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Package: MsBackendSql
Authors: Johannes Rainer [aut, cre] (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6977-7147), Chong Tang [ctb], Laurent Gatto [ctb] (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1520-2268)
Compiled: Wed Nov 20 07:12:13 2024

Introduction

The Spectra Bioconductor package provides a flexible and expandable infrastructure for Mass Spectrometry (MS) data. The package supports interchangeable use of different backends that provide additional file support or different ways to store and represent MS data. The MsBackendSql package provides backends to store data from whole MS experiments in SQL databases. The data in such databases can be easily (and efficiently) accessed using Spectra objects that use the MsBackendSql class as an interface to the data in the database. Such Spectra objects have a minimal memory footprint and hence allow analysis of very large data sets even on computers with limited hardware capabilities. For certain operations, the performance of this data representation is superior to that of other low-memory (on-disk) data representations such as Spectra’s MsBackendMzR backend. Finally, the MsBackendSql supports also remote data access to e.g. a central database server hosting several large MS data sets.

Installation

The package can be installed with the BiocManager package. To install BiocManager use install.packages("BiocManager") and, after that, BiocManager::install("MsBackendSql") to install this package.

Creating and using MsBackendSql SQL databases

MsBackendSql SQL databases can be created either by importing (raw) MS data from MS data files using the createMsBackendSqlDatabase() or using the backendInitialize() function by providing in addition to the database connection also the full MS data to import as a DataFrame. In the first example we use the createMsBackendSqlDatabase() function which takes a connection to an (empty) database and the names of the files from which the data should be imported as input parameters creates all necessary database tables and stores the full data into the database. Below we create an empty SQLite database (in a temporary file) and fill that with MS data from two mzML files (from the msdata package).

library(RSQLite)

dbfile <- tempfile()
con <- dbConnect(SQLite(), dbfile)

library(MsBackendSql)
fls <- dir(system.file("sciex", package = "msdata"), full.names = TRUE)
createMsBackendSqlDatabase(con, fls)

By default the m/z and intensity values are stored as BLOB data types in the database. This has advantages on the performance to extract peaks data from the database but would for example not allow to filter peaks by m/z values directly in the database. As an alternative it is also possible to the individual m/z and intensity values in separate rows of the database table. This long table format results however in considerably larger databases (with potentially poorer performance). Note also that the code and backend is optimized for MySQL/MariaDB databases by taking advantage of table partitioning and specialized table storage options. Any other SQL database server is however also supported (also portable, self-contained SQLite databases).

The MsBackendSql package provides two backends to interact with such databases: the (default) MsBackendSql class and the MsBackendOfflineSql, that inherits all properties and functions from the former, but which does not store the connection to the database within the object but connects (and disconnects) to (and from) the database in each function call. This allows to use the latter also for parallel processing setups or to save/load the object (e.g. using save and saveRDS). Thus, for most applications the MsBackendOfflineSql might be used as the preferred backend to SQL databases.

To access the data in the database we create below a Spectra object providing the connection to the database in the constructor call and specifying to use the MsBackendSql as backend using the source parameter.

sps <- Spectra(con, source = MsBackendSql())
sps
## MSn data (Spectra) with 1862 spectra in a MsBackendSql backend:
##        msLevel precursorMz  polarity
##      <integer>   <numeric> <integer>
## 1            1          NA         1
## 2            1          NA         1
## 3            1          NA         1
## 4            1          NA         1
## 5            1          NA         1
## ...        ...         ...       ...
## 1858         1          NA         1
## 1859         1          NA         1
## 1860         1          NA         1
## 1861         1          NA         1
## 1862         1          NA         1
##  ... 34 more variables/columns.
##  Use  'spectraVariables' to list all of them.
## Database: /tmp/RtmpQWFSn6/fileaaa1c2b43d

As an alternative, the MsBackendOfflineSql backend could also be used to interface with MS data in a SQL database. In contrast to the MsBackendSql, the MsBackendOfflineSql does not contain an active (open) connection to the database and hence supports serializing (saving) the object to disk using e.g. the save() function, or parallel processing (if supported by the database system). Thus, for most use cases the MsBackendOfflineSql should be used instead of the MsBackendSql. See further below for more information on the MsBackendOfflineSql.

