Processing huge data from sql server - c#

I have a stored procedure (SQL Server 2016) which currently returns 100K to 200K rows based on the parameters to that SP.
Each row can be a size of 100KB to 200KB. So total size can be around 10GB to 20GB.
My client(background job) has to call this SP and process all rows and send it to another client.
What is the best approach to handle such scenarios?
Currently I am thinking of using streaming enumerator using yield.
Get the record whenever the 'datareader.Read()' read a row and process it and send it to other client.
dataReader = command.ExecuteReader();
while (dataReader.Read())
{
obj = new SomeClass();
// prepare Someclass
yield return obj;
}
Is this approach sufficient to handler such large data?
Is there any better approach to it? (Such as multi threading etc.)
If so how should I approach to it. Any pointers to refer?
Edit: SP has multiple joins and runs couple of times in a day.

According to your description, I believe that it represents a good scenario for implementing an SSIS (Integration Services) which can manage and write the final results into a CSV file and allow the customer to exchange it.

Related

C# Reading SQLite table concurrently

The goal here is to use SQL to read a SQLite database, uncompress a BLOB field, and parse the data. The parsed data is written to a different SQLite DB using EF6. Because the size of the incoming database could be 200,000 records or more, I want to do this all in parallel with 4 C# Tasks.
SQLite is in its default SERIALIZED mode. I am converting a working single background task into multiple tasks. The SQLite docs say to use a single connection and so I am using a single connection for all the tasks to read the database:
using sqlite_datareader = sqlite_cmd.ExecuteReader();
while (sqlite_datareader.Read() && !Token.IsCancellationRequested)
{
....
}
However, each task reads each record of the database. Not what I want. I need each task to take the next record from the table.
Any ideas?
From SQLite's standpoint, it's likely the limiting factor is the raw disk or network I/O. Naively splitting the basic query into separate tasks or parts would mean more seeks, which makes things slower. We see, then, that the fastest way to get the raw data from the DB is a simple query over a single connection, just like the sqlite documentation says.
But now we want to do some meaningful processing on this data, and this part might benefit from parallel work. What you need to do to get good parallelization, therefore, is create a queuing system as you receive each record.
For this, you want a single process to send the one SQL statement to the sqlite database and retrieve the results from the datareader. This thread will then queue an additional task from each record as quickly as possible, such that each task acts only the received data for the one record... that is, the additional tasks neither know nor care the data came from a database or any other specific source.
The result is you'll end up with as many tasks as you have records. However, you don't have to run that many tasks all at once. You can tune it to 4 or whatever other number you want (2 * the number CPU cores is a good rule of thumb to start with). And the easiest way to do this is to turn to ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem().
As we do this, one thing to remember is the DataReader will mutate itself with each read. So our main thread creating the queue must also be smart enough to copy this data to a new object with each read, so the individual threads don't end up looking at data that was already changed out for a later record.
using sqlite_datareader = sqlite_cmd.ExecuteReader();
while (sqlite_datareader.Read())
{
var temp = CopyDataFromReader(sqlite_datareader);
ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(a => ProcessRecord(temp));
}
Additionally, each task itself has some overhead. If you have enough records, you may also gain some benefit from batching up a bunch of records before sending them to the queue:
int index = 0;
object[] temp;
using sqlite_datareader = sqlite_cmd.ExecuteReader();
while (sqlite_datareader.Read())
{
temp[count] = CopyDataFromReader(sqlite_datareader);
if (++count >= 50)
{
ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(a => ProcessRecords(temp, 50));
count = 0;
}
}
if (count != 0) ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(a => ProcessRecords(temp, count));
Finally, you probably want to do something with this data once it is no longer compressed. One option is wait for all the items to finish, so you can stitch them back into a single IEnumerable of some variety (List, Array, DataTable, iterator, etc). Another is to make sure to include all of the work with the ProcessRecord() method. Another is to use an Event delegate to signal when each item is ready for further work.

What is the best way to load huge result set in memory?

