FAQ

Deployment

For BE, we recommend 16 cores with 64GB or more. For FE, we recommend 8 cores with 16GB or more.
HDDs or SSDs can be used.
CPU must support AVX2 instruction sets, use cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep avx2 to confirm there is output. If not, we recommend replacing the machine. StarRocks' vectorization engine needs CPU instruction sets to perform a better effect.
The network needs 10 GB NIC and 10 GB switch.

Reasonable range partitioning can reduce the amount of data for scanning. Taking a data management perspective, we normally choose “time” or “region” as range partition keys.
With dynamic partitioning, you can create partitions automatically at regular intervals (on a daily basis).

Choose high-cardinality columns as the hash partition key to ensure that data is balanced among buckets. If a column has a unique ID, use it as the hash partition key. If there is data skew, use multiple columns as the hash partition key but try not to choose too many columns.
The number of buckets affects query parallelism. We recommend setting each bucket around 100MB to 1GB.
To make full use of the limited machine resources, set the number of buckets based on Number of BE * cpu core / 2. For example, you have a table with 100GB data and four BEs each of which is 64C. To take full advantage of the CPU resources with only one partition, you can set 144 buckets (4 * 64 /2 = 144) and each bucket contains 694 MB data.

Design the sort key based on your query needs.
To speed up queries, choose columns that are often used as filter and group by conditions as sort keys.
If there is a large data-point query, we recommend you to put the query ID in the first column. For example, if the query is select sum(revenue) from lineorder where user_id='aaa100'; and there is high concurrency, we recommend putting user\_id as the first column of the sort key.
If the query is mainly aggregation and scan, we recommend putting the low-cardinality columns first. For example, if the main type of query is select region, nation, count(*) from lineorder_flat group by region, nation, it would be more appropriate to put region as the first column and nation as the second. Putting the low-cardinality columns in front achieves data locality.

Choose precise data types. In other words, don't use string if you can use int; don't use bigint if you can use int. Precise data types help the database perform better.

Set the query parallelism via the session variable parallel_fragment_exec_instance_num. If the query performance is not satisfying but CPU resources are sufficient, adjust the parallelism by setting parallel_fragment_exec_instance_num = 16;. Parallelism can be set to half the number of CPU cores .
To make the session variable globally valid, setglobal parallel_fragment_exec_instance_num = 16;.
parallel_fragment_exec_instance_num is affected by the number of tablets owned by each BE. For example, if a table has 32 tablets and 3 partitions distributed on 4 BEs, then the number of tablets per BE is 32 * 3 / 4 = 24. In this case, the parallelism value of each BE cannot exceed 24. Even if you set parallel_fragment_exec_instance_num = 32, the parallelism value will still be 24 during execution.
To process high QPS queries, we recommend setting parallel_fragment_exec_instance_num to 1. This reduces the competition for resources during querying and therefore improves the QPS.

To view the query plan, use the command explain sql.
To enable profile reporting, set is_report_success = true.
To view the current query and profile information, go to http:FE_IP:FE_HTTP_PORT/queries.