Spectra objects allow also to change the backend to any other backend (extending MsBackend) using the setBackend() function. Below we use this function to first load all data into memory by changing from the MsBackendSql to a MsBackendMemory.

sps_mem <- setBackend(sps, MsBackendMemory())
sps_mem
## MSn data (Spectra) with 1862 spectra in a MsBackendMemory backend:
##        msLevel     rtime scanIndex
##      <integer> <numeric> <integer>
## 1            1     0.280         1
## 2            1     0.559         2
## 3            1     0.838         3
## 4            1     1.117         4
## 5            1     1.396         5
## ...        ...       ...       ...
## 1858         1   258.636       927
## 1859         1   258.915       928
## 1860         1   259.194       929
## 1861         1   259.473       930
## 1862         1   259.752       931
##  ... 34 more variables/columns.
## Processing:
##  Switch backend from MsBackendSql to MsBackendMemory [Wed Nov 20 07:12:19 2024]

With this function it is also possible to change from any backend to a MsBackendSql in which case a new database is created and all data from the originating backend is stored in this database. To change the backend to an MsBackendOfflineSql we need to provide the connection information to the SQL database as additional parameters. These parameters are the same that need to be passed to a dbConnect() call to establish the connection to the database. These parameters include the database driver (parameter drv), the database name and eventually the user name, host etc (see ?dbConnect for more information). In the simple example below we store the data into a SQLite database and thus only need to provide the database name, which corresponds SQLite database file. In our example we store the data into a temporary file.

sps2 <- setBackend(sps_mem, MsBackendOfflineSql(), drv = SQLite(),
                   dbname = tempfile())
sps2
## MSn data (Spectra) with 1862 spectra in a MsBackendOfflineSql backend:
##        msLevel precursorMz  polarity
##      <integer>   <numeric> <integer>
## 1            1          NA         1
## 2            1          NA         1
## 3            1          NA         1
## 4            1          NA         1
## 5            1          NA         1
## ...        ...         ...       ...
## 1858         1          NA         1
## 1859         1          NA         1
## 1860         1          NA         1
## 1861         1          NA         1
## 1862         1          NA         1
##  ... 34 more variables/columns.
##  Use  'spectraVariables' to list all of them.
## Database: /tmp/RtmpQWFSn6/fileaaa59b9b5b7
## Processing:
##  Switch backend from MsBackendSql to MsBackendMemory [Wed Nov 20 07:12:19 2024]
##  Switch backend from MsBackendMemory to MsBackendOfflineSql [Wed Nov 20 07:12:20 2024]

Similar to any other Spectra object we can retrieve the available spectra variables using the spectraVariables() function.

##  [1] "msLevel"                  "rtime"                   
##  [3] "acquisitionNum"           "scanIndex"               
##  [5] "dataStorage"              "dataOrigin"              
##  [7] "centroided"               "smoothed"                
##  [9] "polarity"                 "precScanNum"             
## [11] "precursorMz"              "precursorIntensity"      
## [13] "precursorCharge"          "collisionEnergy"         
## [15] "isolationWindowLowerMz"   "isolationWindowTargetMz" 
## [17] "isolationWindowUpperMz"   "peaksCount"              
## [19] "totIonCurrent"            "basePeakMZ"              
## [21] "basePeakIntensity"        "ionisationEnergy"        
## [23] "lowMZ"                    "highMZ"                  
## [25] "mergedScan"               "mergedResultScanNum"     
## [27] "mergedResultStartScanNum" "mergedResultEndScanNum"  
## [29] "injectionTime"            "filterString"            
## [31] "spectrumId"               "ionMobilityDriftTime"    
## [33] "scanWindowLowerLimit"     "scanWindowUpperLimit"    
## [35] "spectrum_id_"

The MS peak data can be accessed using either the mz(), intensity() or peaksData() functions. Below we extract the peaks matrix of the 5th spectrum and display the first 6 rows.

peaksData(sps)[[5]] |>
head()
##            mz intensity
## [1,] 105.0347         0
## [2,] 105.0362       164
## [3,] 105.0376         0
## [4,] 105.0391         0
## [5,] 105.0405       328
## [6,] 105.0420         0

All data (peaks data or spectra variables) are always retrieved on the fly from the database resulting thus in a minimal memory footprint for the Spectra object.

print(object.size(sps), units = "KB")
## 89.4 Kb

The backend supports also adding additional spectra variables or changing their values. Below we add 10 seconds to the retention time of each spectrum.

sps$rtime <- sps$rtime + 10

Such operations do however not change the data in the database (which is always considered read-only) but are cached locally within the backend object (in memory). The size in memory of the object is thus higher after changing that spectra variable.

print(object.size(sps), units = "KB")
## 104.1 Kb

Such $<- operations can also be used to cache spectra variables (temporarily) in memory which can eventually improve performance. Below we test the time it takes to extract the MS level from each spectrum from the database, then cache the MS levels in memory using $msLevel <- and test the timing to extract these cached variable.

