Develop Reference

Optimizing a code to populate database using python (Django)

I'm trying to populate a SQLite database using Django with data from a file that consists of 6 million records. However the code that I've written is giving me a lot of time issues even with 50000 records.
This is the code with which I'm trying to populate the database:
import os
def populate():
with open("filename") as f:
for line in f:
col = line.strip().split("|")
duns=col[1]
name=col[8]
job=col[12]
dun_add = add_c_duns(duns)
add_contact(c_duns = dun_add, fn=name, job=job)
def add_contact(c_duns, fn, job):
c = Contact.objects.get_or_create(duns=c_duns, fullName=fn, title=job)
return c
def add_c_duns(duns):
cd = Contact_DUNS.objects.get_or_create(duns=duns)[0]
return cd
if __name__ == '__main__':
print "Populating Contact db...."
os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "settings")
from web.models import Contact, Contact_DUNS
populate()
print "Done!!"
The code works fine since I have tested this with dummy records, and it gives the desired results. I would like to know if there is a way using which I can lower the execution time of this code. Thanks.

I don't have enough reputation to comment, but here's a speculative answer.
Basically the only way to do this through django's ORM is to use bulk_create . So the first thing to consider is the use of get_or_create. If your database has existing records that might have duplicates in the input file, then your only choice is writing the SQL yourself. If you use it to avoid duplicates inside the input file, then preprocess it to remove duplicate rows.
So if you can live without the get part of get_or_create, then you can follow this strategy:
Go through each row of the input file and instantiate a Contact_DUNS instance for each entry (don't actually create the rows, just write Contact_DUNS(duns=duns) ) and save all instances to an array. Pass the array to bulk_create to actually create the rows.
Generate a list of DUNS-id pairs with value_list and convert them to a dict with the DUNS number as the key and the row id as the value.
Repeat step 1 but with Contact instances. Before creating each instance use the DUNS number to get the Contact_DUNS id from the dictionary of step 2. The instantiate each Contact in the following way: Contact(duns_id=c_duns_id, fullName=fn, title=job). Again, after collecting the Contact instances just pass them to bulk_create to create the rows.
This should radically improve performance as you'll be no longer executing a query for each input line. But as I said above, this can only work if you can be certain that there are no duplicates in the database or the input file.
EDIT Here's the code:
import os
def populate_duns():
# Will only work if there are no DUNS duplicates
# (both in the DB and within the file)
duns_instances = []
with open("filename") as f:
for line in f:
duns = line.strip().split("|")[1]
duns_instances.append(Contact_DUNS(duns=duns))
# Run a single INSERT query for all DUNS instances
# (actually it will be run in batches run but it's still quite fast)
Contact_DUNS.objects.bulk_create(duns_instances)
def get_duns_dict():
# This is basically a SELECT query for these two fields
duns_id_pairs = Contact_DUNS.objects.values_list('duns', 'id')
return dict(duns_id_pairs)
def populate_contacts():
# Repeat the same process for Contacts
contact_instances = []
duns_dict = get_duns_dict()
with open("filename") as f:
for line in f:
col = line.strip().split("|")
duns = col[1]
name = col[8]
job = col[12]
ci = Contact(duns_id=duns_dict[duns],
fullName=name,
title=job)
contact_instances.append(ci)
# Again, run only a single INSERT query
Contact.objects.bulk_create(contact_instances)
if __name__ == '__main__':
print "Populating Contact db...."
os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "settings")
from web.models import Contact, Contact_DUNS
populate_duns()
populate_contacts()
print "Done!!"

CSV Import
First of all 6 million records is a quite a lot for sqllite and worse still sqlite isn't very good and importing CSV data directly.
There is no standard as to what a CSV file should look like, and the
SQLite shell does not even attempt to handle all the intricacies of
interpreting a CSV file. If you need to import a complex CSV file and
the SQLite shell doesn't handle it, you may want to try a different
front end, such as SQLite Database Browser.
On the other hand Mysql and Postgresql are more capable of handling CSV data and mysql's LOAD DATA IN FILE and Postgresql COPY are both painless ways to import very large amounts of data in a very short period of time.
Suitability of Sqlite.
You are using django => you are building a web app => more than one user will access the database. This is from the manual about concurrency.
SQLite supports an unlimited number of simultaneous readers, but it
will only allow one writer at any instant in time. For many
situations, this is not a problem. Writer queue up. Each application
does its database work quickly and moves on, and no lock lasts for
more than a few dozen milliseconds. But there are some applications
that require more concurrency, and those applications may need to seek
a different solution.
Even your read operations are likely to be rather slow because an sqlite database is just one single file. So with this amount of data there will be a lot of seek operations involved. The data cannot be spread across multiple files or even disks as is possible with proper client server databases.
The good news for you is that with Django you can usually switch from Sqlite to Mysql to Postgresql just by changing your settings.py. No other changes are needed. (The reverse isn't always true)
So I urge you to consider switching to mysql or postgresl before you get in too deep. It will help you solve your present problem and also help to avoid problems that you will run into sooner or later.

