginlog_id, client_id in there (this means another few thousands INSERTS, as for every loginlogs INSERT I get this new one). Or should I be happy with InnoDB handling my lookups by PRIMARY KEY efficiently.
We have tons of RAM (128GB, most of which is used by MySQL). Load of MySQL is between 40% and 350% CPU (we have 12 core CPU). When I tried to use the new table, I did not see any difference. But I am asking for the future, if our usage grows even more, what is the suggested approach? Duplicate or index?
Thanks!
No.
Looking up table data for a single row using the primary key is extremely efficient, and will take the same time for both tables.
Exceptions to that might be very large row sizes (e.g. 8KB+), and client_id is e.g. a varchar that is stored off-page, in which case you might need to read an additional data block, which at least theoretically could cost you some milliseconds.
Even if this strategy would have an advantage, you would not actually do it by creating a new table, but by adding an index (loginlog_id, client_id) to your original table. InnoDB stores everything, including the actual data, in an index structure, so that adding an index is basically the same as adding a new table with the same columns, but without (you) having the problem of synchronizing those two "tables".
Having a structure with a smaller row size can have some advantages for ranged scans, e.g. MySQL will evaluate select count(*) from tablename using the smallest index of the table, as it has to read less bytes. You already have such a small index (on client_id), so even in that regard, adding such an additonal table/index shouldn't have an effect. If you have any range scan on the primary key (which is probably unlikely for pseudorandom data), you may want to consider this though, or keep it in mind for cases when you have.

Fill Factor And Insert Speed

I have 3 very large tables with clustered indexes on composite keys. No updates only inserts. New inserts will not be within the existing index range but the new inserts will not align with the clustered index and these tables get a lot of inserts (hundreds - thousands per second). What would like to do is DBREINDEX with Fill Factor = 100 but then set a Fill Factor of 5 and have that Fill Factor ONLY applied to inserts. Right now a Fill Factor applies to the whole table only. Is there a way to have a Fill Factor that applies to inserts (or inserts and updates) only? I don't care about select speed at this time. I am loading data. When the data load is complete then I will DBREINDEX at 100. A Fill Factor of 10 versus 30 doubles the rates at which new data is inserted. This load will takes a couple days and it cannot go live until the data is loaded. The clustered indexes are aligned with dominate query used by the end user application.
My practice is to DBREINDEX daily but the problem is now that the tables are getting large a 10 DBREINDEX takes a long time. I have considered indexing into "daily" tables and then inserting that data daily sorted by the clustered index into the production tables.
If you read this far even more. The indexes are all composite and I am running 6 instances of the parser on an 8 core server (lot of testing and that seems to have the best throughput). The data out of a SINGLE parser is in PK order and I am doing the inserts 990 values at a time (SQL value limits). The 3 active tables only share data via a foreign key relationship with a single relative inactive 4th table. My thought at this time is to have holding tables for each parser and then have another process that polls those table for the next complete insert and move the data into the production table in PK order. That is going to be a lot of work. I hope someone has a better idea.
The parses start in PK order but rarely finish in PK order. Some individual parses are so large that I could not hold all the data in memory until the end. Right now the SQL insert is slightly faster than the parse that creates the data. In an individual parse I run the insert asynch and go on parsing but don't insert until the prior insert is complete.
I agree you should have holding tables for the parser data and only insert to the main tables when you're ready. I implemented something similar in a former life (it was quasi-hashed into 10 tables based on mod 10 of the unique ID, then rolled into the primary table later - primarily to assist in load speed). If you're going to use holding tables then I see no need to have them at anything but FF = 100. The less pages you have to use the better.
Apparently, too, you should test the difference permanent tables, #temp tables and table-valued parameters. :-)

MySQL - why not index every field?

