I am working with large datasets (10s of millions of records, at times, 100s of millions), and want to use a database program that links well with R. I am trying to decide between mysql and sqlite. The data is static, but there are lot of queries that I need to do.
In this link to sqlite help, it states that:
"With the default page size of 1024 bytes, an SQLite database is limited in size to 2 terabytes (241 bytes). And even if it could handle larger databases, SQLite stores the entire database in a single disk file and many filesystems limit the maximum size of files to something less than this. So if you are contemplating databases of this magnitude, you would do well to consider using a client/server database engine that spreads its content across multiple disk files, and perhaps across multiple volumes."
I'm not sure what this means. When I have experimented with mysql and sqlite, it seems that mysql is faster, but I haven't constructed very rigorous speed tests. I'm wondering if mysql is a better choice for me than sqlite due to the size of my dataset. The description above seems to suggest that this might be the case, but my data is no where near 2TB.
I'd appreciate any insights into understanding this constraint of maximum file size from the filesystem and how this could affect speed for indexing tables and running queries. This could really help me in my decision of which database to use for my analysis.
The SQLite database engine stores the entire database into a single file. This may not be very efficient for incredibly large files (SQLite's limit is 2TB, as you've found in the help). In addition, SQLite is limited to one user at a time. If your application is web based or might end up being multi-threaded (like an AsyncTask on Android), mysql is probably the way to go.
Personally, since you've done tests and mysql is faster, I'd just go with mysql. It will be more scalable going into the future and will allow you to do more.
I'm not sure what this means. When I have experimented with mysql and sqlite, it seems that mysql is faster, but I haven't constructed very rigorous speed tests.
The short short version is:
If your app needs to fit on a phone or some other embedded system, use SQLite. That's what it was designed for.
If your app might ever need more than one concurrent connection, do not use SQLite. Use PostgreSQL, MySQL with InnoDB, etc.
It seems that (in R, at least), that SQLite is awesome for ad hoc analysis. With the RSQLite or sqldf packages it is really easy to load data and get started. But for data that you'll use over and over again, it seems to me that MySQL (or SQL Server) is the way to go because it offers a lot more features in terms of modifying your database (e.g., adding or changing keys).
SQL if you are mainly using this as a web service.
SQLite, if you want it to able to function offline.
SQLite generally is much much faster, as majority (or ALL) of data/indexes will be cached in memory. However, in the case of SQLite. If the data is split up across multiple tables, or even multiple SQLite database files, from my experience so far. For even millions of records (i yet to have 100's of millions though), it is far more effective then SQL (compensate the latency / etc). However that is when the records are split apart in differant tables, and queries are specific to such tables (dun query all tables).
An example would be a item database used in a simple game. While this may not sound much, a UID would be issued for even variations. So the generator soon quickly work out to more then a million set of 'stats' with variations. However this was mainly due to each 1000 sets of records being split among different tables. (as we mainly pull records via its UID). Though the performance of splitting was not properly measured. We were getting queries that were easily 10 times faster then SQL (Mainly due to network latency).
Amusingly though, we ended up reducing the database to a few 1000 entries, having item [pre-fix] / [suf-fix] determine the variations. (Like diablo, only that it was hidden). Which proved to be much faster at the end of the day.
On a side note though, my case was mainly due to the queries being lined up one after another (waiting for the one before it). If however, you are able to do multiple connections / queries to the server at the same time. The performance drop in SQL, is more then compensated, from your client side. Assuming this queries do not branch / interact with one another (eg. if got result query this, else that)
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I'm studying up on the future of the database I maintain. Right now we have one database server running MySQL using InnoDB and MyISAM tables. I'm watching the metrics closely and I can see that this will not be sustainable forever. Where does one go next? I have reviewed solutions like Cassandra, but I want to stick to an SQL approach so I'm not sure about that. I have also reviewed NDB cluster and federated database solutions, but I've noticed no one has anything good to say about those. Basically, I looking for advice on intermediate solutions. We do not yet need a vast multi-node array operating on tens of DB servers, but one server is about to reach its limit. I don't want to just throw another server on the pile without making sure that the DB architecture at hand benefits well from the extra power. What do you guys suggest for when it is time to move beyond a single server and how to manage this transition. Thank you to anyone who can help.
