Prepare an instance for production workloads

Billing information

The following information describes the billing for upgrading trial instances:

• If you have an unused free quota, upgrading your instance does not affect your ability to use the remaining quota. After your free quota is exhausted or expires, your instance is automatically converted to the pay-as-you-go billing method. For more information about billing rules, see Pay-as-you-go.

• If your free quota is exhausted or has expired, the resources of the upgraded instance are billed on a pay-as-you-go basis. For more information about billing rules, see Pay-as-you-go.

• If you choose not to upgrade the instance, usage that exceeds your free quota or occurs after the free quota expires automatically switches to pay-as-you-go billing. If you no longer need the instance, navigate to the Instances page in the Hologres Management Console, click Stop, and then Delete the instance to avoid unnecessary charges.

Step 1: Upgrade the instance

Hologres 8-Core instances are intended only for evaluation and functional testing. Do not use them for performance testing or production workloads.

To run performance tests or deploy production jobs, you must first upgrade the instance, for example, to a 64-Core instance. For more information, see Upgrade or downgrade instances.

Step 2: Modify the shard count

Hologres is a distributed, real-time data warehouse engine. Data is stored across multiple data partitions, known as shards, in the underlying storage system. A proper shard count allows for better utilization of distributed computing resources and supports parallel processing, which improves query performance.

An 8-Core Hologres instance has a default shard count of 2. After you upgrade the instance, the shard count remains 2 even though the number of compute nodes (Workers) increases. This configuration prevents the system from fully leveraging its distributed query capabilities. After the upgrade, you must adjust the shard count. For more information, see Manage table groups and shard counts.

1. Create a new Table Group with an appropriate shard count.

   For a 64-Core Hologres instance, a shard count of 40 is recommended. Run the following command to create a new Table Group and set its shard count:

   CALL HG_CREATE_TABLE_GROUP ('<new_tg_name>', <shard_count>);

   In this command, new_tg_name specifies the name of the new Table Group and shard_count specifies the number of shards.

2. Set the new Table Group as the default group.

   Run the following command to set the new Table Group as the default. New tables that you create will automatically belong to this group.

   CALL HG_UPDATE_DATABASE_PROPERTY ('default_table_group', '<new_tg_name>');

3. Migrate existing tables to the new Table Group.

   Existing tables still belong to the original Table Group. Run the following command to move an existing table to the new Table Group.

   -- Syntax for V1.1 and later
   CALL HG_MOVE_TABLE_TO_TABLE_GROUP('<table_name>','<new_tg_name>');
   
   -- Syntax for V0.10
   CALL HG_UPDATE_TABLE_SHARD_COUNT('<table_name>','<new_tg_name>');

(Optional) Resource isolation and high availability

If your workload requires read/write splitting or read-read separation, you can use the Hologres shared-storage multi-instance high availability (HA) solution. For more information, see Deploy primary and secondary instances for read/write splitting (shared storage).

For example, for a 64-Core instance, you can configure a 32-Core primary instance to handle data writes and create a 32-Core read-only secondary instance to serve query requests. This setup achieves read/write splitting. If multiple applications require queries, you can use additional read-only secondary instances to achieve read-read separation.

Next steps

After your jobs are running stably in the production environment, consider the following steps:

• To save costs on compute resources, you can switch the billing method from pay-as-you-go to subscription. For more information about pricing differences, see Billing overview. To learn how to change the billing method, see Switch between billing methods.

• To reduce storage costs, you can purchase Standard storage resources on a subscription basis. To do this, you must first switch the instance to the subscription billing method and then upgrade it. Alternatively, you can purchase a storage plan. For more information about storage plans, see Storage plans.

References

• Each Hologres instance type has a corresponding default shard count. For more information, see Manage instances.

• The shard count and the number of Workers have a specific allocation relationship. If you set the shard count properly, you can improve data storage and computational efficiency. For more information, see Relationship between shards and compute node Workers.

• Best practices for table group configuration.