Also, when is it appropriate to use one?
An index is used to speed up searching in the database. MySQL has some good documentation on the subject (which is relevant for other SQL servers as well):
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-indexes.html
An index can be used to efficiently find all rows matching some column in your query and then walk through only that subset of the table to find exact matches. If you don't have indexes on any column in the WHERE clause, the SQL server has to walk through the whole table and check every row to see if it matches, which may be a slow operation on big tables.
The index can also be a UNIQUE index, which means that you cannot have duplicate values in that column, or a PRIMARY KEY which in some storage engines defines where in the database file the value is stored.
In MySQL you can use EXPLAIN in front of your SELECT statement to see if your query will make use of any index. This is a good start for troubleshooting performance problems. Read more here:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/explain.html
A clustered index is like the contents of a phone book. You can open the book at 'Hilditch, David' and find all the information for all of the 'Hilditch's right next to each other. Here the keys for the clustered index are (lastname, firstname).
This makes clustered indexes great for retrieving lots of data based on range based queries since all the data is located next to each other.
Since the clustered index is actually related to how the data is stored, there is only one of them possible per table (although you can cheat to simulate multiple clustered indexes).
A non-clustered index is different in that you can have many of them and they then point at the data in the clustered index. You could have e.g. a non-clustered index at the back of a phone book which is keyed on (town, address)
Imagine if you had to search through the phone book for all the people who live in 'London' - with only the clustered index you would have to search every single item in the phone book since the key on the clustered index is on (lastname, firstname) and as a result the people living in London are scattered randomly throughout the index.
If you have a non-clustered index on (town) then these queries can be performed much more quickly.
An index is used to speed up the performance of queries. It does this by reducing the number of database data pages that have to be visited/scanned.
In SQL Server, a clustered index determines the physical order of data in a table. There can be only one clustered index per table (the clustered index IS the table). All other indexes on a table are termed non-clustered.
SQL Server Index Basics
SQL Server Indexes: The Basics
SQL Server Indexes
Index Basics
Index (wiki)
Indexes are all about finding data quickly.
Indexes in a database are analogous to indexes that you find in a book. If a book has an index, and I ask you to find a chapter in that book, you can quickly find that with the help of the index. On the other hand, if the book does not have an index, you will have to spend more time looking for the chapter by looking at every page from the start to the end of the book.
In a similar fashion, indexes in a database can help queries find data quickly. If you are new to indexes, the following videos, can be very useful. In fact, I have learned a lot from them.
Index Basics
Clustered and Non-Clustered Indexes
Unique and Non-Unique Indexes
Advantages and disadvantages of indexes
Well in general index is a B-tree. There are two types of indexes: clustered and nonclustered.
Clustered index creates a physical order of rows (it can be only one and in most cases it is also a primary key - if you create primary key on table you create clustered index on this table also).
Nonclustered index is also a binary tree but it doesn't create a physical order of rows. So the leaf nodes of nonclustered index contain PK (if it exists) or row index.
Indexes are used to increase the speed of search. Because the complexity is of O(log N). Indexes is very large and interesting topic. I can say that creating indexes on large database is some kind of art sometimes.
INDEXES - to find data easily
UNIQUE INDEX - duplicate values are not allowed
Syntax for INDEX
CREATE INDEX INDEX_NAME ON TABLE_NAME(COLUMN);
Syntax for UNIQUE INDEX
CREATE UNIQUE INDEX INDEX_NAME ON TABLE_NAME(COLUMN);
First we need to understand how normal (without indexing) query runs. It basically traverse each rows one by one and when it finds the data it returns. Refer the following image. (This image has been taken from this video.)
So suppose query is to find 50 , it will have to read 49 records as a linear search.
Refer the following image. (This image has been taken from this video)
When we apply indexing, the query will quickly find out the data without reading each one of them just by eliminating half of the data in each traversal like a binary search. The mysql indexes are stored as B-tree where all the data are in leaf node.
INDEX is a performance optimization technique that speeds up the data retrieval process. It is a persistent data structure that is associated with a Table (or View) in order to increase performance during retrieving the data from that table (or View).
Index based search is applied more particularly when your queries include WHERE filter. Otherwise, i.e, a query without WHERE-filter selects whole data and process. Searching whole table without INDEX is called Table-scan.
