← Back to team overview

dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

Re: [Dhis2-users] Migrating from MySQL to PostgreSQL

 

Dear Saptarshi



Thank you for helping to convert one of the Bangladesh database from MySQL
to PostgreSQL. But there is still a long way to go.



So far all tables are converted and the metadata are exported from MySQL
and imported into PostgreSQL. What we find that the import has lots of
inconsistency and we are trying to find solution. Few problems we already
solved but I need the reason. We are working on it and within few days I
will write to you all for reason and help. But the man challenge is to
convert 32 million data value and 26000 orgunit and associated tables
because of this metadata conversion problem.

What I find the DHIS2 version 2.11 is not suitable for MySQL which is not
fare. We just tuned our MySQL Server and 5.6 have significant improvement
in performance.* So I am requesting the community to reconsider the use of
MySQL as well.*

Regars

Hannan Khan
On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 6:53 PM, Saptarshi Purkayastha <sunbiz@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> Hello DHIS users and devs,
>
> Apologies for the long email... Should have probably been multiple
> blogpost to reduce its length...
>
> I recently encountered a situation with a very large implementation of
> DHIS2 having problems generating data mart.
> Thus no reports were generated and only data entry was being done. I
> thought I'd share some of the experiences to solve these issues, so that it
> might be useful to other implementers.
> Some changes will be needed in the DHIS2 source, so sending this to the
> dev list also, where dev-related discussions can follow-up.
>
> While PostgreSQL is our recommended database, many implementations have
> also used MySQL.
> My findings clearly highlight that DHIS2 performs much better on
> PostgreSQL and there are also some bugs related to MySQL dialect.
> Total org units - 26303
> Total Monthly datasets - 9
> Total Daily dataset - 1
> Total Yearly dataset - 3
>
> The implementation has about 34 million datavalues (non-zero)... but I
> pruned it for my benchmarking. I added 1-million datavalues and ran the
> data mart.
> The results are from my fairly good laptop (quad-core i7; 8GB RAM; tuned
> JVM; tuned MySQL 5.5 (4GB RAM); tuned PostgreSQL 9.2 (4GB RAM); 240GB SSD)
> Using DHIS2 2.11. When doing MySQL benchmark turned off all services
> including postgres and vice versa.
> Java Opts:  -Xmx3G -Xms768m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m
> Java version: 1.7.0_21 x64
> Java vendor: Oracle Corporation OS name: WindowsMySQL = datamart
> completed in 3hrs 46min 12sec
> PostgreSQL = datamart completed in 2hrs 5min 16sec
>
> So, it is obvious that PostgreSQL is doing datamart much faster. The
> advantages might scale better if larger number of datavalues
> One could argue MySQL 5.6 has many performance improvements, I didn't have
> time to explore that.
> The migration to PostgreSQL has some challenges. Following are steps I
> followed:
>
>  - Take the mysqldump
>  - replace bit(1) to tinyint(1) in the SQL file
>  - You'll see that column names are camelCase. This is an issue because
> postgres will added a double quotes around to get case-sensitivity, which
> MySQL by default nicely excludes.
> So you'll have to make all column names to lowercase and remove the quote
> characters. I did this with a simple java program. There are 150-odd column
> names that need changes.
>  - Used Navcat premium (trial version or SQLSquirrel also has this
> feature). "Data transfer" is the name of the feature that will move data
> from MySQL to Postgres
>  - In MySQL non-standard use of boolean (which came only a few yrs back),
> its converted to smallint in Postgres. I wrote a JDBC program to change
> column type from smallint to boolean. A single table example is as follows
> that can be made into a looping procedure as well in pure PSQL.
> ALTER TABLE indicator ALTER COLUMN annualized TYPE boolean
>     USING CASE WHEN annualized = 0 THEN FALSE
>            WHEN annualized = 1 THEN TRUE
>            ELSE NULL
>     END;
>  - remove NULL values from minimumvalue column of minmaxdatalement table
> DELETE from minmaxdatalement WHERE minimumvalue=NULL
>  - remove NULL values from maximumvalue column of minmaxdatalement table
> DELETE from minmaxdatalement WHERE maximumvalue=NULL
>  - remove NULL values from name column of relationshiptype table
> DELETE from relationshiptype WHERE name=NULL
>  - blobs to bytea conversion is a mess and I had to truncate. Probably a
> JDBC based connector program will do better conversion, but I just
> truncated it and accepted the data loss to systemsetting and usersetting :-)
> *
> Devs*:
> We need to make all column names lowercase in hbm.xml files in code. This
> will ensure portability and is generally a good practice.
> We should also have a convention of using last_updated instead of
> lastUpdated in column names, as is the common practice.
>
> ---
> Regards,
> Saptarshi PURKAYASTHA
>
> My Tech Blog:  http://sunnytalkstech.blogspot.com
> You Live by CHOICE, Not by CHANCE
>
> _______________________________________________
> Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~dhis2-users
> Post to     : dhis2-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~dhis2-users
> More help   : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
>
>

References