Which are the performance considerations I should keep in mind when I'm planning an SQL Azure application? Azure Storage, and the worker and the web roles looks very scalable, but if at the end they are using one database... it looks like the bottleneck.
I was trying to find numbers about:
How many concurrent connections does
SQL Azure support?
Which is the bandwidth?
But no luck.
For example, I'm planning and application that uses a very high level of inserts, but I need return the result of an aggregate function each time (e.g.: the sum of all records with same key in a column), so I can not go with table storage.
Batching is an option, but time response is critical as well, so I'm afraid the database will be bloated with lot of connections.
Sharding is another option, but even when the amount of inserts is massive, the amount of data is very small, 4 to 6 columns with one PK and no FK. So even a 1Gb DB would be an overkill (and an overpay :D) for a partition.
Which would be the performance keys I should keep in mind when I'm facing these kind of applications?
Cheers.
Achieving both scalability and performance can be very difficult, even in the cloud. Your question was primarily about scalability, so you may want to design your application in such a way that your data becomes "eventually" consistent, using queues for example. A worker role would listen for incoming insert requests and would perform the insert asynchronously.
To minimize the number of roundtrips to the database and optimize connection pooling make sure to batch your inserts as well. So you could send 100 inserts in one shot. Also keep in mind that SQL Azure now supports MARS (multiple active recordsets) so that you can return multiple SELECTs in a single batch back to the calling code. The use of batching and MARS should reduce the number of database connections to a minimum.
Sharding usually helps for Read operations; not so much for inserts (although I never benchmarked inserts with sharding). So I am not sure sharding will help you that much for your requirements.
Remember that the Azure offering is designed first for scalability and reasonable performance in a multitenancy environment, where your database is shared with others on the same server. So if you need strong performance with guaranteed response time you may need to reevaluate your hosting choices or indeed test the performance boundaries of Azure for your needs as suggested by tijmenvdk.
SQL Azure will throttle your connections if any form of resource contention occurs (this includes heavy load but might also occur when your database is physically moved around). Throttling is non-deterministic, meaning that you cannot predict if and when this happens. When throttling, SQL Azure will drop your connection, requiring you to perform a retry. Number of connections supported and bandwidth is not published "by design" due to the flexible nature of the underlying infrastructure. Having said that, the setup is optimized for high availability, not high throughput.
If the bursts happen at a known time, you might consider sharding just during those bursts and consolidating the data after the burst has happened. Another way to handle this, is to start queueing/batching writes if and only if throttling occurs. You can use an Azure Queue for that plus a worker role to empty the queue later. This "overflow mechanism" has the advantage of automatically engaging if throttling occurs.
As an alternative you could use Azure Table Storage and keep a separate table of running totals that you can report back instead of performing an aggregation over the data to return the required sum of all records (this might be tricky due to the lack of locking on the tables though).
Apologies for stating the obvious, but the first step would be to test if you run into throttling at all in your scenario. I would give the overflow solution a try.
Related
We have an enterprise application that uses an SQL database. The database access characteristics are about 90% reads. The data that does get updated or created needs to be up-to-date immediately. The cache needs to be correctly invalidated with high certainty. The entities are referred to by their primary key for 98% of the cases.
The application is based on Node.js and is AWS-native. Since the application is AWS-native, I'd like to rely on managed services from AWS rather than hosting my own. One option is to implement our read-through Redis-based cache. Upon retrieving the entities, we'd check the cache and if the data is not cached we'd put it into the cache before turning it to the user. The parts of the code that update those entities will invalidate the cache by primary key.
Generally speaking, in computer science cache coherency is one of the most challenging problems to get right. I am of the opinion that rather than implementing a Redis cache and thinking through all of the possible scenarios for correctly invalidating it, it is wiser to instead configure an Aurora read-replica specifically for reading frequently accessed entities. The RDBMS will do a much better job at caching than anything we can build ourselves.
So, I am facing two options -- go through the effort of implementing my own caching, or use read replicas. My personal opinion is to use a read replica.
Any advice is greatly appreciated, as always.
Yes, you're right, cache invalidation is a tough problem. The simplest solution is to add code to your data writes, to replace the cached values. So they're always current. But this is easy only if the cached values have a pretty much 1-to-1 correlation with rows in your database.