I am trying to load 2 huge resultsets(source and target) coming from different RDBMS but the problem with which i am struggling is getting those 2 huge result set in memory.
Considering below are the queries to pull data from source and target:
Sql Server -
select Id as LinkedColumn,CompareColumn from Source order by LinkedColumn
Oracle -
select Id as LinkedColumn,CompareColumn from Target order by LinkedColumn
Records in Source : 12377200
Records in Target : 12266800
Following are the approaches i have tried with some statistics:
1) open data reader approach for reading source and target data:
Total jobs running in parallel = 3
Time taken by Job1 = 01:47:25
Time taken by Job1 = 01:47:25
Time taken by Job1 = 01:48:32
There is no index on Id Column.
Major time is spent here:
var dr = command.ExecuteReader();
Problems:
There are timeout issues also for which i have to kept commandtimeout to 0(infinity) and it is bad.
2) Chunk by chunk reading approach for reading source and target data:
Total jobs = 1
Chunk size : 100000
Time Taken : 02:02:48
There is no index on Id Column.
3) Chunk by chunk reading approach for reading source and target data:
Total jobs = 1
Chunk size : 100000
Time Taken : 00:39:40
Index is present on Id column.
4) open data reader approach for reading source and target data:
Total jobs = 1
Index : Yes
Time: 00:01:43
5) open data reader approach for reading source and target data:
Total jobs running in parallel = 3
Index : Yes
Time: 00:25:12
I observed that while having an index on LinkedColumn does improve performance, the problem is we are dealing with a 3rd party RDBMS table which might not have an index.
We would like to keep database server as free as possible so data reader approach doesn't seem like a good idea because there will be lots of jobs running in parallel which will put so much pressure on database server which we don't want.
Hence we want to fetch records in the resource memory from source to target and do 1 - 1 records comparison to keep the database server free.
Note: I want to do this in my c# application and don't want to use SSIS or Linked Server.
Update:
Source Sql Query Execution time in sql server management studio: 00:01:41
Target Sql Query Execution time in sql server management studio:00:01:40
What will be the best way to read huge result set in memory?
Code:
static void Main(string[] args)
{
// Running 3 jobs in parallel
//Task<string>[] taskArray = { Task<string>.Factory.StartNew(() => Compare()),
//Task<string>.Factory.StartNew(() => Compare()),
//Task<string>.Factory.StartNew(() => Compare())
//};
Compare();//Run single job
Console.ReadKey();
}
public static string Compare()
{
Stopwatch stopwatch = new Stopwatch();
stopwatch.Start();
var srcConnection = new SqlConnection("Source Connection String");
srcConnection.Open();
var command1 = new SqlCommand("select Id as LinkedColumn,CompareColumn from Source order by LinkedColumn", srcConnection);
var tgtConnection = new SqlConnection("Target Connection String");
tgtConnection.Open();
var command2 = new SqlCommand("select Id as LinkedColumn,CompareColumn from Target order by LinkedColumn", tgtConnection);
var drA = GetReader(command1);
var drB = GetReader(command2);
stopwatch.Stop();
string a = stopwatch.Elapsed.ToString(#"d\.hh\:mm\:ss");
Console.WriteLine(a);
return a;
}
private static IDataReader GetReader(SqlCommand command)
{
command.CommandTimeout = 0;
return command.ExecuteReader();//Culprit
}
There is nothing (I know of) faster than a DataReader for fetching db records.
Working with large databases comes with its challenges, reading 10 million records in under 2 seconds is pretty good.
If you want faster you can:
jdwend's suggestion:
Use sqlcmd.exe and the Process class to run query and put results into a csv file and then read the csv into c#. sqlcmd.exe is designed to archive large databases and runs 100x faster than the c# interface. Using linq methods are also faster than the SQL Client class
Parallize your queries and fetch concurrently merging results: https://shahanayyub.wordpress.com/2014/03/30/how-to-load-large-dataset-in-datagridview/
The easiest (and IMO the best for a SELECT * all) is to throw hardware at it:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/hardware-is-cheap-programmers-are-expensive/
Also make sure you're testing on the PROD hardware, in release mode as that could skew your benchmarks.
This is a pattern that I use. It gets the data for a particular record set into a System.Data.DataTable instance and then closes and disposes all un-managed resources ASAP. Pattern also works for other providers under System.Data include System.Data.OleDb, System.Data.SqlClient, etc. I believe the Oracle Client SDK implements the same pattern.
// don't forget this using statements
using System.Data;
using System.Data.SqlClient;
// here's the code.
var connectionstring = "YOUR_CONN_STRING";
var table = new DataTable("MyData");
using (var cn = new SqlConnection(connectionstring))
{
cn.Open();
using (var cmd = cn.CreateCommand())
{
cmd.CommandText = "Select [Fields] From [Table] etc etc";
// your SQL statement here.
using (var adapter = new SqlDataAdapter(cmd))
{
adapter.Fill(table);
} // dispose adapter
} // dispose cmd
cn.Close();
} // dispose cn
foreach(DataRow row in table.Rows)
{
// do something with the data set.
}
I think I would deal with this problem in a different way.
But before lets make some assumptions:
According to your question description, you will get data from SQL Server and Oracle
