Month: August 2011

Polymorphic count with NHibernate

Szymon Kulec 'Scooletz' NHibernate , ,

If you’re a user of NHibernate, I hope you enjoy using polymorphic queries. It’s one of the most powerful features of this ORM allowing you to write queries spanning against several hierarchies. Finally, you can even query for the derivations of object to get all the objects from db (don’t try this at home:P). The most important fact is, that having a nicely implemented dialect NH can do it in one DB call, separating specific queries by semicolon (in case of MS SQL)

// whoa!
var allObjects = session.QueryOver<object>().List();

Although the feature is powerful, you can find a small problem. How to count entities returned by the query without getting’em all to the memory. Setting a simple projection Projections.RowCount() will not work. Why? ‘Cause it’s gonna query each table with COUNT demanding at the same time that IDataReader should contain only one, unique result. It won’t happen, and all you’ll be left with it’ll be a nice exception. So, is it possible to count entities in a polymorphic way? Yes! You can define in a extension method and use it every time you need a polymorphic count.

private static int GetPolymorphicCount(ISession s, Type countedType)
{
    var factory = s.GetSessionImplementation().Factory;
    var implementors = factory.GetImplementors(countedType.FullName);

    return implementors
        .Select(i => s.CreateCriteria(i)
                .SetProjection(Projections.RowCount())
                .FutureValue<int>())
        .ToArray() // to eagerly create all the future values for counting
        .Aggregate(0, (count, v) => count + v.Value); // sum up counts
}

Happy counting!

DarkSwitch

Szymon Kulec 'Scooletz' Design, Microsoft

Recently I found an article on my RSS InfoQ feed. I do understand that InfoQ presented a new information about some programming product, but it should be posted with a big exclamation “Do not use it for your app”. It’s nothing more than another ‘create app with no programming skills’ product. Take a look at the Ayende’s post or download it. I found it nothing more than a Balsamiq which tries to do sth more than being a simple sketch. If you want to sketch your solution, to show your devs how sth should be done – stay with Balsamiq.

Deiphobus, no more SELECT n + 1

Szymon Kulec 'Scooletz' Cassandra, Deiphobus , ,

The previous post contained an information about lazy loading of group of properties, let’s call them families as it is called in the Cassandra. What about the following code. How many db hits you’d like to get by default?

using (var s = sessionFactory.Open())
{
	var user = s.Load<IUser>(5);
	foreach(var post in user.Posts)
	{
		Console.WriteLine(post.Title);
	}
}

I’ll tell you how many you’ll get. The answer is two: first hit will occur, when a collection of posts is accessed in the foreach loop, the second – when a title is printed on the console. During the second hit all the posts loaded in the session will have their titles loaded. In some cases it may drive to a small overhead, but it simplifies batching and working with your entities in the majority of cases. Would anyone like to set FetchMode, like it was done in the NHibernate? 😉

Deiphobus, mapping properties groups to column families

Szymon Kulec 'Scooletz' Cassandra, Deiphobus , ,

As i it is stated in the official documentation, the column family can be compared to a table in the relational database and as with table, the main target of creating one is to hold the same type of objects together to create a better model, allow querying, etc. Speaking about Cassandra it has one more advantage: the whole column family is stored on one server (the data are consistently hashed by key), so you may consider a column family as a collection of items frequently used together, for instance: the surname and the name, or the user name and the password.
In NHibernate you can embed those values within component to make it look like a whole, but they’re still stored in the same table. Speaking about Deiphobus, it can be easily configured to match the needs of grouping properties (simple properties, and referencing other entities in many-to-one or one-to-one way) by implementing a convention interface:

public interface IPropertyFamilyConvention
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Gets the Cassandra family name.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="mappedType">The mapped type.</param>
    /// <param name="propertyInfo">The info of a mapped property.</param>
    /// <returns>The family name.</returns>
    FamilyName GetFamilyName(Type mappedType, PropertyInfo propertyInfo);
}

It’s worth to mention, that by default all the properties are mapped to one column family called ‘Entity’. Ok, you know how it influences the storage from the Cassandra point of view, but what about Deiphobus? As it was implemented, every time you access previously not loaded property of an entity mapped with Deiphobus, the whole column family, containing the specified property is loaded from the database (actually a bit more data is retrieved, but for the sake of simplicity it can be omitted in here). It means, that once you started using a property which is strongly connected with others, all the needed properties will be loaded in one db hit. Simple and powerful, isn’t it?