An advantage of your own cache is that you can cache data that is not 1-to-1 with rows of data in the database. You might cache an entire HTML fragment for a drop-down menu for example. That could be the result of several SQL queries. It could be quite an advantage to cache data that is higher up the "food chain" so to speak. But cache invalidation becomes less straightforward. Best for storing results of queries that don't change often.
Using a read-replica is not a substitute for using a cache. Querying a read-replica still has overhead of making a database connection, authentication, SQL query parsing and optimization, locking, and all the other overhead that goes into RDBMS workings.
Querying data from a cache can be orders of magnitude faster.
Both have their place. It's best to use both a cache and a read-replica for different tasks. I would also add message queues as an important technology. I believe database, cache, and queue form a three-legged stool.
But you must have experience and judgment to know when each is the best tool for a given case.
Is there any tools or proper way to handle more than 2000 requests (Mostly write request) per second to mysql database? Without reaching queuelimit.
There are a few different ways to handle massive amounts of requests to a MySQL (or any other relational/RDB) database. Starting out with growing traffic you can employ replication which allows for additional machines to send read-only (no INSERTs, UPDATEs, DELETEs, etc.) from one machine and to only write to a single "master" machine (the read replicas copy the written data from the master or write-allowed instance but may be slightly behind the latest data written for a short period of time). Oracle (owner of the MySQL project) has a good article about it (and scaling PHP) here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/dsl/white-php-part1-355135.html
Once your app begins taking on requests on a truly massive scale (like Facebook, Google, etc. level) you will want to consider other strategies such as clustering, utilizing NoSQL (for certain functions such as search, analytics, logging, monitoring, etc.), splitting tables and databases based on geographic regions (if it makes sense). There is a starter white paper here: https://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/white-papers/guide-to-scaling-web-databases-with-mysql-cluster/
You can also conduct generic searches for "scaling MySQL" which deliver even more results.
MariaDB 10+ comes with Galera Cluster that allows you to have multiple MASTER servers and you can load balance either by IP or through a device.
Also, the number or requests/second are dependent on how fast a write is completed. If you have a simple atomic raw write, you can turn off INDEXES on the receiving table, so it's as fast as your server can handle. That raw table can by MyISAM and not InnoDB. That's usually up to 10x faster in writes. Have another process read the raw data in bulk into another table with proper indexes. We've had success with up to 10K transactions/second this way
I've seen pictures like this where multiple rails engines write to a single mySQL server.
1) Is this possible? Or does Rails want each application server to write to one database server?
2) If this is possible, how is it accomplished? Are there queues and a scheduler between the application servers and the write database server?
Scaling a mysql db is a pretty difficult thing to do, but its certainly been done plenty of times and there are a lot of best practices out there for you to take advantage of. The first thing you should know is that before you worry about scaling writes for a while yet, you probably need to scale your reads first.
Scaling reads can be done fairly easily using replication. There are several tools out there that make managing replication a lot easier such as Amazon RDS. Generally speaking many web severs can connect to many databases (as suggested by others), however you quickly run into scale issues once you have a lot of traffic, connections or whatever other action you are performing that generates load on the server.
As replicated severs are read only, you need to manage which sever you connect to depending on the action you're performing. I.e. if you had a users table, when creating, updating or deleting users you need to use the "write" database (the primary "source" sever) but when reading the user table, you can use one of the read replicas. This reduces the load on the primary write sever (allowing it to deal with even more writes) and as you can have multiple read databases behind a load balancer, you can get away with this structure for a very long time and scale reads across tens of database severs before you'll hit any significant issues (however most apps get away with 1-3).
There are situations where you will need to use your write database for read actions (although you should avoid it as much as possible) as the read replicas can be slightly behind the write dbs due to latency in replicating the write db queries, however most of the time you should be able to code knowing that there is the possibility that the read db is delayed (i.e. queue actions a reasonable period of time such that the updates will propagate across all the read severs) and simply use one of your read dbs rather than the write db.
Beyond this the key items to work on are ensuring you have efficient indexes and applying other best practices around maintaining a sensible data structure. You might also want to consider having 3 distinct "groups" of database servers. I generally like to have write, read and "stats" db groups. The write group for create, update and delete operations (as well as select for update), the read for general read items that must return their results quickly, and stats for anything that is going to be under high load and that you do not rely on for a prompt response (this keeps heavy queries that are not time sensitive away from your read db that you need quick responses from for general reads)
Once you get into a situation where you can no longer buy larger hardware and you're near maxing out your write capacity, you'll need to look into sharding, however that will take a lot of traffic / data (so dont worry about it unless you've done all of the above already).
