Posted by I read an interesting article the other day about data modelling and data denormalization.
I’ll paraphrase the topic and requirement here (apologies to the original author for any omissions or excessive brevity).
We have a fictional application with chat rooms, people subscribing to those chat rooms, and posting messages in the chat rooms. To satisfy this we have the following data model
So for general queries, logging new messages etc, that’s all fine. But an additional requirement is present. When user “X” logs on to the application, they want to see how many rooms that they subscribe to have unread messages, where “unread” is defined as: there is a message in the MSGS table for that room with a timestamp more recent than the LAST_VIEWED timestamp for that user/room combination in ROOM_USERS.
Now if the MSGS table has millions of records, and users check them infrequently, then a query along the lines of:
select count(distinct m.room_id)
from MSGS m,
ROOM_USERS ru
where m.tstamp > ru.last_viewed
and ru.user_id = ...
is perhaps a scalability threat. For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume it is.
The article then gets onto the topic of denormalization, and validly makes the point that this is a non-trivial task. I’m not disputing any of that content. The desired functionality is to be able to cheaply identify the number of unread rooms without scanning the MSGS table.
But there is also this statement
Oracle’s materialized views seem to offer some of the most advanced functionality out there, but are still very limited.
There’s no database in the market today that can implement our desired definition of User.numUnreadFields via a materialized view, as far as I know.
So I figured I would try to help out 
First let’s build some objects to fit out model
SQL> create table users ( user_id int primary key, uname varchar2(20));
Table created.
SQL> create table rooms ( room_id int primary key, rname varchar2(20));
Table created.
SQL> create table room_users (
2 room_id int ,
3 user_id int,
4 last_viewed date not null,
5 constraint room_users_pk primary key ( user_id, room_id ),
6 constraint room_users_fk_users foreign key ( user_id ) references users ( user_id ),
7 constraint room_users_fk_rooms foreign key ( room_id ) references rooms ( room_id )
8 );
Table created.
SQL> create table msgs (
2 msg_id int primary key,
3 sender_user_id int not null,
4 room_id int not null,
5 tstamp date not null,
6 text varchar2(100) not null,
7 constraint msgs_fk_membership foreign key ( sender_user_id ,room_id )
8 references room_users ( user_id , room_id)
9 );
Table created.
SQL> create index msgs_ix1 on msgs ( room_id );
Index created.
SQL> create index msgs_ix2 on msgs ( sender_user_id );
Index created.
SQL> create index msgs_ix3 on msgs ( tstamp );
Index created.
SQL> insert into users
2 select rownum, 'User '||rownum
3 from dual
4 connect by level <= 100; 100 rows created. SQL> insert into rooms
2 select 10000+rownum, 'Room '||(10000+rownum)
3 from dual
4 connect by level <= 50; 50 rows created. SQL> insert into room_users
2 select 10000+rownum, rownum, trunc(sysdate) from dual connect by level <= 10; 10 rows created. SQL> insert into room_users
2 select 10000+rownum, rownum+2, trunc(sysdate-2) from dual connect by level <= 10; 10 rows created. SQL> insert into room_users
2 select 10000+rownum, rownum+7, trunc(sysdate-7) from dual connect by level <= 10;
10 rows created.
So I’ve created some objects, put some constraints and typical indexes that I might expect to see in such an application. Here’s our users, rooms and the subscriptions
SQL> select * from users;
USER_ID UNAME
---------- --------------------
1 User 1
2 User 2
3 User 3
4 User 4
5 User 5
6 User 6
7 User 7
8 User 8
9 User 9
10 User 10
11 User 11
12 User 12
13 User 13
14 User 14
15 User 15
16 User 16
17 User 17
18 User 18
19 User 19
20 User 20
21 User 21
22 User 22
23 User 23
24 User 24
25 User 25
26 User 26
27 User 27
28 User 28
29 User 29
30 User 30
31 User 31
32 User 32
33 User 33
34 User 34
35 User 35
36 User 36
37 User 37
38 User 38
39 User 39
40 User 40
41 User 41
42 User 42
43 User 43
44 User 44
45 User 45
46 User 46
47 User 47
48 User 48
49 User 49
50 User 50
51 User 51
52 User 52
53 User 53
54 User 54
55 User 55
56 User 56
57 User 57
58 User 58
59 User 59
60 User 60
61 User 61
62 User 62
63 User 63
64 User 64
65 User 65
66 User 66
67 User 67
68 User 68
69 User 69
70 User 70
71 User 71
72 User 72
73 User 73
74 User 74
75 User 75
76 User 76
77 User 77
78 User 78
79 User 79
80 User 80
81 User 81
82 User 82
83 User 83
84 User 84
85 User 85
86 User 86
87 User 87
88 User 88
89 User 89
90 User 90
91 User 91
92 User 92
93 User 93
94 User 94
95 User 95
96 User 96
97 User 97
98 User 98
99 User 99
100 User 100
100 rows selected.