Edit to better explain: At present, we have about a hundred tables. We run many join operations to gather the data the end user needs to see, such that most of our queries join at least two tables to complete any operation. The data set is not too big yet, only a few hundred Megs, but the data is accessed in such a way that each table has a few writes everyday, the heaviest of which has about a thousand writes a day. We probably have about a few hundred thousand reads a day too, so read do outnumber writes about 9 to 1.
First Solutions:
Indices go a LONG way
Use profiling software to find your slow queries and optimize them
Depending on your hosting company you can usually update the RAM/CPU of the server
Second Solutions:
Split your reads and your writes into two databases. (I don't know if you're using PHP or not but PHP has a plugin that will automatically split them for you without having to change any of your code http://php.net/manual/en/mysqlnd-ms.rwsplit.php)
Use software like memcache to store database information that is frequently queried but not frequently updated
For a customer I am currently investigating improvements to their database structure.
My customer offers holiday rentals on their website.
On their front page they have a search function wich sends a query to a MySQL database architecture (Master-Master setup) that answers that query with all the holiday rentals that the customer is interested in.
Due to the growth of the company and the increasing load on their servers the search query's are currently running up to 10+ seconds. Mainly because the query's end with an ORDER BY which causes MySQL to create a temp table and sort all the data, an average search query can return up to 20k holiday homes.
Ofcourse one of the things we are doing is investigating the query's, rewriting them and putting indexes where needed. Unfortunately we are unable to get allot more performance under these circumstances.
That's why we are looking into implementing Memcached on top of MySQL to cache these large datasets in memory for faster retrieval. Unfortunately the datasets that the query's return are quite large wich makes Memcached not that effective at this point. The array that MySQL returns are currently about 15k rows with about 60 values per row.
The reason Memcached is interesting is because we want to drastically improve the search function, and lowering the load on the MySQL platform. This would make it more scalable.
I am wondering if there is anyone that is familair with (longterm) caching MySQL data in Memcached and making it more effective for large datasets?
Thanks a bunch!
Memcache is for storing key-value pairs, not for large sets of data. Will it work? Yes. Of course it will. But with how much data you guys are going to throw at it, you're going to run out of memory very soon and end up hitting the database anyway with how often your search results may change. And remember that just because it's memcache doesn't mean it doesn't have to go through web sockets to a (most likely) different machine. Your problem seems to be that you're using MySQL for something it was never designed well for, which is its use as a search engine. No matter how many things you optimize, all you're doing is raising the ceiling an inch at a time.
I could take this post in a "you need to optimize MySQL parameters so that it doesn't have to create those temp tables" direction, but I'm going to assume you've already looked into that and keep going.
My recommendation is that you implement something on top of MySQL to handle the searching. In my own quest for fast searching, these are the solutions I gave the most weight to:
Sphinx: http://sphinxsearch.com
Solr: http://lucene.apache.org/solr
Elasticsearch: http://www.elasticsearch.org
You'll find plenty of resources here on StackOverflow for which of those is better and faster and what not. For our purposes, we picked Elasticsearch for one of our projects and Solr for another.
In our (currently MySQL) database there are over 120 million records, and we make frequent use of complex JOIN queries and application-level logic in PHP that touch the database. We're a marketing company that does data mining as our primary focus, so we have many large reports that need to be run on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Concurrently, customer service operates on a replicated slave of the same database.
We would love to be able to make these reports happen in real time on the web instead of having to manually generate spreadsheets for them. However, many of our reports take a significant amount of time to pull data for (in some cases, over an hour).
We do not operate in the cloud, choosing instead to operate using two physical servers in our server room.