You will find exact information for Sql-Indexes in clear and reliable way:
follow these links:
For cocnept-wise understanding:
http://dotnetauthorities.blogspot.in/2013/12/Microsoft-SQL-Server-Training-Online-Learning-Classes-INDEX-Overview-and-Optimizations.html
For implementation-wise understanding:
http://dotnetauthorities.blogspot.in/2013/12/Microsoft-SQL-Server-Training-Online-Learning-Classes-INDEX-Creation-Deletetion-Optimizations.html
If you're using SQL Server, one of the best resources is its own Books Online that comes with the install! It's the 1st place I would refer to for ANY SQL Server related topics.
If it's practical "how should I do this?" kind of questions, then StackOverflow would be a better place to ask.
Also, I haven't been back for a while but sqlservercentral.com used to be one of the top SQL Server related sites out there.
An index is used for several different reasons. The main reason is to speed up querying so that you can get rows or sort rows faster. Another reason is to define a primary-key or unique index which will guarantee that no other columns have the same values.
So, How indexing actually works?
Well, first off, the database table does not reorder itself when we put index on a column to optimize the query performance.
An index is a data structure, (most commonly its B-tree {Its balanced tree, not binary tree}) that stores the value for a specific column in a table.
The major advantage of B-tree is that the data in it is sortable. Along with it, B-Tree data structure is time efficient and operations such as searching, insertion, deletion can be done in logarithmic time.
So the index would look like this -
Here for each column, it would be mapped with a database internal identifier (pointer) which points to the exact location of the row. And, now if we run the same query.
Visual Representation of the Query execution
So, indexing just cuts down the time complexity from o(n) to o(log n).
A detailed info - https://pankajtanwar.in/blog/what-is-the-sorting-algorithm-behind-order-by-query-in-mysql
INDEX is not part of SQL. INDEX creates a Balanced Tree on physical level to accelerate CRUD.
SQL is a language which describe the Conceptual Level Schema and External Level Schema. SQL doesn't describe Physical Level Schema.
The statement which creates an INDEX is defined by DBMS, not by SQL standard.
An index is an on-disk structure associated with a table or view that speeds retrieval of rows from the table or view. An index contains keys built from one or more columns in the table or view. These keys are stored in a structure (B-tree) that enables SQL Server to find the row or rows associated with the key values quickly and efficiently.
Indexes are automatically created when PRIMARY KEY and UNIQUE constraints are defined on table columns. For example, when you create a table with a UNIQUE constraint, Database Engine automatically creates a nonclustered index.
If you configure a PRIMARY KEY, Database Engine automatically creates a clustered index, unless a clustered index already exists. When you try to enforce a PRIMARY KEY constraint on an existing table and a clustered index already exists on that table, SQL Server enforces the primary key using a nonclustered index.
Please refer to this for more information about indexes (clustered and non clustered):
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/indexes/clustered-and-nonclustered-indexes-described?view=sql-server-ver15
Hope this helps!
Related
I have a large set of city, state pairs I'm loading into a SQLite table. I will be querying the city and will know the state. Suppose I want to look for a particular city that I know is in Texas. The following query is roughly O(n) notwithstanding the limit, right?
SELECT * FROM cities WHERE state_abbr=? LIMIT 1
Is there some way of grouping the rows by state or creating a secondary index or something so that SQLite knows where to the find the 'TX' rows and only search within them? I've considered creating separate tables for each state-- and that's an option-- but I'm hoping I can just do something within this single table to make the queries more efficient.
In the tutorials I've read, the query doesn't change after creating a composite index. Is SQLite just using the index under the hood on the same query?
Why not just have a composite index?
create index cities_state_abbr_city on cities(state, city);
I'm setting up my database and sometimes I'll need to use an ID. At first, I added an ID as a property to my nodes of interest but realized I could also just use neo4j's internal id "". Then I stumbled upon the CREATE INDEX ON :label(something) and was wondering exactly what this would do? I thought an index and the would be the same thing?
This might be a stupid question, but since I'm kind of a beginner in databases, I may be missing some of these concepts.
Also, I've been reading about which kind of database to use (mySQL, MongoDB or neo4j) and decided on neo4j since my data pretty much follows a graph structure. (it will be used to build metabolic models: connections genes->proteins->reactions->compounds)
In SQL the syntax just seemed too complex as I had to go around several tables to make simple connections that neo4j accomplishes quite easily...