SQL> select * from rooms;
ROOM_ID RNAME
---------- --------------------
10001 Room 10001
10002 Room 10002
10003 Room 10003
10004 Room 10004
10005 Room 10005
10006 Room 10006
10007 Room 10007
10008 Room 10008
10009 Room 10009
10010 Room 10010
10011 Room 10011
10012 Room 10012
10013 Room 10013
10014 Room 10014
10015 Room 10015
10016 Room 10016
10017 Room 10017
10018 Room 10018
10019 Room 10019
10020 Room 10020
10021 Room 10021
10022 Room 10022
10023 Room 10023
10024 Room 10024
10025 Room 10025
10026 Room 10026
10027 Room 10027
10028 Room 10028
10029 Room 10029
10030 Room 10030
10031 Room 10031
10032 Room 10032
10033 Room 10033
10034 Room 10034
10035 Room 10035
10036 Room 10036
10037 Room 10037
10038 Room 10038
10039 Room 10039
10040 Room 10040
10041 Room 10041
10042 Room 10042
10043 Room 10043
10044 Room 10044
10045 Room 10045
10046 Room 10046
10047 Room 10047
10048 Room 10048
10049 Room 10049
10050 Room 10050
50 rows selected.
SQL> select * from room_users;
ROOM_ID USER_ID LAST_VIEW
---------- ---------- ---------
10001 1 06-OCT-16
10002 2 06-OCT-16
10003 3 06-OCT-16
10004 4 06-OCT-16
10005 5 06-OCT-16
10006 6 06-OCT-16
10007 7 06-OCT-16
10008 8 06-OCT-16
10009 9 06-OCT-16
10010 10 06-OCT-16
10001 3 04-OCT-16
10002 4 04-OCT-16
10003 5 04-OCT-16
10004 6 04-OCT-16
10005 7 04-OCT-16
10006 8 06-OCT-16
10007 9 04-OCT-16
10008 10 04-OCT-16
10009 11 04-OCT-16
10010 12 04-OCT-16
10001 8 06-OCT-16
10002 9 29-SEP-16
10003 10 29-SEP-16
10004 11 29-SEP-16
10005 12 29-SEP-16
10006 13 29-SEP-16
10007 14 29-SEP-16
10008 15 29-SEP-16
10009 16 29-SEP-16
10010 17 29-SEP-16
30 rows selected.
SQL>
Now lets add some messages, with timestamps spanning the last month or so
SQL> insert into msgs
2 select rownum,
3 mod(rownum,10)+1,
4 10000+mod(rownum,10)+1,
5 sysdate-32+rownum/10,
6 'text '||rownum
7 from dual
8 connect by level <= 300; 300 rows created. SQL>
SQL>
SQL> insert into msgs
2 select 1000+rownum,
3 2+mod(rownum,10)+1,
4 10000+mod(rownum,10)+1,
5 sysdate-32+rownum/10,
6 'text '||(rownum+1000)
7 from dual
8 connect by level <= 300; 300 rows created. SQL>
SQL>
SQL> insert into msgs
2 select 2000+rownum,
3 7+mod(rownum,10)+1,
4 10000+mod(rownum,10)+1,
5 sysdate-32+rownum/10,
6 'text '||(rownum+2000)
7 from dual
8 connect by level <= 300;
300 rows created.
