limit means we only return 50k letters, if there are more than that for
a service we'll skip them and they won't be picked up until the next
day.
If you remove the limit, sqlalchemy prefetches query results so it can
build up ORM results, for example collapsing joined rows into single
objects with chidren. SQLAlchemy streams the data into a buffer, and
normally will still prefetch the entire resultset so it can ensure
integrity of the session, (so that if you modify one result that is
duplicated further down in the results, both rows are updated in the
session for example). However, we don't care about that, but we do care
about preventing the result set taking up too much memory. We can use
`yield_per` to yield from sqlalchemy to the iterator (in this case the
`for letter in letters_awaiting_sending` loop in letters_pdf_tasks.py) -
this means every time we hit 10000 rows, we go back to the database to
get the next 10k. This way, we only ever need 10k rows in memory at a
time.
This has some caveats, mostly around how we handle the data the query
returns. They're a bit hard to parse but I'm pretty sure the notable
limitations are:
* It's dangerous to modify ORM objects returned by yield_per queries
* It's dangerous to join in a yield_per query if you think there will be
more than one row per item (for example, if you join from notification
to service, there'll be multiple result rows containing the same
service, and if these are split over different yield chunks, then we
may experience undefined behaviour.
These two limitations are focused around there being no guarantee of
having one unique row per item.
For more reading:
https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/13/orm/query.html?highlight=yield_per#sqlalchemy.orm.query.Query.yield_perhttps://www.mail-archive.com/sqlalchemy@googlegroups.com/msg12443.html
previously we were returning the entire ORM object. Returning columns
has a couple of benefits:
* Means we can join on to services there and then, avoiding second
queries to get the crown status of the service later in the collate
flow.
* Massively reduces the amount of data we return - particularly free
text fields like personalisation that could be potentially quite big.
5 columns rather than 26 columns.
* Minor thing, but will skip some CPU cycles as sqlalchemy will no
longer construct an ORM object and try and keep track of changes. We
know this function doesn't change any of the values to persist them
back, so this is an unnecessary step from sqlalchemy.
Disadvantages are:
* The dao_get_letters_to_be_printed return interface is now much more
tightly coupled to the get_key_and_size_of_letters_to_be_sent_to_print
function that calls it.
we had issues where we had 150k 2nd class notifications, and the collate
task never ran properly, presumably because the volume of data being
returned was too big.
to try and help with this, we can switch to streaming rather than using
`.all` and building up lists of data. This should help, though the
initial query may be a problem still.
We have had a few instances where letters have caused problems. Particularly for precompiled letters, often the issue comes from the same service.
The hope is that by adding a sort order this will help the print provider narrow down the problem.
There is a small degradation of the performance of the query, but it's not enough to concern me.
Our code was assuming that any notifications with `international` set to
`True` were text messages. It was then trying to look up delivery
information for a notification which wasn’t sent to a phone number,
causing an exception.
This done so that we do not use statsd on our http endpoint.
We decided we do not need metrics that this gave us. If we
change our minds, we will add Prometheus-friendly decorators
instead in the future.
Years ago we started to implement a way to schedule a notification. We hit a problem but we never came up with a good solution and the feature never made it back to the top of the priority list.
This PR removes the code for scheduled_for. There will be another PR to drop the scheduled_notifications table and remove the schedule_notifications service permission
Unfortunately, I don't think we can remove the `scheduled_for` attribute from the notification.serialized method because out clients might fail if something is missing. For now I have left it in but defaulted the value to None.
The standard way that we indicate that there are more results than can
be returned is by paginating. So even though we don’t intend to paginate
the search results in the admin app, it can still use the presence or
absence of a ‘next’ link to determine whether or not to show a message
about only showing the first 50 results.
We were doing this temporarily while the `normalised_to` field was not
populated for letters. Once we have a week of data in the
`normalised_to` field we can stop looking in the `to` field. This should
improve performance because:
- it’s one `WHERE` clause not two
- we had to do `ilike` on the `to` field, because we don’t lowercase its
contents – even if the two where clauses are somehow paralleized it’s
is slower than a `like` comparison, which is case-sensitive
Depends on:
- [ ] Tuesday 5 May (7 full days after deploying https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api/pull/2814)
Like we have search by email address or phone number, finding an
individual letter is a common task. At the moment users are having to
click through pages and pages of letters to find the one they’re looking
for.
