Thursday, June 20, 2013

EclipseLink supports HQL and several advanced new JPQL features

EclipseLink 2.5 added several new JPQL features and supported syntax.
These include:
  • HQL compatibility
  • Array expressions
  • Hierarchical selects
  • Historical queries

HQL Compatibility

A common issue for users migrating from Hibernate to EclipseLink is that the HQL syntax of not having a SELECT clause is not supported, as it is not standard JPQL syntax. EclipseLink now supports this syntax. For queries that will return the entire object, this allows you to omit the SELECT clause, and start the query with the FROM clause.
from Employee e where e.salary > 50000

Array Expressions

Previously in JPQL you could use the IN operation and sub-selects to compare a single value, but what if you wanted to compare multiple values, such as composite ids? You would then have to dynamically generate very long AND/OR expression trees to compare each value one by one, which is difficult and cumbersome. Many databases provide a much better solution to this problem with array expressions, this allows for arrays within the SQL in sub-selects comparisons, or nested within an IN comparison.

EclipseLink now supports array expressions with JPQL. EclipseLink also uses array expressions internally when object comparisons are done in JPQL and objects with composite ids.

Select e from Employee e where (e.firstName, e.lastName) IN :names

Select e from Employee e where (e.firstName, e.lastName) IN (Select m.firstName, m.lastName from Managers m)

Hierarchical Selects

Traditionally it has been very difficult to query hierarchical trees in relational data. For example querying all employees who work under a particular manager. Querying one level is simple, two levels is possible, but querying the entire depth of the tree, when you don't know how deep the tree is, is very difficult.

Some databases support a special syntax for this type of query. In Oracle the CONNECT BY clause allows for hierarchical queries to be expressed. EclipseLink now supports a CONNECT BY clause in JPQL, to support hierarchical queries on databases that support CONNECT BY.

Select e from Employee e START WITH e.id = :id CONNECT BY e.managedEmployees

Select e from Employee e START WITH e.id = :id CONNECT BY e.managedEmployees ORDER SIBLINGS BY e.salary where e.salary > 100000

Historical Queries

Historical queries allow you to query back in time. This requires that you use EclipseLink's history support, or use a database that supports historical queries such as Oracle's flashback support. Historical queries use the AS OF clause to query an entity as of a point in time (or an Oracle SCN for flashback). This provides the ability to do some pretty cool queries and analytic on your data.
Select e from Employee e AS OF :date where e.id = :id

Select e from Employee e, Employee e2 AS OF :date where e = e2 and e.salary > e2.salary

Monday, June 10, 2013

Cool performance features of EclipseLink 2.5

The main goal of the EclipseLink 2.5 release was the support of the JPA 2.1 specification, as EclipseLink 2.5 was the reference implementation for JPA 2.1. For a list of JPA 2.1 features look here, or here.

Most of the features that went into the release were to support JPA 2.1 features, so there was not a lot of development time for other features. However, I was still able to sneak in a few cool new performance features. The features are not well documented yet, so I thought I would outline them here.

Indexing Foreign Keys

The first feature is auto indexing of foreign keys. Most people incorrectly assume that databases index foreign keys by default. Well, they don't. Primary keys are auto indexed, but foreign keys are not. This means any query based on the foreign key will be doing full table scans. This is any OneToMany, ManyToMany or ElementCollection relationship, as well as many OneToOne relationships, and most queries on any relationship involving joins or object comparisons. This can be a major perform issue, and you should always index your foreign keys fields.

EclipseLink 2.5 makes indexing foreign key fields easy with a new persistence unit property:

"eclipselink.ddl-generation.index-foreign-keys"="true"
This will have EclipseLink create an index for all mapped foreign keys if EclipseLink is used to generate the persistence unit's DDL. Note that DDL generation is now standard in JPA 2.1, so to enable DDL generation in EclipseLink 2.5 you can now use:
"javax.persistence.schema-generation.database.action"="create"
EclipseLink 2.5 and JPA 2.1 also support several new DDL generation features, including allowing user scripts to be executed. See, DDL generation for more information.