Let’s now see if we can get a materialized view to help us out. Obviously we want this view to be fast refreshable, so first we’ll put materialized logs on the appropriate tables
SQL> create materialized view log on msgs
2 with primary key, rowid,
3 sequence (room_id, sender_user_id,tstamp) including new values;
Materialized view log created.
SQL> create materialized view log on room_users
2 with primary key, rowid,
3 sequence (last_viewed) including new values;
Materialized view log created.
Now lets add a materialized view to capture the information we need
SQL> create materialized view MSGS_MV refresh fast on commit as
2 select
3 ru.room_id,
4 ru.user_id,
5 ru.last_viewed,
6 count(*) msg_count,
7 count(case when m.tstamp > ru.last_viewed then 1 end ) has_unread
8 from msgs m,
9 room_users ru
10 where m.room_id = ru.room_id
11 group by
12 ru.room_id,
13 ru.user_id,
14 ru.last_viewed;
Materialized view created.
So we’ve got a row for each room/user pairing, plus we are bringing the LAST_VIEWED attribute along for the ride. The COUNT(*) is not needed by our application, but is required to make the materialized view fast refreshable. The second COUNT is a count of the unread messages in this room for this user. Note that this is NOT the requirement satisfied yet, because we are looking for a ROOM count, not a MESSAGE count. But lets look at this view in action now.
SQL> select
2 mv.room_id,
3 mv.user_id,
4 mv.last_viewed,
5 case when mv.has_unread > 0 then 'Y' end unread,
6 r.rname,
7 u.uname
8 from MSGS_MV mv,
9 users u,
10 rooms r
11 where mv.user_id = u.user_id
12 and mv.room_id = r.room_id
13 order by 2,1;
ROOM_ID USER_ID LAST_VIEW U RNAME UNAME
---------- ---------- --------- - -------------------- --------------------
10001 1 06-OCT-16 Room 10001 User 1
10002 2 06-OCT-16 Room 10002 User 2
10001 3 04-OCT-16 Y Room 10001 User 3
10003 3 06-OCT-16 Room 10003 User 3
10002 4 04-OCT-16 Room 10002 User 4
10004 4 06-OCT-16 Room 10004 User 4
10003 5 04-OCT-16 Room 10003 User 5
10005 5 06-OCT-16 Room 10005 User 5
10004 6 04-OCT-16 Room 10004 User 6
10006 6 06-OCT-16 Room 10006 User 6
10005 7 04-OCT-16 Y Room 10005 User 7
10007 7 06-OCT-16 Room 10007 User 7
10001 8 29-SEP-16 Y Room 10001 User 8
10006 8 04-OCT-16 Y Room 10006 User 8
10008 8 06-OCT-16 Room 10008 User 8
10002 9 29-SEP-16 Y Room 10002 User 9
10007 9 04-OCT-16 Y Room 10007 User 9
10009 9 06-OCT-16 Room 10009 User 9
10003 10 29-SEP-16 Y Room 10003 User 10
10008 10 04-OCT-16 Y Room 10008 User 10
10010 10 06-OCT-16 Room 10010 User 10
10004 11 29-SEP-16 Y Room 10004 User 11
10009 11 04-OCT-16 Y Room 10009 User 11
10005 12 29-SEP-16 Y Room 10005 User 12
10010 12 04-OCT-16 Y Room 10010 User 12
10006 13 29-SEP-16 Y Room 10006 User 13
10007 14 29-SEP-16 Y Room 10007 User 14
10008 15 29-SEP-16 Y Room 10008 User 15
10009 16 29-SEP-16 Y Room 10009 User 16
10010 17 29-SEP-16 Y Room 10010 User 17
30 rows selected.
We can see with a simple CASE statement, we can now isolate per user/room combination, which rooms are “unread”. Normally we would run such a query with a given user_id, but I’m showing all of the data here just for explanation purposes. From here, satisfying our room count requirement is trivial
SQL> select user_id, count(unread)
2 from
3 (
4 select
5 mv.room_id,
6 mv.user_id,
7 mv.last_viewed,
8 case when mv.has_unread > 0 then 'Y' end unread,
9 r.rname,
10 u.uname
11 from MSGS_MV mv,
12 users u,
13 rooms r
14 where mv.user_id = u.user_id
15 and mv.room_id = r.room_id
16 )
17 group by user_id
18 order by 1;
USER_ID COUNT(UNREAD)
---------- -------------
1 0
2 0
3 1
4 0
5 0
6 0
7 1
8 2
9 2
10 2
11 2
12 2
13 1
14 1
15 1
16 1
17 1
17 rows selected.