We have to search in the `to` and `normalised_to` fields for now because
we’re not populating the `normalised_to` column for letters at the
moment.
It is possible a service has data rention that is smaller than the time it takes to get a delivery receipt.
This PR refactors process_ses_receipt to update NotificationHistory if the Notifcation has already been purged.
- fix test name
- make query filter consistent with each other
- add comment for clarity
- add inner loop to continue to insert and delete notifications while the delete count is greater than 0
The insert_notification_history_delete_notifications function uses a temp table to store the data to insert and delete. This will save extra queries while performing the insert and delete operations.
The function is written in such a way that if the task is stop while processing when it's started up again it will just pick up where it left off.
I've made a decision to delete all test data in one query, I don't anticipate a problem with that.
The performance of this might also be better than last nights test because we are inserting everything we need for the NotificationHistory insert, so we don't need the join to Notifications to perform the insert.
Need to test the performance of this function, then we can call it from the task.
- Create a temporary table to insert ids of the desired rows, limit by 10K (might be too low).
- Insert into NotifcationHistory select from notification where id in temp table
- Delete from Notifications where id in temp table
- drop temp table
We should be able to iterate of this. The query stats for the query to create the temp table are very good, 17ms.
The date in the notifications table should always be the most recent date for the template.
Removed the template_type param for the query as well.
Simplified the tests.
The existing endpoint returned a whole notification for the last time the template was used. But this only takes into account data in the last week. This new methods allows us to be specific about when the template was last used if ever but looking into the ft_notification_status table as well.
Before the search term was either:
- an email address (or partial email address)
- a phone number (or partial phone number)
Now it can also be:
- a reference (or partial reference)
We can take a pretty good guess, by looking at the search term, whether
the thing the user is searching by email address or phone number. This
helps us:
- only show relevant notifications
- normalise the search term to give the best chance of matching what we
store in the `normalised_to` field
However we can’t look at a search term and guess whether it’s a
reference, because a reference could take any format. Therefore if the
user hasn’t told us what kind of thing their search term is, we should
stop trying to guess.
We have a team who want to find emails that might have been sent to an
incorrect address. Therefore they can’t search by the correct address,
because it won’t match.
What they do have is the reference number of the user’s application,
which is also stored in the `client_reference` field on the
notification.
So when a user is searching we should also look at the client reference,
as well as the recipient, allowing the user to enter either in the
search box.
The nightly job to delete email notifications was failing because it was
timing out (`psycopg2.errors.QueryCanceled: canceling statement due to statement timeout`).
This adds a query limit to the query which inserts or updates
notification history so that it only updates a maximum of 10000 rows at
a time.
All our endpoint should perform a check that the params are valid - this is an easy whay to check that and is standard for our endpoints.
I reverted the query to just filter by job id.
Now we consistently use the created_at date, so we can always get the right file location and name.
The previous updates to this code were trying to solve the problem if a pdf being created at 17:29, but not ready to upload until 17:31 after the antivirus and validation check.
But in those cases we would have trouble finding the file.
When we cancel a job, we need to check if all notifications are
already in the database. So far, we were querying for all
notification objects in the database and counting them in
admin app, which runs into pagination problems for large jobs,
and could time out for very large jobs.
* remove unnecessary parametrisation where we're not testing
type-specific things
* remove some unused fixtures
* replace len(x.all()) with x.count()
* don't deleted notificationhistory now that we know it's not written
* remove some pre-test function asserts
re-order notification dao delete notifications test to move "fixtures"
to the top of the file
changed create_service_data_retention to take an ORM object, not an id.
brings it in line with other db.py test functions
Update subquery to run again but for test keys. Test data is never inserted in Notifications so they need to be deleted separately now given the join to NotificationHistory.
This PR adds a function to upsert (insert or update if exists) NotificationHistory all the rows from Notification that we are about to delete in the nightly task. This will happen just before the delete function. Since it is a upsert query the function can be called more than once.
This should allow us remove all the insert/updates to NotificationHistory.
However, there is a consern that this will double the length of time the tasks take. So do we do these upserts in a separate task or in the same one?