Given all this, what is our best option for a database?
I think you're going the wrong way about the problem.
Thinking if you drop in NoSQL that you'll get better performance is not really true. At the lowest level, you're writing and retrieving a fair chunk of data. That implies your bottleneck is (most likely) HDD I/O (which is the common bottleneck).
Sticking to the hardware you have momentarily and using a monolithic data storage isn't scalable and as you noticed - has implications when wanting to do something in real-time.
What are your options? You need to scale your server and software setup (which is what you'd have to do with any NoSQL anyway, stick in faster hard drives at some point).
You also might want to look into alternative storage engines (other than MyISAM and InnoDB - for example, one of better engines that seemingly turn random I/O to sequential I/O is TokuDB).
Implementing faster HDD subsystem would also aid to your needs (FusionIO if you have the resources to get it).
Without more information on your end (what the server setup is, what MySQL version you're using and what storage engines + data sizes you're operating with), it's all speculation.
Cassandra still needs Hadoop for MapReduce, and MongoDB has limited concurrency with regard to MapReduce...
... so ...
... 120 mio records is not that much, and MySQL should easily be able to handle that. My guess is an IO bottleneck, or you're doing lots of random reads instead of sequential reads. I'd rather hire a MySQL techie for a month or so to tune your schema and queries, instead of investing into a new solution.
If you provide more information about your cluster, we might be able to help you better. "NoSQL" by itself is not the solution to your problem.
As much as I'm not a fan of MySQL once your data gets large, I have to say that you're nowhere near needing to move to a NoSQL solution. 120M rows is not a big deal: the database I'm currently working with has ~600M in one table alone and we query it efficiently. Managing that much data from an ops perspective is the problem; querying it isn't.
It's all about proper indexes and the correct use of them when joining, and secondarily memory settings. Find your slow queries (mysql slow query log FTW!), and learn to use the explain keyword to understand whey they are slow. Then tweak your indexes so your queries are efficient. Further, make sure you understand MySQL's memory settings. There are great pages in the docs explaining how they work, and they aren't that hard to understand.
If you've done both of those things and you're still having problems, make sure disk I/O isn't an issue. Then you should look in to another solution for querying your data if it is.
NoSQL solutions like Cassandra have a lot of benefits. Cassandra is fantastic at writing data. Scaling your writes is very easy--just add more nodes! But the tradeoff is that it's harder to get the data back out. From a cost perspective, if you have expertise in MySQl, it's probably better to leverage that and scale your current solution until it hits a limit before completely switching your underlying architecture.
I've started developing a browser (database) game. My question is how many queries can a regular hosting handle (when I mean regular, I mean a shared hosting you cand find for about 7$/month).
As for the queries, nothing complicated (simple SELECT and WHERE operations).
So... ? 10? 100 ? 10000?
This is completely dependant on the server hardware, it's caching ability and configuration, and the type of hardware it uses for non-volatile storage (e.g., a RAID array of hard drives with spindles or SSDs?), not to mention the type of query and database being queried, including:
Number of joins
Indexes
Number of rows in the tables queried
Size of the result set
Concurrent load
etc...
Without knowing all of these factors, it is impossible to estimate performance. The best estimate comes from actual profiling, performed under normal operating conditions with the type of queries that will actually be presented.
Yoshinori Matsunobu in one of his articles claims 105,000 queries per second using SQL, and 750,000 queries per second using native InnoDB API.
All queries are simple PK lookups.
On a shared hosting these numbers will of course be much lower. How much exactly of course depends on the shared hosting.
Many factors can influence the response time of a database. Hardware, application configuration, (mysql out of the box does not perform all that well), and last but not least, your coding!
Badly written queries can bring make an app feel slow and sluggish. Using count(*) in your code, for a very trivial example, or having no indexes on the database, for example, will influence your db response time as your dataset grows.
How do I know when a project is just to big for MySQL and I should use something with a better reputation for scalability?