Each query will return a bunch of data
You do not specify what is the point of getting all that data in memory, neither the use of it.
I assume that the data you will process is going to be used multiple times and you will not repeat both queries multiple times.
And whatever you will do with the data, probably is not going to be displayed to the user all at the same time.
Having these foundation points I would process the following:
Think at this problem as a data processing
Have a third database or some other place with auxiliar Database tables where you can store all the result of the 2 queries.
To avoid timeouts or so, try to obtain the data using pagging (get thousands at a time) and save then in these aux DB tables, and NOT in "RAM" memory.
As soon as your logic completes all the data loading (import migration), then you can start processing it.
Data processing is a key point of database engines, they are efficient and lots of evolution during many years, do don't spend time reinventing the wheel. Use some Stored procedure to "crunch/process/merge" of the 2 auxiliary tables into only 1.
Now that you have all "merged" data in a 3th aux table, now you can use it to display or something else you need to use it.
If you want to read it faster, you must use original API to get the data faster. Avoid framework like linq and do rely on DataReader that one. Try to check weather you need something like dirty read (with(nolock) in sql server).
If your data is very huge, try to implement partial read. Something like making index to your data. Maybe you can put condition where date from - to until everything selected.
After that you must consider using Threading in your system to parallelize the flow. Actually 1 thread to get from job 1, another thread to get from job 2. This one will cut lot of time.
Technicalities aside, I think there is a more fundamental problem here.
select [...] order by LinkedColumn
I does observe that while having index on LinkedColumn does improve performance but the problem is we are dealing with 3rd party RDBMS tables which might have index or might not.
We would like to keep database server as free as possible
If you cannot ensure that the DB has a tree based index on that column, it means the DB will be quite busy sorting your millions of elements. It's slow and resource hungry. Get rid of the order by in the SQL statement and perform it on application side to get results faster and reduce load on DB ...or ensure the DB has such an index!!!
...depending if this fetching is a common or a rare operation, you'll want to either enforce a proper index in the DB, or just fetch it all and sort it client side.
I had a similar situation many years ago. Before I looked at the problem it took 5 days running continuously to move data between 2 systems using SQL.
I took a different approach.
We extracted the data from the source system into just a small number of files representing a flattened out data model and arranged the data in each file so it all naturally flowed in the proper sequence as we read from the files.
I then wrote a Java program that processed these flattened data files and produced individual table load files for the target system. So, for example, the source extract had less than a dozen data files from the source system which turned into 30 to 40 or so load files for the target database.
That process would run in just a few minutes and I incorporated full auditing and error reporting and we could quickly spot problems and discrepancies in the source data, get them fixed, and run the processor again.
The final piece of the puzzle was a multi-threaded utility I wrote that performed a parallel bulk load on each load file into the target Oracle database. This utility created a Java process for each table and used Oracle's bulk table load program to quickly push the data into the Oracle DB.
When all was said and done that 5 day SQL-SQL transfer of millions of records turned into just 30 minutes using a combination of Java and Oracle's bulk load capabilities. And there were no errors and we accounted for every penny of every account that was transferred between systems.
So, maybe think outside the SQL box and use Java, the file system, and Oracle's bulk loader. And make sure you're doing your file IO on solid state hard drives.
If you need to process large database result sets from Java, you can opt for JDBC to give you the low level control required. On the other hand, if you are already using an ORM in your application, falling back to JDBC might imply some extra pain. You would be losing features such as optimistic locking, caching, automatic fetching when navigating the domain model and so forth. Fortunately most ORMs, like Hibernate, have some options to help you with that. While these techniques are not new, there are a couple of possibilities to choose from.
A simplified example; let's assume we have a table (mapped to class "DemoEntity") with 100.000 records. Each record consists of a single column (mapped to the property "property" in DemoEntity) holding some random alphanumerical data of about ~2KB. The JVM is ran with -Xmx250m. Let's assume that 250MB is the overall maximum memory that can be assigned to the JVM on our system. Your job is to read all records currently in the table, doing some not further specified processing, and finally store the result. We'll assume that the entities resulting from our bulk operation are not modified

