efficient way to process data

[Larry Martell]

On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 1:09 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 2:35 PM, Larry Martell <larry.martell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Thanks for the reply. I'm going to take a stab at removing the group
>> by and doing it all in python. It doesn't look too hard, but I don't
>> know how it will perform.
>
> Well, if you can't switch to PostgreSQL or such, then doing it in
> Python is your only option. There are such things as GiST and GIN
> indexes that might be able to do some of this magic, but I don't think
> MySQL has anything even remotely like what you're looking for.
>
> So ultimately, you're going to have to do your filtering on the
> database, and then all the aggregation in Python. And it's going to be
> somewhat complicated code, too. Best I can think of is this, as
> partial pseudo-code:
>
> last_x = -999
> x_map = []; y_map = {}
> merge_me = []
> for x,y,e in (SELECT x,y,e FROM t WHERE whatever ORDER BY x):
>     if x<last_x+1:
>         x_map[-1].append((y,e))
>     else:
>         x_map.append([(y,e)])
>     last_x=x
>     if y in y_map:
>         merge_me.append((y_map[y], x_map[-1]))
>     y_map[y]=x_map[-1]
>
> # At this point, you have x_map which is a list of lists, each one
> # being one group, and y_map which maps a y value to its x_map list.
>
> last_y = -999
> for y in sorted(y_map.keys()):
>     if y<last_y+1:
>         merge_me.append((y_map[y], last_x_map))
>     last_y=y
>     last_x_map=y_map[y]
>
> for merge1,merge2 in merge_me:
>     merge1.extend(merge2)
>     merge2[:]=[] # Empty out the list
>
> for lst in x_map:
>     if not lst: continue # been emptied out, ignore it
>     do aggregate stats, get sum(lst) and whatever else
>
> I think this should be linear complexity overall, but there may be a
> few aspects of it that are quadratic. It's a tad messy though, and
> completely untested. But that's an algorithmic start. The idea is that
> lists get collected based on x proximity, and then lists get merged
> based on y proximity. That is, if you have (1.0, 10.1), (1.5, 2.3),
> (3.0, 11.0), (3.2, 15.2), they'll all be treated as a single
> aggregation unit. If that's not what you want, I'm not sure how to
> handle it.

Thanks. Unfortunately this has been made a low priority task and I've
been put on to something else (I hate when they do that). I'll revive
this thread when I'm allowed to get back on this.