Recently I've learned the wonder of indexes, and performance has improved dramatically. However, with all I've learned, I can't seem to find the answer to this question.
Indexes are great, but why couldn't someone just index all fields to make the table incredibly fast? I'm sure there's a good reason to not do this, but how about three fields in a thirty-field table? 10 in a 30 field? Where should one draw the line, and why?
Indexes take up space in memory (RAM); Too many or too large of indexes and the DB is going to have to be swapping them to and from the disk. They also increase insert and delete time (each index must be updated for every piece of data inserted/deleted/updated).
You don't have infinite memory. Making it so all indexes fit in RAM = good.
You don't have infinite time. Indexing only the columns you need indexed minimizes the insert/delete/update performance hit.
Keep in mind that every index must be updated any time a row is updated, inserted, or deleted. So the more indexes you have, the slower performance you'll have for write operations.
Also, every index takes up further disk space and memory space (when called), so it could potentially slow read operations as well (for large tables).
Check this out
You have to balance CRUD needs. Writing to tables becomes slow. As for where to draw the line, that depends on how the data is being acessed (sorting filtering, etc.).
Indexing will take up more allocated space both from drive and ram, but also improving the performance a lot. Unfortunately when it reaches memory limit, the system will surrender the drive space and risk the performance. Practically, you shouldn't index any field that you might think doesn't involve in any kind of data traversing algorithm, neither inserting nor searching (WHERE clause). But you should if otherwise. By default you have to index all fields. The fields which you should consider unindexing is if the queries are used only by moderator, unless if they need for speed too
It is not a good idea to indexes all the columns in a table. While this will make the table very fast to read from, it also becomes much slower to write to. Writing to a table that has every column indexed would involve putting the new record in that table and then putting each column's information in the its own index table.
this answer is my personal opinion based I m using my mathematical logic to answer
the second question was about the border where to stop, First let do some mathematical calculation, suppose we have N rows with L fields in a table if we index all the fields we will get a L new index tables where every table will sort in a meaningfull way the data of the index field, in first glance if your table is a W weight it will become W*2 (1 tera will become 2 tera) if you have 100 big table (I already worked in project where the table number was arround 1800 table ) you will waste 100 times this space (100 tera), this is way far from wise.
If we will apply indexes in all tables we will have to think about index updates were one update trigger all indexes update this is a select all unordered equivalent in time
from this I conclude that you have in this scenario that if you will loose this time is preferable to lose it in a select nor an update because if you will select a field that is not indexed you will not trigger another select on all fields that are not indexed
what to index ?
foreign-keys : is a must based on
primary-key : I m not yet sure about it may be if someone read this could help on this case
other fields : the first natural answer is the half of the remaining filds why : if you should index more you r not far from the best answer if you should index less you are not also far because we know that no index is bad and all indexed is also bad.
from this 3 points I can conclude that if we have L fields composed of K keys the limit should be somewhere near ((L-K)/2)+K more or less by L/10
this answer is based on my logic and personal prictices
First of all, at least in SAP - ABAP and in background database table, we can create one index table for all required index fields, we will have their addresses only. So other SQL related software-database system can also use one table for all fields to be indexed.
Secondly, what is the writing performance? A company in one day records 50 sales orders for example. And let assume there is a table VBAK sales order header table with 30 fields for example each has 20 CHAR length..
I can write to real table in seconds, but other index table can work in the background, and at the same time a report is tried to be run, for this report while index table is searched, ther can be a logic- for database programming- a index writing process is contiuning and wait it for ending ( 5 sales orders at the same time were being recorded for example and take maybe 5 seconds) ..so , a running report can wait 5 seconds then runs 5 seconds total 10 seconds..
without index, a running report does not wait 5 seconds for writing performance..but runs maybe 40 seconds...
So, what is the meaning of writing performance no one writes thousands of records at the same time. But reading them.
And reading a second table means that : there were all ready sorted fields.I have 3 fields selected and I can find in which sorted sets I need to search these data, then I bring them...what RAM, what memory it is just a copied index table with only one data for each field -address data..What memory?
I think, this is one of the software company secrets hide from customers, not to wake them up , otherwise they will not need another system in the future with an expensive price.

Should I reset a table index / optimize after deletion of many rows?

I have a table with 1,000,000 records and I'm running a statement that's deleting ~700k rows. The auto-increment-index is of course still at 1,000,001. The highest primary key afterwards for example 40,000.
After such a huge deletion of rows should I manually set the index back to 40,001 or optimize the table in any way? Or doesn't MySQL care for this huge gap when inserting new rows and using the index in select statements afterwards (in terms of speed)?
The MySQL manual says:
OPTIMIZE TABLE should be used if you
have deleted a large part of a table
or if you have made many changes to a
table with variable-length rows
But don't reset the primary key, it can mess things up. The INT datatype (presumably) has a lot of room to grow from 1M.
In terms of query speed, it doesn't matter whether the index value is at 1 000 000 or at 1 000 000 000.
Using OPTIMIZE TABLE afterwards helps MySQL determine how best/fastest to peform queries, e.g. use index or just table scan? It uses what are called Statistics to do so, and so calling OPTIMIZE TABLE is basically giving it a hint that you've made a significant change.

MySQL: low cardinality/selectivity columns = how to index?