6,000,000 is quite a lot to import via Python. If Python is not a hard requirement, you could write a SQLite script that directly import the CSV data and create your tables using SQL statements. Even faster would be to preprocess your file using awk and output two CSV files corresponding to your two tables.
I used to import 20,000,000 records using sqlite3 CSV importer and it took only a few minutes minutes.

Python Storing Data

I have a list in my program. I have a function to append to the list, unfortunately when you close the program the thing you added goes away and the list goes back to the beginning. Is there any way that I can store the data so the user can re-open the program and the list is at its full.

You may try pickle module to store the memory data into disk,Here is an example:
store data:
import pickle
dataset = ['hello','test']
outputFile = 'test.data'
fw = open(outputFile, 'wb')
pickle.dump(dataset, fw)
fw.close()
load data:
import pickle
inputFile = 'test.data'
fd = open(inputFile, 'rb')
dataset = pickle.load(fd)
print dataset

You can make a database and save them, the only way is this. A database with SQLITE or a .txt file. For example:
with open("mylist.txt","w") as f: #in write mode
f.write("{}".format(mylist))
Your list goes into the format() function. It'll make a .txt file named mylist and will save your list data into it.
After that, when you want to access your data again, you can do:
with open("mylist.txt") as f: #in read mode, not in write mode, careful
rd=f.readlines()
print (rd)

The built-in pickle module provides some basic functionality for serialization, which is a term for turning arbitrary objects into something suitable to be written to disk. Check out the docs for Python 2 or Python 3.
Pickle isn't very robust though, and for more complex data you'll likely want to look into a database module like the built-in sqlite3 or a full-fledged object-relational mapping (ORM) like SQLAlchemy.

For storing big data, HDF5 library is suitable. It is implemented by h5py in Python.

Python: sharing sqlite cursor with two classes only, plus the database

I have a script built using procedural programming that uses a sqlite database file. The script processes a CSV file, then uses a standard cursor to pass its particulars to a single SQLite DB.
After this, the script extracts from the DB to produce a number of spreadsheets in Excel via xlwt.
The problem with this is that the script only handles one input file at a time, whereas I will need to be iterating through about 70-90 of these files on any given day.
I've been trying to rewrite the script as object-oriented, but I'm having trouble with sharing the cursor.
The original input file comes in a zip archive that I would extract via Linux or Mac OS X command lines. Previously this was done manually; now I've managed to write classes and loop through totally ad-hoc numbers of multiple input files via the multi version of tkfiledialog.
Furthermore the original input file (ie one of the 70-90) is a text file in csv format with a DRF extension (obv., not really important) that gets picked by a simple tkfiledialog box:
FILENAMER = tkFileDialog.askopenfilename(title="Open file", \
filetypes=[("txt file",".DRF"),("txt file", ".txt"),\
("All files",".*")])
The DRF file itself is issued daily by location and date, ie 'BHP0123.DRF' is for the BHP location, issued for 23 January. To keep everything as straightforward as possible the procedural script further decomposes the DRF to just the BHP0123 part or prefix, then uses it to build a SQLite DB.
FBASENAME = os.path.basename(FILENAMER)
FBROOT = os.path.splitext(FBNAMED)[0]
OUTPUTDATABASE = 'sqlite_' + FBROOT + '.db'
Basically with the program as a procedural script I just had to create one DB, one connection and one cursor, which could be shared by all the functions in the script:
conn = sqlite3.connect(OUTPUTDATABASE) # <-- originally :: Is this the core problem?
curs = conn.cursor()
conn.text_factory = sqlite3.OptimizedUnicode
In the procedural version these variables above are global.
Procedurally I have
1) one function to handle formatting, and
2) another to handle the calculations needed. The DRF is indexed with about 2500 fields per row; I discard the majority and only use about 400-500 of these per row.
The formatting function parses out the CSV via a for-loop (discards junk characters, incomplete data, etc), then passes the formatted data for the calculator to process and chew on. The core problem seems to be that on the one hand I need the DB connection to be constant for each input DRF file, but on the other that connection can only be shared by the formatter and calculator, and 'regenerated' for each DRF.
Crucially, I've tried to rewrite as little of the formatter and calculator as possible.
I've tried to create a separate dbcxn class, then create an instance to share, but I'm confused as to how to handle the output DB situation with the cursor (and pass it intact to both formatter and calculator):
class DBcxn(object):
def __init__(self, OUTPUTDATABASE):
OUTPUTDATABASE = ?????
self.OUTPUTDATABASE = OUTPUTDATABASE
def init_db_cxn(self, OUTPUTDATABASE):
conn = sqlite3.connect(OUTPUTDATABASE) # < ????
self.conn = conn
curs = conn.cursor()
self.curs = curs
conn.text_factory = sqlite3.OptimizedUnicode
dbtest = DBcxn( ???? )
If anyone might suggest a way of untangling this I'd be very grateful. Please let me know if you need more information.
Cheers
Massimo Savino

