Stream Analytics Output

Question

I have a project that uses an event hub to receive data, this is sent every second, the data is received by a website using SignalR, this is all working fine, i have been storing the data in to blob storage via a Stream Analytics Job, but this is really slow to access, and with the amount of data i am receiving off just 6 devices, it will get even slower as this increases, i need to access the data to display historical data on via graphs on the website, and then this is topped up with the live data coming in.

I don't really need to store the data every second, so thought about only storing it every 30 seconds instead, but into a SQL DB, what i am trying to do, is still receive the data every second but only store it every 30, i have tried a tumbling window, but from what i can see, this just dumps everything every 30 seconds instead of the single entries.

am i miss understanding the Tumbling, Sliding and Hopping windows, i am guessing i cannot use them in this way ? if that is the case, i am guessing the only way to do it, would be to have the output db as an input, so i can cross reference the timestamp with the current time ?

unless anyone has any other ideas ? any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

am i miss understanding the Tumbling, Sliding and Hopping windows

You are correct that this will put all events within the Tumbling/Sliding/Hopping window together. However, this is only valid within a group by case, which requires a aggregate function over this group.

There is a aggregate function Collect() which will create an array of the events within a group.

I think this should be possible when you group every event within a 30 second tumbling window using Collect(), then in the next step, CROSS APPLY each record, which should output all received events within the 30 seconds.

With Grouper AS (
    SELECT Collect() AS records
    FROM Input TIMESTAMP BY time
    GROUP BY TumblingWindow(second, 30)
)
SELECT 
    record.ArrayValue.FieldA AS FieldA,
    record.ArrayValue.FieldB AS FieldB
INTO Output
FROM Grouper
CROSS APPLY GetArrayElements(Grouper.records) AS record

Answer 2

If you are trying to aggregate 30 entries into one summary row every 30 seconds then a tumbling window is a good choice. Something like the following should work:

SELECT System.TimeStamp AS OutTime, TollId, COUNT(*) as cnt, sum(TollCharge) as TollCharge
FROM Input TIMESTAMP BY EntryTime
GROUP BY TollId, TumblingWindow(second, 30)

Answer 3

Thanks for the response, I have been speaking to my contact at Microsoft and he suggested something similar, I had also found something like that in various examples online. what I actually want to do, is only update the database with the data every 30 seconds. so I will receive the event, store it, and I will not store it again until 30 seconds have passed. I am not sure how I can do it with and ASA job to be honest, as I need to have a record of the last time it was updated, I actually have a connection to the event hub from my web site, so in the receiver, I am going to perform a simple check, and then store the data from there.