I need to add indexes to my table (columns) and stumbled across this post:
How many database indexes is too many?
Quote:
“Having said that, you can clearly add a lot of pointless indexes to a table that won't do anything. Adding B-Tree indexes to a column with 2 distinct values will be pointless since it doesn't add anything in terms of looking the data up. The more unique the values in a column, the more it will benefit from an index.”
Is an Index really pointless if there are only two distinct values? Given a table as follows (MySQL Database, InnoDB)
Id (BIGINT)
fullname (VARCHAR)
address (VARCHAR)
status (VARCHAR)
Further conditions:
The Database contains 300 Million records
Status can only be “enabled” and “disabled”
150 Million records have status= enabled and 150 Million records have
stauts= disabled
My understanding is, without having an index on status, a select with where status=’enabled’ would result in a full tablescan with 300 Million Records to process?
How efficient is the lookup when I use a BTREE index on status?
Should I index this column or not?
What alternatives (maybe any other indexes) does MySQL InnoDB provide to efficiently look records up by the "where status="enabled" clause in the given example with a very low cardinality/selectivity of the values?
The index that you describe is pretty much pointless. An index is best used when you need to select a small number of rows in comparison to the total rows.
The reason for this is related to how a database accesses a table. Tables can be assessed either by a full table scan, where each block is read and processed in turn. Or by a rowid or key lookup, where the database has a key/rowid and reads the exact row it requires.
In the case where you use a where clause based on the primary key or another unique index, eg. where id = 1, the database can use the index to get an exact reference to where the row's data is stored. This is clearly more efficient than doing a full table scan and processing every block.
Now back to your example, you have a where clause of where status = 'enabled', the index will return 150m rows and the database will have to read each row in turn using separate small reads. Whereas accessing the table with a full table scan allows the database to make use of more efficient larger reads.
There is a point at which it is better to just do a full table scan rather than use the index. With mysql you can use FORCE INDEX (idx_name) as part of your query to allow comparisons between each table access method.
Reference:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/how-to-avoid-table-scan.html
I'm sorry to say that I do not agree with Mike. Adding an index is meant to limit the amount of full records searches for MySQL, thereby limiting IO which usually is the bottleneck.
This indexing is not free; you pay for it on inserts/updates when the index has to be updated and in the search itself, as it now needs to load the index file (full text index for 300M records is probably not in memory). So it might well be that you get extra IO in stead of limitting it.
I do agree with the statement that a binary variable is best stored as one, a bool or tinyint, as that decreases the length of a row and can thereby limit disk IO, also comparisons on numbers are faster.
If you need speed and you seldom use the disabled records, you may wish to have 2 tables, one for enabled and one for disabled records and move the records when the status changes. As it increases complexity and risk this would be my very last choice of course. Definitely do the move in 1 transaction if you happen to go for it.
It just popped into my head that you can check wether an index is actually used by using the explain statement. That should show you how MySQL is optimizing the query. I don't really know hoe MySQL optimizes queries, but from postgresql I do know that you should explain a query on a database approximately the same (in size and data) as the real database. So if you have a copy on the database, create an index on the table and see wether it's actually used. As I said, I doubt it, but I most definitely don't know everything:)
If the data is distributed like 50:50 then query like where status="enabled" will avoid half scanning of the table.
Having index on such tables is completely depends on distribution of data, i,e : if entries having status enabled is 90% and other is 10%. and for query where status="disabled" it scans only 10% of the table.
so having index on such columns depends on distribution of data.
#a'r answer is correct, however it needs to be pointed out that the usefulness of an index is given not only by its cardinality but also by the distribution of data and the queries run on the database.
In OP's case, with 150M records having status='enabled' and 150M having status='disabled', the index is unnecessary and a waste of resource.
In case of 299M records having status='enabled' and 1M having status='disabled', the index is useful (and will be used) in queries of type SELECT ... where status='disabled'.
Queries of type SELECT ... where status='enabled' will still run with a full table scan.
You will hardly need all 150 mln records at once, so I guess "status" will always be used in conjunction with other columns. Perhaps it'd make more sense to use a compound index like (status, fullname)
Jan, you should definitely index that column. I'm not sure of the context of the quote, but everything you said above is correct. Without an index on that column, you are most certainly doing a table scan on 300M rows, which is about the worst you can do for that data.
Jan, as asked, where your query involves simply "where status=enabled" without some other limiting factor, an index on that column apparently won't help (glad to SO community showed me what's up). If however, there is a limiting factor, such as "limit 10" an index may help. Also, remember that indexes are also used in group by and order by optimizations. If you are doing "select count(*),status from table group by status", an index would be helpful.
You should also consider converting status to a tinyint where 0 would represent disabled and 1 would be enabled. You're wasting tons of space storing that string vs. a tinyint which only requires 1 byte per row!
I have a similar column in my MySQL database. Approximately 4 million rows, with the distribution of 90% 1 and 10% 0.
I've just discovered today that my queries (where column = 1) actually run significantly faster WITHOUT the index.
Foolishly I deleted the index. I say foolishly, because I now suspect the queries (where column = 0) may have still benefited from it. So, instead I should explicitly tell MySQL to ignore the index when I'm searching for 1, and to use it when I'm searching for 0. Maybe.