SQL Server - Best practice to circumvent large IN (...) clause (>40000 items)

I'm developing an ASP.NET app that analyzes Excel files uploaded by user. The files contain various data about customers (one row = one customer), the key field is CustomerCode. Basically the data comes in form of DataTable object.
At some point I need to get information about the specified customers from SQL and compare it to what user uploaded. I'm doing it the following way:
Make a comma-separated list of customers from CustomerCode column: 'Customer1','Customer2',...'CustomerN'.
Pass this string to SQL query IN (...) clause and execute it.
This was working okay until I ran into The query processor ran out of internal resources and could not produce a query plan exception when trying to pass ~40000 items inside IN (...) clause.
The trivial ways seems to:
Replace IN (...) with = 'SomeCustomerCode' in query template.
Execute this query 40000 times for each CustomerCode.
Do DataTable.Merge 40000 times.
Is there any better way to work this problem around?
Note: I can't do IN (SELECT CustomerCode FROM ... WHERE SomeConditions) because the data comes from Excel files and thus cannot be queried from DB.
"Table valued parameters" would be worth investigating, which let you pass in (usually via a DataTable on the C# side) multiple rows - the downside is that you need to formally declare and name the data shape on the SQL server first.
Alternatively, though: you could use SqlBulkCopy to throw the rows into a staging table, and then just JOIN to that table. If you have parallel callers, you will need some kind of session identifier on the row to distinguish between concurrent uses (and: don't forget to remove your session's data afterwards).
You shouldn't process too many records at once, because of errors as you mentioned, and it is such a big batch that it takes too much time to run and you can't do anything in parallel. You shouldn't process only 1 record at a time either, because then the overhead of the SQL server communication will be too big. Choose something in the middle, process eg. 10000 records at a time. You can even parallelize the processing, you can start running the SQL for the next 10000 in the background while you are processing the previous 10000 batch.