And there we have it. Once again I’m showing ALL users here, but the same applies for any single user. We have the unread room count using the materialized view and not from the MSGS table.
So how do we keep this materialized view in sync with the detail ? Well…that’s already taken care of, because it is fast refreshable on commit. We can see from the two above outputs that user 8 has two unread rooms, namely room 10001 and 10006. So let’s have her login and jump into chat room 10001.
SQL> update room_users
2 set last_viewed = sysdate
3 where room_id = 10001
4 and user_id = 8;
1 row updated.
SQL>
SQL> commit;
Commit complete.
and now let’s take a look at our unread room query
SQL> select user_id, count(unread)
2 from
3 (
4 select
5 mv.room_id,
6 mv.user_id,
7 mv.last_viewed,
8 case when mv.has_unread > 0 then 'Y' end unread,
9 r.rname,
10 u.uname
11 from MSGS_MV mv,
12 users u,
13 rooms r
14 where mv.user_id = u.user_id
15 and mv.room_id = r.room_id
16 )
17 group by user_id
18 order by 1;
USER_ID COUNT(UNREAD)
---------- -------------
1 0
2 0
3 1
4 0
5 0
6 0
7 1
8 1 <===
9 2
10 2
11 2
12 2
13 1
14 1
15 1
16 1
17 1
17 rows selected.
As we expect, the unread count for user 8 has dropped by 1. Now she jumps rooms…
SQL> update room_users
2 set last_viewed = sysdate
3 where room_id = 10006
4 and user_id = 8;
1 row updated.
SQL>
SQL> commit;
Commit complete.
SQL>
SQL> select user_id, count(unread)
2 from
3 (
4 select
5 mv.room_id,
6 mv.user_id,
7 mv.last_viewed,
8 case when mv.has_unread > 0 then 'Y' end unread,
9 r.rname,
10 u.uname
11 from MSGS_MV mv,
12 users u,
13 rooms r
14 where mv.user_id = u.user_id
15 and mv.room_id = r.room_id
16 )
17 group by user_id
18 order by 1;
USER_ID COUNT(UNREAD)
---------- -------------
1 0
2 0
3 1
4 0
5 0
6 0
7 1
8 0 <===
9 2
10 2
11 2
12 2
13 1
14 1
15 1
16 1
17 1
17 rows selected.
And as we can see, we have cleared her room status. It’s all been handled by the database, and the application does not need do any of the “heavy lifting”.
Just to reiterate, I’m not trying to denounce the author’s statements – denormalization IS hard to get right, especially if you try to hand craft it in a multi-user environment. It’s very easy to end up with something that appears to work but silently corrupts the derived data over time.
But with a little care and thought, you’ll be amazed at what materialized views in Oracle are capable of.
Learning is not a spectator sport 
Great write-up Connor!
Just wanted to share the first thought I got while reading the requirement “see how many rooms that they subscribe to have unread messages” and the query used to tackle that.
The way that query was ‘worded’ could indeed end up being a scalability issue.
But a more natural way of expressing exactly that what was worded in Engligh language into SQL would be:
select count(*)
from ROOM_USERS ru
where ru.user_id = :current_user
and exists
(select ‘an more recent msg’
from MSGS m
where m.room_id = ru.room_id
and m.user_id = ru.user_id
and m.tstamp > ru.last_viewed)
Now, assuming for this business requirement, an index on MSGS(ROOM_ID,USER_ID,TSTAMP) is available, a plan involving a SEMI-join is likely to be generated by the CBO and that should perform very well here.
