this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
19 points (100.0% liked)

Programming

20237 readers
501 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]



founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
19
database greenhorn (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

hi my dears, I have an issue at work where we have to work with millions (150 mln~) of product data points. We are using SQL server because it was inhouse available for development. however using various tables growing beyond 10 mln the server becomes quite slow and waiting/buffer time becomes >7000ms/sec. which is tearing our complete setup of various microservices who read, write and delete from the tables continuously down. All the stackoverflow answers lead to - its complex. read a 2000 page book.

the thing is. my queries are not that complex. they simply go through the whole table to identify any duplicates which are not further processed then, because the processing takes time (which we thought would be the bottleneck). but the time savings to not process duplicates seems now probably less than that it takes to compare batches with the SQL table. the other culprit is that our server runs on a HDD which is with 150mb read and write per second probably on its edge.

the question is. is there a wizard move to bypass any of my restriction or is a change in the setup and algorithm inevitable?

edit: I know that my questions seems broad. but as I am new to database architecture I welcome any input and discussion since the topic itself is a lifetime know-how by itself. thanks for every feedbach.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

BTW, your hard disks are going to be your bottleneck unless you’re reaching out over the internet, so your best bet is to move that data onto an NVMe SSD. That’ll blow any other suggestion I have out of the water.

Yes, we are currently in the process of migrating to PostgreSQL and to a new hardware. Nonetheless the approach we are using is a disaster. So we will refactor our approach as well. Appreciate your input.

I don’t know what language you’re working in.

All processing and SQL related transactions are executed via python. But should not have any influence since the SQL server is the bottleneck.

WITH (NOLOCK)

Yes I have considered this already for the next update. Since our setup can accept dirty reads - but I have not tested/quantified any benefits yet.

Don’t do a write and a read at the same time since you’re on HDDs.

While I understand the underlying issue here, I do not know yet how to control this. Since we have multiple microservices set up which are connected to the DB and either fetch (read), write or delete from different tables. But to my understanding since I am currently not using NOLOCK such occurrences should be handled by SQL no? What I mean is that during a process the object is locked - so no other process can interfere on the SQL object?

Thanks for putting this together I will review it tomorrow again (Y).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

Thanks for giving it a good read through! If you're getting on nvme ssds, you may find some of your problems just go away. The difference could be insane.

I was reading something recently about databases or disk layouts that were meant for business applications vs ones meant for reporting and one difference was that on disk they were either laid out by row vs by column.