'Streaming' data into Sql server

I'm working on a project where we're receiving data from multiple sources, that needs to be saved into various tables in our database.
Fast.
I've played with various methods, and the fastest I've found so far is using a collection of TableValue parameters, filling them up and periodically sending them to the database via a corresponding collection of stored procedures.
The results are quite satisfying. However, looking at disk usage (% Idle Time in Perfmon), I can see that the disk is getting periodically 'thrashed' (a 'spike' down to 0% every 13-18 seconds), whilst in between the %Idle time is around 90%. I've tried varying the 'batch' size, but it doesn't have an enormous influence.
Should I be able to get better throughput by (somehow) avoiding the spikes while decreasing the overall idle time?
What are some things I should be looking out to work out where the spiking is happening? (The database is in Simple recovery mode, and pre-sized to 'big', so it's not the log file growing)
Bonus: I've seen other questions referring to 'streaming' data into the database, but this seems to involve having a Stream from another database (last section here). Is there any way I could shoe-horn 'pushed' data into that?
A very easy way of inserting loads of data into an SQL-Server is -as mentioned- the 'bulk insert' method. ADO.NET offers a very easy way of doing this without the need of external files. Here's the code
var bulkCopy = new SqlBulkCopy(myConnection);
bulkCopy.DestinationTableName = "MyTable";
bulkCopy.WriteToServer (myDataSet);
That's easy.
But: myDataSet needs to have exactly the same structure as MyTable, i.e. Names, field types and order of fields must be exactly the same. If not, well there's a solution to that. It's column mapping. And this is even easier to do:
bulkCopy.ColumnMappings.Add("ColumnNameOfDataSet", "ColumnNameOfTable");
That's still easy.
But: myDataSet needs to fit into memory. If not, things become a bit more tricky as we have need a IDataReader derivate which allows us to instantiate it with an IEnumerable.
You might get all the information you need in this article.
Building on the code referred to in alzaimar's answer, I've got a proof of concept working with IObservable (just to see if I can). It seems to work ok. I just need to put together some tidier code to see if this is actually any faster than what I already have.
(The following code only really makes sense in the context of the test program in code download in the aforementioned article.)
Warning: NSFW, copy/paste at your peril!
private static void InsertDataUsingObservableBulkCopy(IEnumerable<Person> people,
SqlConnection connection)
{
var sub = new Subject<Person>();
var bulkCopy = new SqlBulkCopy(connection);
bulkCopy.DestinationTableName = "Person";
bulkCopy.ColumnMappings.Add("Name", "Name");
bulkCopy.ColumnMappings.Add("DateOfBirth", "DateOfBirth");
using(var dataReader = new ObjectDataReader<Person>(people))
{
var task = Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
{
bulkCopy.WriteToServer(dataReader);
});
var stopwatch = Stopwatch.StartNew();
foreach(var person in people) sub.OnNext(person);
sub.OnCompleted();
task.Wait();
Console.WriteLine("Observable Bulk copy: {0}ms",
stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds);
}
}
It's difficult to comment without knowing the specifics, but one of the fastest ways to get data into SQL Server is Bulk Insert from a file.
You could write the incoming data to a temp file and periodically bulk insert it.
Streaming data into SQL Server Table-Valued parameter also looks like a good solution for fast inserts as they are held in memory. In answer to your question, yes you could use this, you just need to turn your data into a IDataReader. There's various ways to do this, from a DataTable for example see here.
If your disk is a bottleneck you could always optimise your infrastructure. Put database on a RAM disk or SSD for example.

How to stream data rows into sqlserver?

I need to copy large resultset from one database and save it to another database.
Stored procedures are used for both fetching and storing due to the fact that there is some logic involved during saving.
I'm trying to find an efficent solution, no way I can hold the whole dataset in memory, and I would like to minimize roundtrips count.
Data is read from source table with
var reader = fetchCommand.ExecuteReader();
while (reader.Read()){...}
Is there a way to insert this data to another sqlCommand without loading the whole dataset into a DataTable but also without inserting rows ine by one?
Sqlserver is MS SQL Server 2008 on both source and target databases. Databases are on different servers. Use of SSIS or linked servers is not an option.
EDIT:
It appears it's possible to stream rows into a stored procedure using table-valued paramaters. Will investigate this approach as well.
UPDATE:
Yes it's possible to stream data out from command.ExecuteReader to another command like this:
var reader = selectCommand.ExecuteReader();
insertCommand.Parameters.Add(
new SqlParameter("#data", reader)
{SqlDbType = SqlDbType.Structured}
);
insertCommand.ExecuteNonQuery();
Where insertCommand is a stored procedure with table-valued parameter #data.
You need SqlBulkCopy. You can just use it like this:
using (var reader = fetchCommand.ExecuteReader())
using (var bulkCopy = new SqlBulkCopy(myOtherDatabaseConnection))
{
bulkCopy.DestinationTableName = "...";
bulkCopy.ColumnMappings = ...
bulkCopy.WriteToServer(reader);
}
There is also a property to set the batch size. Something like 1000 rows might give you the best trade-off between memory usage and speed.
Although this doesn't let you pipe it into a stored procedure, the best approach might be to copy data to a temporary table and then run bulk update command on the server to copy the data into its final location. This usually faster by far than executing lots of separate statements for each row.
You can use SqlBulkCopy with a data-reader, which does roughly what you are asking (non-buffered etc) - however, this won't be calling stored procedures to insert. If you want that, perhaps use SqlBulkCopy to push the data into a second table (same structure), then at the DB server, loop over the rows calling the sproc locally. That way, latency etc ceases to be an issue (as the loop is all at the DB server).

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