REFRESH¶
Refresh one or more tables explicitly.
Table of contents
Description¶
The REFRESH TABLE command refreshes one or more tables, making all changes made to that table visible to subsequent commands.
The PARTITION clause can be used to refresh specific partitions of a
partitioned table instead of all partitions. The PARTITION clause requires
a list of all partition columns as an
argument.
In case the PARTITION clause is omitted all open partitions will be
refreshed. Closed partitions are not refreshed.
See also
For performance reasons, refreshing tables or partitions should be avoided as it is an expensive operation. By default CrateDB periodically refreshes the tables anyway. See Refresh and refresh_interval for more information about the periodic refreshes.
Without an explicit REFRESH, other statements like UPDATE, DELETE
or SELECT won’t see data until the periodic refresh happens.
An exception to that are statements which can filter on a primary key with an exact match on all primary key values within a record. For example, looking up a single document in a table with a single primary key column:
WHERE pk = 'ID1'
If the primary key consists of multiple columns it would look like this:
WHERE pk1 = 'ID_PART_1' AND pk2 = 'ID_PART_2'
Or if you want to query multiple records:
WHERE pk = 'ID1' OR pk = 'ID2' OR pk = 'ID3'
These kind of filters will result in a primary key lookup. You can use the EXPLAIN statement to verify if this is the case:
cr> CREATE TABLE pk_demo (id int primary key);
CREATE OK, 1 row affected (... sec)
cr> EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM pk_demo WHERE id = 1;
+--------------------------------------------------------+
| QUERY PLAN |
+--------------------------------------------------------+
| Get[doc.pk_demo | id | DocKeys{1} | (id = 1)] (rows=1) |
+--------------------------------------------------------+
EXPLAIN 1 row in set (... sec)
This lists a Get operator, which is the internal
operator name for a primary key lookup. Compare this with the following
output:
cr> EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM pk_demo WHERE id > 1;
+-------------------------------------------------------+
| QUERY PLAN |
+-------------------------------------------------------+
| Collect[doc.pk_demo | [id] | (id > 1)] (rows=unknown) |
+-------------------------------------------------------+
EXPLAIN 1 row in set (... sec)
The filter changed to id > 1, in this case CrateDB can no longer use a
primary key lookup and the used operator changed to a Collect operator.
To avoid the need for manual refreshes it can be useful to make use of primary key lookups, as they see the data even if the table hasn’t been refreshed yet.
See also Consistency.
Parameters¶
- table_ident
The name (optionally schema-qualified) of an existing table that is to be refreshed.
Clauses¶
PARTITION¶
If the table is partitioned, the optional
PARTITION clause can be used to refresh one partition exclusively.
[ PARTITION ( partition_column = value [ , ... ] ) ]
- partition_column
One of the column names used for table partitioning.
- value
The respective column value.
All partition columns (specified by the
PARTITIONED BY clause) must be listed inside the
parentheses along with their respective values using the partition_column =
value syntax (separated by commas).
Because each partition corresponds to a unique set of partition column row values, this clause uniquely identifies a single partition to refresh.
Tip
The SHOW CREATE TABLE statement will show you the complete list of partition columns specified by the PARTITIONED BY clause.