🙂
Agreed, and in defence of the original author, I *think* your query is the one they suggested using, albeit with the annotation:
“HOLY MOTHER, that query has quite a few moving parts, including scans and joins on multiple data types”
REFRESH FAST ON COMMIT is a great solution unless you use database links, in which case you get this:
SELECT * FROM dual@db_link;
UPDATE msgs
SET tstamp = tstamp + 1
WHERE ROWNUM = 1;
COMMIT ;
Error at line 17
ORA-02050: transaction 45.9.165086 rolled back, some remote DBs may be in-doubt
ORA-02051: another session or branch in same transaction failed or finalized
Not just DB links, any distributed transaction…
Sorry. Didn’t mean to post twice.
Also fast refresh MVs can sometimes do horrid things to your commit times.
https://orastory.wordpress.com/2014/11/27/the-mess-that-is-fast-refresh-join-only-materialized-views/
Not just DB links – any distributed transaction…
Connor, thanks for this awesome writeup! I didn’t realize Oracle was this capable.
I would love to explore if Oracle’s materialized views can model a full “denormalization graph”. Can we start from a single table modeling the global stream of events (as in Event Sourcing), then declare all the tables we’ve been talking about (User, Room, Message, RoomUser) to be materialized views?
Then the MV for User.numUnreadViews is a second step of denormalization.
My SQL skills are weak, so I’d really appreciate if you can comment on whether that’s feasible and show what that would look like.
The WAL (Write Ahead Log) is already performing event sourcing behind the scenes. The DB engine writes queries to the log immediately, so that the log can be replayed or verified to produce the tables. In essence, the tables are materialized views of the WAL.
Sure but I want to *start* from a model of the global stream of events. If you just look at the WAL, it doesn’t look like the stream of event objects that I want to start with.
Hi Liron,
Thanks for stopping by. Theoretically I imagine you could create a system where you have a single stream of data coming in from a source, and farm materialized views off that.
But as Sam points out, that’s somewhat akin to reinventing the core functionality of most databases, namely, a stream of “change vectors”, with the tables being a “point in time” representation of that stream. There’s a big difference between “doable” and “best way to do it” 🙂
Probably the most common implementation of such a strategy is as per Dan’s comment – events come in as queue messages (whether its AQ or some other tech doesnt really matter, its more just having a guaranteed delivery, ordered, consistent messaging system) with appropriate daemons or similar processing or farming out the work.
A materialized view is almost an internalisation of that very concept – the materialized view logs are the stream, and the refresh (either on commit or on demand) is the “downstream” processing
Cheers,
Connor
I agree with everything you’re saying, but I’m still looking to figure out a Functional Reactive Programming paradigm for the whole database. Materialized Views are good FRP, but manually piping streams around or dealing with logs is not.
(I have done a lot of programming on the client UI side. React (and MobX) have been a revolutionary change in the last few years, and totally sold me on Functional Reactive Programming. I believe that FRP style is destined to extend from the client back to the database layer too.)
So to humor me… do you think I can realistically architect an Oracle SQL database which is one normal table (the Events table) and then 2 or 3 layers of materialized views?
architect ? yes
realistically ? no 🙂
The chain of work to do during commit processing would be too large, which means now you would be relaxing your data consistency requirements. And once it becomes asynchronous, then I’m not sure we’re seeing a lot of benefit with materialized views over a standard message processing implementation. Perhaps a little less coding ?
Haha gotcha thanks. Btw I’m looking at Event Store too: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/event-store/—1gZyGJy0
When I hear “Event Sourcing,” I think of Advanced Queues, another tool in the Oracle toolbox. In 12c they switched to JMS sharded queues for much better throughput and scalability:
Click to access jms-wp-2533807.pdf
These are database backed queues that can be used to provide a degree of eventual consistency when necessary.
Practical problem with this MV solution is scalability. When one session inserts a row into msgs and commits, it will refresh the MV, and other sessions doing the same simultaneously will wait with “enq: JI – contention”. So hopefully the chat rooms are all quiet ones.
http://rwijk.blogspot.nl/2010/01/enq-ji-contention.html
Thanks Connor,
I added an enable query rewrite to the materialized view (MV) definition so that I did not have to reference the MV directly.
I know you are well aware of this capability but thought it is interesting to note that not only does your design remove the scan of MSGS by the use of the MV its implementation may also have little to no impact on maintaining existing code.
Can you tell me if this method (query rewrite) of implementation is robust for this scenario, i.e. are there circumstances where refresh fast on commit requires direct reference to the MV?