Better software through software architecture and devops

@jamessnape

Monthly Archives: June 2009

  • Whilst doing some design work today for a customer project I realised there are a set of principals I try and adhere to when creating SQL Server Integration Services packages. The list is no doubt incomplete but this is what I have so far.

    Minimise IO

    This is a general data processing principal. Usually disk and, to a lesser extent, network performance determine the overall processing speed. Reducing the amount of IO in a solution will therefore increase performance.

    Solutions that consist of multiple read-process-write steps should be redesigned into a single read-process-process-process-write step.

    Prefer Sequential IO to Random IO

    Disks perform at their best when sequentially reading or writing large chunks of data. Random IO (and poor performance) manifests when procedural style programming occurs - signs to look out for are SQL statements modifying/returning only few rows but being executed repeatedly.

    Watch out for hidden random IO - for example, if you are reading from one table and writing to another in a sequential manor then disk access will still be random if both tables are stored on the same spindles.

    Avoid data flow components that pool data

    Data flow components work on batches of data called buffers. In most instances buffers are modified in place and passed down stream. Some components, such as “Sort” cannot process data like this and effectively hang on to buffers until the entire data stream is in memory (or spooled to disk in low memory situations). This increased memory pressure will affect performance.

    Sometimes SQL is the better solution

    Whilst the SSIS data flow has lots of useful and flexible components, it is sometimes more efficient to perform the equivalent processing in a SQL batch. SQL Server is extremely good at sorting, grouping and data manipulation (insert, update, delete) so it is unlikely you will match it for raw performance on a single read-process-write step.

    SSIS does not handle hierarchical data well

    Integration Services is a tabular data processing system. Buffers are tabular and the components and associated APIs are tabular. Consequently it is difficult to process hierarchical data such as the contents of an XML document. There is an XML source component but it’s output is a collection of tabular data streams that need to joined to make sense.

    Execute SSIS close to where you wish to write your data

    Reading data is relatively easy and possible from a wide variety of locations. Writing data, on the other hand, can involve complex locking and other issues which are difficult to optimise on a network protocol. In particular when writing data to a local SQL Server instance, SSIS automatically used the Shared Memory transport for direct inter-process transfer.

    Don’t mess with the data flow metadata at runtime

    It’s very difficult to do this anyway but worth mentioning that SSIS gets it’s stellar performance from being able to setup a data flow at runtime safe in the knowledge that buffers are of a fixed format and component dependencies will not change.

    The only time this is acceptable is when you need to build a custom data flow programmatically. You should use the SSIS API’s and not attempt to write the package XML directly.

    This entry was posted in data-warehousing  and tagged #integration-services #sql-server #sql-server-integration-services #ssis  on .
    Discuss this on Twitter or LinkedIn
  • RJR Consulting Thumbnail Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on a web site for my cousin. This was a ground up redesign of his company web to replace the old SEO unfriendly Flash site.

    Normally as the developer I only get someone else’s completed design; I just do the implementation but I wanted to see if any of my recent photography and image editing skills were transferable.

    The site was first designed in Illustrator/Photoshop with a fair number of round trips to agree the final design. Implementation was done in Expression Web using HTML, CSS and some JQuery for interactivity. There are no anywhere on the site; it is a pure CSS layout. I also used Expression Web “Dynamic Web Templates” for the master page layout as the server where it is now hosted does not support .NET.

    Some things I’ve learned from doing this:

    • jQuery makes life easy and Glimmer makes it even easier
    • IE8 standards support is fantastic but way to many still use IE6/7 to use it
    • You need to have an idea of what is possible in HTML before letting loose in Photoshop
    • background-image is your friend

    As it is all pretty static at the moment there are plans to move to a site that supports .NET so I can add some more features, in particular a blog and news feed. I would like to try this in ASP.MVC to get some experience there.

    So go to RJR Consulting and have a look around (especially if you need telemarketing, telesales or similar services).

    This entry was posted in and tagged #web-design  on .
    Discuss this on Twitter or LinkedIn