From what I understand MongoDb stores data independently, and, since my data is connected, it doesnt really seem to fit the data structure.
But again, since my knowledge on this subject is limited, perhaps I'm not doing the right choice?
Thanks in advance.
Graph dbs are ideal for connected data like this, it's a more natural fit for both storing and querying than relational dbs or document stores.
As far as indexes and ids, here's the index section of the docs, but the gist of it is that this has to do with how Neo4j can look up starting nodes. Neo4j only uses indexes for finding these starting nodes (though in 3.5 when we do index lookup like this, if you have ORDER BY on the indexed property, it will use the index to augment the performance of the ordering).
Here is what Neo4j will attempt to use, depending on availability, from fastest to slowest:
Lookup by internal ID - This is always quick, however we don't recommend preserving these internal ids outside the context of a query. The reason for that is that when graph elements are deleted, their ids become eligible for reuse. If you preserve the internal ids outside of Neo4j, and perform a lookup with them later, there is a chance that whatever you expected it to reference could have been deleted, and may point at nothing, or may point at some new node with completely different data.
Lookup by index - This where you would want to use CREATE INDEX ON (or add a unique constraint, if that makes sense for your model). When you use a MATCH or MERGE using the label and property (or properties) associated with the index, then this is a fast and direct lookup of the node(s) you want.
Lookup by label scan - If you perform a MATCH with a label present in the pattern, but no means to use an index (either no index present for the label/property combination, or only a label is present but no property), then a label scan will be performed, and every node of the given label will be matched to and filtered. This becomes more expensive as more nodes with those labels are added.
All nodes scan - If you do not supply any label in your MATCH pattern, then every node in your db will be scanned and filtered. This is very expensive as your db grows.
You can EXPLAIN or PROFILE a query to see its query plan, which will show you which means of lookup are used to find the starting nodes, and the rest of the operations for executing the query.
Once a starting node or nodes are found, then Neo4j uses relationship traversal and filtering to expand and find all paths matching your desired pattern.
I have a 25k "row" parquet file (totaling 469.5kb) where each item in the parquet has a unique integer id. Knowing this i've put an index on this column, but it doesn't appear indexing the column actually affects performance when using Athena (AWS service) / Presto (underlying engine). I'm trying a simple select from where where I want to pull one of the rows by it's id-
SELECT *
FROM widgets w
WHERE w.id = 1
The id column is indexed, so once Presto finds this match it shouldn't do any further scanning. The column is also ordered, so it should be able to do a binary search the resolve the location instead of a dumb scan.
I can tell if the index is being used properly since Athena returns the number of bytes scanned in the operation. With and without the index, Athena returns the byte size of the file itself as the scan size, meaning it scanned the entire file. Just to be sure, ordering so that the id was the very first row also didn't have an affect.
Is this not possible with the current version of Athena/Presto? I am using python, pandas, and pyarrow.
You did not specify how you created the index, I assume you are talking about a Hive index. According to 1 and 2, Presto does not support Hive indexes. According to 3, Hive itself has dropped support for them in Hive 3.
That answers your question regarding why the presence of the index does not affect the way Presto executes the query. So what other ways are there to limit the amount of data that has to be processed?
Parquet metadata includes the min and max values per row group for each column. If you have multiple row groups in your table, only those will be read that could potentially match.
The upcoming PARQUET-1201 feature will add page-level indexes to the Parquet files themselves.
If you query specific columns, only those columns will be read.
If your table is partitioned, filtering for the "partition by" column will only read that partition.
Please note, however, that all of these measures only make sense for data sizes sevaral orders of magnitude larger than 500KB. In fact, Parquet itself is an overkill for such small tables. The default size of a row group is 128MB and you are expected to have many row groups.
I have a dictionary in Python where the keys are integers and the values sets of integers. Considering the potential size (millions of key-value pairs, where a set can contain from 1 to several hundreds of integers), I would like to store it in a SQL (?) database, rather than serialize it with pickle to store it and load it back in whenever I need it.
From reading around I see two potential ways to do this, both with its downsides:
Serialize the sets and store them as BLOBs: So I would get an SQL with two columns, the first column are the keys of the dictionary as INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, the second column are the BLOBS, containing a set of integers.
