I have a client that needs roughly 250,000 items removed monthly from a file containing 5-6 million records.
Since there is no need to use the keys (records) for any other purpose except for deleting because they are old, a standard data/basic SELECT statement is just about as fast as you can get. It isn't encumbered by the number of selected keys as it's not retaining them for any purpose. This simple program looks like this: OPEN "MASTER" TO F.MASTER ELSE STOP OPEN "REFERENCE" TO F.REFERENCE ELSE STOP DEL.DTE=ICONV("01/02/2003","D") SELECT F.MASTER 10 READNEXT ID ELSE STOP READV DTE FROM F.MASTER, ID, 5 ELSE GOTO 10 IF DTE GT DEL.DATE THEN GOTO 10 DELETE F.MASTER, ID DELETE F.REFERENCE, ID GOTO 10 END Of course if there's additional use for the deleted keys, then use another approach. my 1 cent. ----- Original Message ----- From: "ashish ratna" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Anthony Youngman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, March 15, 2004 7:55 AM Subject: RE: Help Needed regarding performance improvement of delete query Hi Wol, The scenario is that- We have a master file having more than 3-4 million records and have corresponding reference file which contains reference data for this master file. Now we start our purge program which selects records from master file on the basis of date. Corresponding data should be deleted from the other file (reference file). For this requirement we have adopted the approach that- select the record from master file on the basis of date. Save the list of these records, then on the basis of this list select the records from reference file. Issue is that this list contains more than 0.5 million and I want to take few (say 10,000 at a time) record ids from this list for further processing. Any pointers for this problem will be very helpful. Thanks in advance. Ashish. -----Original Message----- From: Anthony Youngman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, March 15, 2004 4:50 PM To: ashish ratna Subject: RE: Help Needed regarding performance improvement of delete query Ahhh I thought you were selecting records and deleting them. So the first thousand would have disappeared, and you would obviously get a different thousand next time round because the first lot would have gone :-) Sounds like that's not the case. In that case, do you have a field that is repeated across many records, but where each individual value (or range of values) wouldn't return too big a bunch of records? Or do you have a numeric id - you could declare an index on that ... Let's take that numeric id idea - and then you'll have to build on it for yourself. Declare an i-descriptor as @ID[3]. That logically partitions your file into a thousand pieces. Declare an index on this. The first term in your select will then be "WITH IDESC EQ whatever-number-you-want". That'll reduce the load on the database for each pass, you'll just need to wrap it in a loop where "whatever-number" goes from 0 to 999 Actually, what I would probably do is declare my i-descriptor as INT(@ID/30) and then run this purge daily with "whatever-number" as today's day. Obviously, it'll do nothing on the 31sts, and in March it'll do two month's work on the 29th and 30th, but you've reduced the "hit" on the system considerably. Without knowing what you're doing in more detail, it's difficult to give you any proper advice, but certainly I'll try and think of any tips that you can build upon, like this. But you need to work out what's right for you :-) NB Any reason for taking this off the mailing list? By all means cc it to me, but if you keep it on the list there are other people who may be able to help too - I'm very good at overviews, but I fall short on the logic - I think there is a way to get the next thousand records, but I haven't got a clue what the syntax is ... Cheers, Wol -----Original Message----- From: ashish ratna [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 15 March 2004 10:33 To: Anthony Youngman Subject: RE: Help Needed regarding performance improvement of delete query Hi, Thanks for the nice suggestions. I have another question that, using SAMPLE once I process 1000 records (using SAMPLE 1000), how can I select next 1000 records in next run (i.e. 1001 to 2000 records and so on)? I was trying few combinations but didn't succeeded. Can you tell me the syntax for that? Thanks again. Regards, Ashish. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Anthony Youngman Sent: Monday, March 15, 2004 2:32 PM To: U2 Users Discussion List Subject: RE: Help Needed regarding performance improvement of delete query This might help speed things up a bit ... Firstly, of course, is your file properly sized? Secondly, (and in this case you will need to run the SELECT / DELETE sequence several times) try putting a SAMPLE 1000 (or whatever number makes sense) at the end of your select. Basically, this will mean that the SELECT runs until it finds that number of records and then stops. So each sequence won't load the system so badly. Creating a huge select list will stress your ram badly ... looping through this sequence won't stress the system so badly, though you really do need to use indices to reduce the stress even more ... Create an index on various fields that you're using as your select criteria. If you're selecting old records, then you need to select on date, and this really will make life both easy and fast. The more closely you can guarantee that a select, acting on a single index, will pick up only or mostly records that you are going to delete, the better. That will SERIOUSLY reduce the time taken and the performance hit. Cheers, Wol -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of ashish ratna Sent: 15 March 2004 08:25 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Help Needed regarding performance improvement of delete query Hi All, We are working for purging of old data from the database. But we are facing performance problems in this. We are using select query which is created dynamically on the basis of number of records. We want to know if there is any limit for size of query in Universe. Although in universe help pdf it is mentioned that there is no limit for the length of select query. But when we run the program on the file with records more than 0.5 million it gave the error- "Pid 14433 received a SIGSEGV for stack growth failure. Possible causes: insufficient memory or swap space, or stack size exceeded maxssiz. Memory fault(coredump)" If there is no limitation on the size of query then please suggest some other possible solution which can help us reducing the time of query and completing the process successfully without giving the error. Thanks in advance. Regards, Ashish. ************************************************************************ *********** This transmission is intended for the named recipient only. It may contain private and confidential information. If this has come to you in error you must not act on anything disclosed in it, nor must you copy it, modify it, disseminate it in any way, or show it to anyone. 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