Is there a max database size for MySQL before degradation of performance occurs? What factors contribute to MySQL not being a viable option compared to a commercial DBMS like Oracle or SQL Server?
Google uses MySQL. Is your project bigger than Google?
Smart-alec comments aside, MySQL is a professional level database application. If your application puts a strain on MySQL, I bet it'll do the same to just about any other database.
If you are looking for a couple of examples:
Facebook moved to Cassandra only after it was storing over 7 Terabytes of inbox data. (Source: Lakshman, Malik: Cassandra - A Decentralized Structured Storage System.) (... Even though they were having quite a few issues at that stage.)
Wikipedia also handles hundreds of Gigabytes of text data in MySQL.
I work for a very large Internet company. MySQL can scale very, very large with very good performance, with a couple of caveats.
One problem you might run into is that an index greater than 4 gigabytes can't go into memory. I spent a lot of time once trying to improve the MySQL's full-text performance by fiddling with some index parameters, but you can't get around the fundamental problem that if your query hits disk for an index, it gets slow.
You might find some helper applications that can help solve your problem. For the full-text problem, there is Sphinx: http://www.sphinxsearch.com/
Jeremy Zawodny, who now works at Craig's List, has a blog on which he occasionally discusses the performance of large databases: http://blog.zawodny.com/
In summary, your project probably isn't too big for MySQL. It may be too big for some of the ways that you've used MySQL before, and you may need to adapt them.
Mostly it is table size.
I am assuming here that you will use the Oracle innoDB plugin for mysql as your engine. If you do not, that probably means you're using a commercial engine such as infiniDB, InfoBright for Tokutek, in which case your questions should be sent to them.
InnoDB gets a bit nasty with very large tables. You are advised to partition your tables if at all possible with very large instances. Essentially, if your (frequently used) indexes don't all fit into ram, inserts will be very slow as they need to touch a lot of pages not in ram. This cannot be worked around.
You can use the MySQL 5.1 partitioning feature if it does what you want, or partition your tables at the application level if it does not. If you can get your tables' indexes to fit in ram, and only load one table at a time, then you're on a winner.
You can use the plugin's compression to make your ram go a bit further (as the pages are compressed in ram as well as on disc) but it cannot beat the fundamental limtation.
If your table's indexes don't all (or at least MOSTLY - if you have a few indexes which are NULL in 99.99% of cases you might get away without those ones) fit in ram, insert speed will suck.
Database size is not a major issue, provided your tables individually fit in ram while you're doing bulk loading (and of course, you only load one at once).
These limitations really happen with most row-based databases. If you need more, consider a column database.
Infobright and Infinidb both use a mysql-based core and are column based engines which can handle very large tables.
Tokutek is quite interesting too - you may want to contact them for an evaluation.
When you evaluate the engine's suitability, be sure to load it with very large data on production-grade hardware. There's no point in testing it with a (e.g.) 10G database, that won't prove anything.
MySQL is a commercial DBMS, you just have the option to get the support/monitoring that is offered by Oracle or Microsoft. Or you can use community support or community provided monitoring software.
Things you should look at are not only size at operations. Critical are also:
Scenaros for backup and restore?
Maintenance. Example: SQL Server Enterprise can rebuild an index WHILE THE OLD ONE IS AVAILABLE - transparently. This means no downtime for an index rebuild.
Availability (basically you do not want to have to restoer a 5000gb database if a server dies) - mirroring preferred, replication "sucks" (technically).
Whatever you go for, be carefull with Oracle RAC (their cluster) - it is known to be "problematic" (to say it finely). SQL Server is known to be a lot cheaper, scale a lot worse (no "RAC" option) but basically work without making admins want to commit suicide every hour (the "RAC" option seems to do that). Scalability "a lot worse" still is good enough for the Terra Server (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa226316(SQL.70).aspx)
THere wer some questions here recently of people having problems rebuilding indices on a 10gb database or something.
So much for my 2 cents. I am sure some MySQL specialists will jump in on issues there.