Downside: Not able to alter sets anymore without loading the complete BLOB in, and after adding a value to it, serialize it back and insert it back to the database as a BLOB.
Add a unique key for each element of each set: I would get two columns, one with the keys (which are now key_dictionary + index element of set/list), one with one integer value in each row. I'd now be able to add values to a "set" without having to load the whole set into python. I would have to put more work in keeping track of all the keys.
In addition, once the database is complete, I will always need sets as a whole, so idea 1 seems to be faster? If I query for all in primary keys BETWEEN certain values, or LIKE certain values, to obtain my whole set in system 2, will the SQL database (sqlite) still work as a hashtable? Or will it linearly search for all values that fit my BETWEEN or LIKE search?
Overall, what's the best way to tackle this problem? Obviously, if there's a completely different 3rd way that solves my problems naturally, feel free to suggest it! (haven't found any other solution by searching around)
I'm kind of new to Python and especially to databases, so let me know if my question isn't clear. :)
You second answer is nearly what I would recommend. What I would do is have three columns:
Set ID
Key
Value
I would then create a composite primary key on the Set ID and Key which guarantees that the combination is unique:
CREATE TABLE something (
set,
key,
value,
PRIMARY KEY (set, key)
);
You can now add a value straight into a particular set (Or update a key in a set) and select all keys in a set.
This being said, your first strategy would be more optimal for read-heavy workloads as the size of the indexes would be smaller.
will the SQL database (sqlite) still work as a hashtable?
SQL databases tend not to use hashtables. Nor do they usually do a sequential lookup. What they do is usually create an index (Which tends to be some kind of tree, e.g. a B-tree) which allows for range lookups (e.g. where you don't know exactly what keys you're looking for).
There's two columns in the table inside mysql database. First column contains the fingerprint while the second one contains the list of documents which have that fingerprint. It's much like an inverted index built by search engines. An instance of a record inside the table is shown below;
34 "doc1, doc2, doc45"
The number of fingerprints is very large(can range up to trillions). There are basically following operations in the database: inserting/updating the record & retrieving the record accoring to the match in fingerprint. The table definition python snippet is:
self.cursor.execute("CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `fingerprint` (fp BIGINT, documents TEXT)")
And the snippet for insert/update operation is:
if self.cursor.execute("UPDATE `fingerprint` SET documents=CONCAT(documents,%s) WHERE fp=%s",(","+newDocId, thisFP))== 0L:
self.cursor.execute("INSERT INTO `fingerprint` VALUES (%s, %s)", (thisFP,newDocId))
The only bottleneck i have observed so far is the query time in mysql. My whole application is web based. So time is a critical factor. I have also thought of using cassandra but have less knowledge of it. Please suggest me a better way to tackle this problem.
Get a high end database. Oracle has some offers. SQL Server also.
TRILLIONS of entries is well beyond the scope of a normal database. THis is very high end very special stuff, especially if you want decent performance. Also get the hardware for it - this means a decent mid range server, 128+gb memory for caching, and either a decent SAN or a good enough DAS setup via SAS.
Remember, TRILLIONS means:
1000gb used for EVERY BYTE.
If the fingerprint is stored as an int64 this is 8000gb disc space alone for this data.
Or do you try running that from a small cheap server iwth a couple of 2tb discs? Good luck.
That data structure isn't a great fit for SQL - the 'correct' design in SQL would be to have a row for each fingerprint/document pair, but querying would be impossibly slow unless you add an index that would take up too much space. For what you are trying to do, SQL adds a lot of overhead to support functions you don't need while not supporting the multiple value column that you do need.
A redis cluster might be a good fit - the atomic set operations should be perfect for what you are doing, and with the right virtual memory setup and consistent hashing to distribute the fingerprints across nodes it should be able to handle the data volume. The commands would then be
SADD fingerprint, docid
to add or update the record, and
SMEMBERS fingerprint
to get all the document ids with that fingerprint.
SADD is O(1). SMEMBERS is O(n), but n is the number of documents in the set, not the number of documents/fingerprints in the system, so effectively also O(1) in this case.
The SQL insert you are currently using is O(n) with n being the very large total number of records, because the records are stored as an ordered list which must be reordered on insert rather than a hash table which is constant time for both get and set.
Greenplum data warehouse, FOC, postgres driven, good luck ...