Query Cache Invalidation

EclipseLink has always supported a query cache. Unlike the object cache, the query cache is not enabled by default, but must be enabled through the query hint "eclipselink.query-results-cache". The main issue with the query cache, is that the results of queries can change when objects are modified, so the query cache could become out of date. Previously the query cache did support time-to-live and daily invalidation through the query hint "eclipselink.query-results-cache.expiry", but would not be kept in synch with changes as they were made.

In EclipseLink 2.5 automatic invalidation of the query cache was added. So if you had a query "Select e from Employee e" and had enabled query caching, every execution of this query would hit the cache and avoid accessing the database. Then if you inserted a new Employee, in EclipseLink 2.5 the query cache for all queries for Employee will automatically get invalidated. The next query will access the database, and get the correct result, and update the cache so all subsequent queries will once again obtain cache hits. Since the query cache is now kept in synch, the new persistence unit property "eclipselink.cache.query-results"="true" was added to enable the query cache on all named queries. If, for some reason, you want to allow stale data in your query cache, you can disable invalidation using the QueryResultsCachePolicy.setInvalidateOnChange() API.

Query cache invalidation is also integrated with cache coordination, so even if you modify an Employee on another server in your cluster, the query cache will still be invalidated. The query cache invalidation is also integrated with EclipseLink's support for Oracle Database Change Notification. If you have other applications accessing your database, you can keep the EclipseLink cache in synch with an Oracle database using the persistence unit property "eclipselink.cache.database-event-listener"="DCN". This support was added in EclipseLink 2.4, but in EclipseLink 2.5 it will also invalidate the query cache.

Tuners

EclipseLink 2.5 added an API to make it easier to provide tuning configuration for a persistence unit. The SessionTuner API allows a set of tuning properties to be configured in one place, and provides deployment time access to the EclipseLink Session and persistence unit properties. This makes it easy to have a development, debug, and production configuration of your persistence unit, or provide different configurations for different hardware. The SessionTuner is set through the persistence unit property "eclipselink.tuning".

Concurrent Processing

The most interesting performance feature provided in EclipseLink 2.5 is still in a somewhat experimental stage. The feature allows for a session to make use of concurrent processing.

There is no public API to configure it as of yet, but if you are interested in experimenting it is easy to set through a SessionCustomizer or SessionTuner.


public class MyCustomizer implements SessionCustomizer {
  public void customize(Session session) {
    ((AbstractSession)session).setIsConcurrent(true);
  }
}

Currently this enables two main features, one is the concurrent processing of result sets. The other is the concurrent loading of load groups.

In any JPA object query there are three parts. The first is the execution of the query, the second is the fetching of the data, and the third is the building of the objects. Normally the query is executed, all of the data is fetched, then the objects are built from the data. With concurrency enabled two threads will be used instead, one to fetch the data, and one to build the objects. This allows two things to be done at the same time, allowing less overall time (but the same amount of CPU). This can provide a benefit if you have a multi-CPU machine, or even if you don't, it allows the client to be doing processing at the same time as the database machine.

The second feature allows all of the relationships for all of the resulting objects to be queried and built concurrently (only when using a shared cache). So, if you queried 32 Employees and also wanted each Employee's address, the address queries could all be executed and built concurrently, resulting in significant less response time. This requires the usage of a LoadGroup to be set on the query. LoadGroup defines a new API setIsConcurrent() to allow concurrency to be enabled (this defaults to true when a session is set to be concurrent).

A LoadGroup can be configured on a query using the query hint "eclipselink.load-group", "eclipselink.load-group.attribute", or through the JPA 2.1 EntityGraph query hint "javax.persistence.loadgraph".

Note that for concurrency to improve your application's performance you need to have spare CPU time. So, to benefit the most you need multiple-CPUs. Also, concurrency will not help you scale an application server that is already under load from multiple client requests. Concurrency does not use less CPU time, it just allows for the CPUs to be used more efficiently to improve response times.