Extract and sort data from .mdb file using mdbtools in Python

I'm quite new to Python, so any help will be appreciated. I am trying to extract and sort data from 2000 .mdb files using mdbtools on Linux. So far I was able to just take the .mdb file and dump all the tables into .csv. It creates huge mess since there are lots of files that need to be processed.
What I need is to extract particular sorted data from particular table. Like for example, I need the table called "Voltage". The table consists of numerous cycles and each cycle has several rows also. The cycles usually go in chronological order, but in some cases time stamp get recorded with delay. Like cycle's one first row can have later time than cycles 1 first row. I need to extract the latest row of the cycle based on time for the first or last five cycles. For example, in table below, I will need the second row.
Cycle# Time Data
1 100.59 34
1 101.34 54
1 98.78 45
2
2
2 ...........
Here is the script I use. I am using the command python extract.py table_files.mdb. But I would like the script to just be invoked with ./extract.py. The path to filenames should be in the script itself.
import sys, subprocess, os
DATABASE = sys.argv[1]
subprocess.call(["mdb-schema", DATABASE, "mysql"])
# Get the list of table names with "mdb-tables"
table_names = subprocess.Popen(["mdb-tables", "-1", DATABASE],
stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]
tables = table_names.splitlines()
print "BEGIN;" # start a transaction, speeds things up when importing
sys.stdout.flush()
# Dump each table as a CSV file using "mdb-export",
# converting " " in table names to "_" for the CSV filenames.
for table in tables:
if table != '':
filename = table.replace(" ","_") + ".csv"
file = open(filename, 'w')
print("Dumping " + table)
contents = subprocess.Popen(["mdb-export", DATABASE, table],
stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]
file.write(contents)
file.close()

Personally, I wouldn't spend a whole lot of time fussing around trying to get mdbtools, unixODBC and pyodbc to work together. As Pedro suggested in his comment, if you can get mdb-export to dump the tables to CSV files then you'll probably save a fair bit of time by just importing those CSV files into SQLite or MySQL, i.e., something that will be more robust than using mdbtools on the Linux platform.
A few suggestions:
Given the sheer number of .mdb files (and hence .csv files) involved, you'll probably want to import the CSV data into one big table with an additional column to indicate the source filename. That will be much easier to manage than ~2000 separate tables.
When creating your target table in the new database you'll probably want to use a decimal (as opposed to float) data type for the [Time] column.
At the same time, rename the [Cycle#] column to just [Cycle]. "Funny characters" in column names can be a real nuisance.
Finally, to select the "last" reading (largest [Time] value) for a given [SourceFile] and [Cycle] you can use a query something like this:
SELECT
v1.SourceFile,
v1.Cycle,
v1.Time,
v1.Data
FROM
Voltage v1
INNER JOIN
(
SELECT
SourceFile,
Cycle,
MAX([Time]) AS MaxTime
FROM Voltage
GROUP BY SourceFile, Cycle
) v2
ON v1.SourceFile=v2.SourceFile
AND v1.Cycle=v2.Cycle
AND v1.Time=v2.MaxTime

To bring it directly to Pandas in python3 I wrote this little snippet
import sys, subprocess, os
from io import StringIO
import pandas as pd
VERBOSE = True
def mdb_to_pandas(database_path):
subprocess.call(["mdb-schema", database_path, "mysql"])
# Get the list of table names with "mdb-tables"
table_names = subprocess.Popen(["mdb-tables", "-1", database_path],
stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]
tables = table_names.splitlines()
sys.stdout.flush()
# Dump each table as a stringio using "mdb-export",
out_tables = {}
for rtable in tables:
table = rtable.decode()
if VERBOSE: print('running table:',table)
if table != '':
if VERBOSE: print("Dumping " + table)
contents = subprocess.Popen(["mdb-export", database_path, table],
stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]
temp_io = StringIO(contents.decode())
print(table, temp_io)
out_tables[table] = pd.read_csv(temp_io)
return out_tables