I'm thinking about moving our production env from a self hosted solution to amazon aws. I took a look at the different services and thought about using RDS as replacement for our mysql instances. The hardware we're using for our master seems to be better than the best hardware we can get when using rds (Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance). Since I can't simply move our production env to aws and see if the performance is still good enough I'd love to make some tests in advance.
I thought about creating a full query log from our current master, configure the rds instance and start to replay the full query log against it. Actually I don't even know if this kind of testing is a good idea but I guess you'll tell me if there are better ways to make sure the performance of mysql won't drop dramatically when making the move to rds.
Is there a preferred tool to replay the full query log?
at what metrics should I take a look while running the test
cpu usage?
memory usage?
disk usage?
query time?
anything else?
Thanks in advance
I'd recommend against replaying the query log - it's almost certainly not going to give you the information you want, and will take a significant amount of effort.
Firstly, you'd need to prepare your database so that replaying the query log won't break constraints when inserting, updating or deleting data, and that subsequent "select" queries will find the records they should find. This is distinctly non-trivial on anything other than a toy database - just taking a back-up and replaying the log doesn't necessarily guarantee the ordering of DML statements will match what happened on production. This may well give you a false sense of comfort - all your select statements return in a few milliseconds, because the data they're looking for doesn't exist!
Secondly, load and performance testing rarely works by replaying what happened on production - that doesn't (usually) reflect the peak conditions that will bring your system to its knees. For instance, most production systems run happily most of the time at <50% capacity, but go through spikes during the day, when they might reach 80% or more of capacity - that's what you care about, can your new environment handle the peaks.
My recommendation would be to use a tool like JMeter to write performance scripts (either directly to the database using the JDBC driver, or through the front end if you've got a web appilcation). Your performance scripts should reflect the behaviour you see from users, and be parameterized so they're not dependent on the order in which records are created.
Set yourself some performance targets (ideally based on current production levels, with a multiplier to cover you against spikes), e.g. "100 concurrent users, with no query taking more than 1 second"), and use JMeter to simulate that load. If you reach it first time, congratulations - go home! If not, look at the performance counters to see where the bottleneck is; see if you can alleviate that bottleneck (or tune your queries, your awesome on-premise hardware may be hiding some performance issues). Typical bottlenecks are CPU, RAM, and disk I/O.
Experiment with different test scenarios - "lots of writes", "lots of reads", "lots of reporting queries", and mix them up.
The idea is to understand the bottlenecks on the system, and see how far you are from those bottleneck, and understand what you can do to alleviate them. Once you know that, your decision to migrate will be far more robust.
I want to import data from a MySQL server into Oracle database, and I found a suggestion to use Oracle database link. The Oracle instance is 10.0.2.1, and the MySQL server instance should be 5.1. The connection between two servers and the hard-disk should not be bottle neck.
I want to ask about the performance of Oracle database link? How fast it is? Is it very slow, slow or fast? Is it capable of transferring 1000 rows/second?
Thank you
1000 rows/sec is definitely acheivable... the question is whether it's acheivable on your database/network infrastructure.
Even if we had a detailed knowledge of your infrastructure it would still be very hard to say... it depends on so many factors like network speed, network latency, the size of the database rows being transfered etc.
The only way to tell for sure is to test it.
I would look on this as a good thing - the process of building the test is bound to teach you a lot about how it could work... it will throw up a number of issues that you're going to have to consider at some point - how do you handle backlogs when they form? What is the max through-put you can acheive? etc. You'll learn what kind of data-transfer works best for you (e.g. single rows at a time or larger batches) You might want to try it with a mechanisms other than SQL (e.g. queues)
You say that you don't think the network / hard disk access will be an issue - again, you need to test this assumption. Every database has a limiting factor on the performance somewhere (or they'd be infinitely fast!) and it's quite often disk access that is the limiting factor. In this case I would speculate that the network may be the limiting factor, but there's no way to know for sure without measuring it.
Generally speaking dblink performance limited by network speed, but there are some pitfalls, leading to performance issues:
unnecessary joins between local and remote tables that leads to transferring large amounts of data;
lack of parallelism built into the query (unions help in this case);
implicit sorting on remote database side;
failure to comply with Oracle recommendations such as using of collocated views and hints (mainly DRIVING_SITE and NO_MERGE).