Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Billion-Row Tables

Here's the good news, and the bad news, all on one line:


Foxhound fails when a single table hits one billion rows.

The bad news, it's a bug in Foxhound:

The Display Schema feature shows Value out of range for destination because some intermediate calculations use DECIMAL ( 11, 2 ) to hold the row count for indivdual tables.

The good news is

SQL Anywhere is being used to hold billion-row tables!

That's billion rows, not bytes.

And the problem was first reported for SQL Anywhere 9 which has been around longer than Facebook.

The Display Schema side of Foxhound isn't exactly popular, it's the Foxhound Monitor folks want. Nevertheless, Display Schema does have its fans:
Question: Do you like the Display Schema feature? If so, I can create a patch for you.

Answer: "Yes, it's a life saver being that I'm in the middle of converting from ASA9 to ASA17.

It gives me quick view of database information to compare each database stat from before unload and after reload."
Innocent Ekhelar
Dir. Network Services
LOG-NET, Inc.
More good news, a fix is available for Foxhound - click "Show Patches" and read about "Patch 4".
"It works perfectly!!"
Innocent Ekhelar

2 comments:

Justin said...

Interesting. A billion rows is a lot. I once created a recruitment database with a million candidates to prove to a customer it was scalable - but a billion is a whole different thing!!

Breck Carter said...

@Justin: yes, a billion is indeed a lot of rows, even if it is the limp American definition (one thousand million) rather than more manly Scottish version (a million million :)