There's an alternative to mdbtools for Python: JayDeBeApi with the UcanAccess driver. It uses a Python -> Java bridge which slows things down, but I've been using it with considerable success and comes with decent error handling.
It takes some practice setting it up, but if you have a lot of databases to wrangle, it's well worth it.

Reading DBF files with pyodbc

In a project, I need to extract data from a Visual FoxPro database, which is stored in dbf files, y have a data directory with 539 files I need to take into account, each file represents a database table, so I've been doing some testing and my code goes like this:
import pyodbc
connection = pyodbc.connect("Driver={Microsoft Visual FoxPro Driver};SourceType=DBF;SourceDB=P:\\Data;Exclusive=No;Collate=Machine;NULL=No;DELETED=Yes")
tables = connection.cursor().tables()
for _ in tables:
print _
this prints only 15 tables, with no obvious pattern, always the same 15 tables, I thought this was because the rest of the tables were empty but I checked and it some of the tables (dbf files) on the list are empty too, then, I thought it was a permission issue, but all the files have the same permission structure, so, I don't know what's happening here.
Any light??
EDIT:
It is not truccating the output, the tables it list are not the 15 first or anything like that

I DID IT!!!!
There where several problems with what I was doing so, here I come with what I did to solve it (after implementing it the first time with Ethan Furman's solution)
The first thing was a driver problem, it turns out that the Windows' DBF drivers are 32 bits programs and runs on a 64 bits operating system, so, I had installed Python-amd64 and that was the first problem, so I installed a 32bit Python.
The second issue was a library/file issue, according to this, dbf files in VFP > 7 are diferent, so my pyodbc library won't read them correctly, so I tried some OLE-DB libraries with no success and I decided to to it from scratch.
Googling for a while took me to this post which finally gave me a light on this
Basically, what I did was the following:
import win32com.client
conn = win32com.client.Dispatch('ADODB.Connection')
db = 'C:\\Profit\\profit_a\\ARMM'
dsn = 'Provider=VFPOLEDB.1;Data Source=%s' % db
conn.Open(dsn)
cmd = win32com.client.Dispatch('ADODB.Command')
cmd.ActiveConnection = conn
cmd.CommandText = "Select * from factura, reng_fac where factura.fact_num = reng_fac.fact_num AND factura.fact_num = 6099;"
rs, total = cmd.Execute() # This returns a tuple: (<RecordSet>, number_of_records)
while total:
for x in xrange(rs.Fields.Count):
print '%s --> %s' % (rs.Fields.item(x).Name, rs.Fields.item(x).Value)
rs.MoveNext() #<- Extra indent
total = total - 1
And it gave me 20 records which I checked with DBFCommander and were OK
First, you need to install pywin32 extensions (32bits) and the Visual FoxPro OLE-DB Provider (only available for 32bits), in my case for VFP 9.0
Also, it's good to read de ADO Documentation at the w3c website
This worked for me. Thank you very much to those who replied

I would use my own dbf package and the code would go something like this:
import dbf
from glob import glob
for dbf_file in glob(r'p:\data\*.dbf'):
with dbf.Table(dbf_file) as table:
for record in table:
do_something_with(record)
A table is list-like, and iteration through it returns records. A record is list-, dict-, and obj-like, and iteration returns the values; besides iteration through the record, individual fields can be accessed either by offset (record[0] for the first field), by field-name using dict-like access (record['some_field']), or by field-name using obj.attr-like access (record.some_field).
If you just wanted to dump the contents of each dbf file into a csv file you could do:
for dbf_file in glob(r'p:\data\*.dbf'):
with dbf.Table(dbf_file) as table:
dbf.export(table, dbf_file)

I know this doesn't directly answer your question, but might still help. I've had lots of issues using ODBC with VFP databases and I've found it's often much easier treating the VFP tables as free tables when possible.
Using Yusdi Santoso's dbf.py and glob, here's some code to open each table in a directory and run through each record.
import glob
import os
import dbf
os.chdir("P:\\data")
for file in glob.glob("*.dbf"):
table = dbf.readDbf(file)
for row in table:
#do stuff