Persistence strategy for low latency reads and writes

Question

I am building an application that includes a feature to bulk tag millions of records, more or less interactively. The user interaction is very similar to Gmail where users can tag individual emails, or bulk tag large amounts of emails. I also need quick read access to these tag memberships as well, and where the read pattern is more or less random.

Right now we're using Mysql and inserting one row for every tag-document pair. Writing millions of rows to Mysql takes a while (high I/O), even with bulk insertions and heavy optimization. We need this to be an interactive process, not a batch process.

For the data that we're storing and reading, consistency and availability of the data are not as important as performance and scalability. So in the event of system failure while the writes are occurring, I can deal with some data loss. However, the data definitely needs to be persisted to secondary storage at some point.

So, to sum up, here are the requirements:

• Low latency bulk writes of potentially tens of millions of records
• Data needs to be persisted in some way
• Low latency random reads
• Durable writes not required
• Eventual consistency is okay

Here are some solutions I've looked at:

• Write behind caches (Terracotta, Gigaspaces, Coherence) where records are written to memory and drained to the database asynchronously. These scare me a little because they appear to add a certain amount of complexity to the app that I'd want to avoid.
• Highly scalable key-value stores, like MongoDB, HBase, Tokyo Tyrant

Answer 1

If you have the budget to use Coherence for this, I highly recommend doing so. There is direct support for write-behind, eventual consistency behavior in Coherence and it is very survivable to both a database outage and Coherence cluster node outages (if you use >= 3 Coherence nodes on separate JVMs, preferably on separate hosts). I have implemented this for doing high-volume CRM for a Fortune 100 company's e-commerce site and it works fantastically.

One of the best aspects of this architecture is that you write your Java application code as if none of the write-behind behavior were taking place, and then plug in the Coherence topology and configuration that makes it happen. If you need to change the behavior or topology of Coherence later, no change in your application is required. I know there are probably a handful of reasonable ways to do this, but this behavior is directly supported in Coherence rather than having to invent or hand-roll a way of doing it.

To make a really fine point - your worry about adding application complexity is a good one. With Coherence, you simply write updates to the cache (or if you're using Hibernate it can be the L2 cache provider). Depending upon your Coherence configuration and topology, you have the option to deploy your application to use write-behind, distributed, caches. So, your application is no more complex (and, frankly unaware) due to the features of the cache.

Finally, I implemented the solution mentioned above from 2005-2007 when Coherence was made by Tangosol and they had the best possible support. I'm not sure how things are now under Oracle - hopefully still good.

Answer 2

I've worked on a large project that used asyncrhonous writes althoguh in that case it was just hand-written using background threads. You could also implement something like that by offloading the db write process to a JMS queue.

One thing that will certainly speed up db writes is to do them in batches. JDBC batch updates can be orders of magnitude faster than individual writes, and if you're doing them asynchronously you can just write them 500 at a time.

Answer 3

Depending on how your data is organized perhaps you would be able to use sharding, if the read latency isn't low enough you can also try to add caching. Memcache is one popular solution.

Answer 4

Berkeley DB has a very high performance disk-based hash table that supports transactions, and integrates with a Java EE environment if you need that. If you're able to model the data as key/value pairs, this can be a very scalable solution.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/berkeley-db/je/index.html

(Note: oracle bought berkeley db about 5-10 years ago; the original product has been around for 15-20 years).