##    user  system elapsed 
##   0.006   0.000   0.007
sps$msLevel <- msLevel(sps)
system.time(msLevel(sps))
##    user  system elapsed 
##   0.002   0.000   0.002

We can also use the reset() function to reset the data to its original state (this will cause any local spectra variables to be deleted and the backend to be initialized with the original data in the database).

sps <- reset(sps)

To use the MsBackendOfflineSql backend we need to provide all information required to connect to the database along with the database driver to the Spectra function. Which parameters are required to connect to the database depends on the SQL database and the used driver. In our example the data is stored in a SQLite database, hence we use the SQLite() database driver and only need to provide the database name with the dbname parameter. For a MySQL/MariaDB database we would use the MariaDB() driver and would have to provide the database name, user name, password as well as the host name and port through which the database is accessible.

sps_off <- Spectra(dbfile, drv = SQLite(),
                   source = MsBackendOfflineSql())
sps_off
## MSn data (Spectra) with 1862 spectra in a MsBackendOfflineSql backend:
##        msLevel precursorMz  polarity
##      <integer>   <numeric> <integer>
## 1            1          NA         1
## 2            1          NA         1
## 3            1          NA         1
## 4            1          NA         1
## 5            1          NA         1
## ...        ...         ...       ...
## 1858         1          NA         1
## 1859         1          NA         1
## 1860         1          NA         1
## 1861         1          NA         1
## 1862         1          NA         1
##  ... 34 more variables/columns.
##  Use  'spectraVariables' to list all of them.
## Database: /tmp/RtmpQWFSn6/fileaaa1c2b43d

This backend provides the exact same functionality than MsBackendSql with the difference that the connection to the database is opened and closed for each function call. While this leads to a slightly lower performance, it allows to to serialize the object (i.e. save/load the object to/from disk) and to use it (and hence the Spectra object) also in a parallel processing setup. In contrast, for the MsBackendSql parallel processing is disabled since it is not possible to share the active backend connection within the object across different parallel processes.

Below we compare the performance of the two backends. The performance difference is the result from opening and closing the database connection for each call. Note that this will also depend on the SQL server that is being used. For SQLite databases there is almost no overhead.

## Unit: milliseconds
##              expr      min       lq     mean   median       uq      max neval
##      msLevel(sps) 4.984957 5.095313 5.248655 5.182901 5.250958 10.33789   100
##  msLevel(sps_off) 6.475206 6.762277 6.951200 6.873113 7.009753 12.56671   100

Performance comparison with other backends

The need to retrieve any spectra data on-the-fly from the database will have an impact on the performance of data access function of Spectra objects using the MsBackendSql backends. To evaluate its impact we next compare the performance of the MsBackendSql to other Spectra backends, specifically, the MsBackendMzR which is the default backend to read and represent raw MS data, and the MsBackendMemory backend that keeps all MS data in memory (and is thus not suggested for larger MS experiments). Similar to the MsBackendMzR, also the MsBackendSql keeps only a limited amount of data in memory. These on-disk backends need thus to retrieve spectra and MS peaks data on-the-fly from either the original raw data files (in the case of the MsBackendMzR) or from the SQL database (in the case of the MsBackendSql). The in-memory backend MsBackendMemory is supposed to provide the fastest data access since all data is kept in memory.

Below we thus create Spectra objects from the same data but using the different backends.

sps <- Spectra(con, source = MsBackendSql())
sps_mzr <- Spectra(fls, source = MsBackendMzR())
sps_im <- setBackend(sps_mzr, backend = MsBackendMemory())

At first we compare the memory footprint of the 3 backends.

print(object.size(sps), units = "KB")
## 89.4 Kb
print(object.size(sps_mzr), units = "KB")
## 386.7 Kb
print(object.size(sps_im), units = "KB")
## 54494.5 Kb

The MsBackendSql has the lowest memory footprint of all 3 backends because it does not keep any data in memory. The MsBackendMzR keeps all spectra variables, except the MS peaks data, in memory and has thus a larger size. The MsBackendMemory keeps all data (including the MS peaks data) in memory and has thus the largest size in memory.

Next we compare the performance to extract the MS level for each spectrum from the 4 different Spectra objects.

## Unit: microseconds
##              expr      min        lq       mean    median        uq      max
##      msLevel(sps) 4919.454 5062.0150 5215.57665 5124.2065 5236.5710 8921.037
##  msLevel(sps_mzr)  363.428  393.6895  412.77713  405.2460  426.5605  639.332
##   msLevel(sps_im)   10.780   13.6350   21.32601   21.9905   25.2225   62.115
##  neval
##    100
##    100
##    100

Extracting MS levels is thus slowest for the MsBackendSql, which is not surprising because both other backends keep this data in memory while the MsBackendSql needs to retrieve it from the database.

We next compare the performance to access the full peaks data from each Spectra object.

microbenchmark(peaksData(sps, BPPARAM = SerialParam()),
               peaksData(sps_mzr, BPPARAM = SerialParam()),
               peaksData(sps_im, BPPARAM = SerialParam()), times = 10)
## Unit: microseconds
##                                         expr        min         lq       mean
##      peaksData(sps, BPPARAM = SerialParam())  97540.809 119631.367 224360.009
##  peaksData(sps_mzr, BPPARAM = SerialParam()) 444553.800 446345.501 617274.189
##   peaksData(sps_im, BPPARAM = SerialParam())    319.957    335.415   2008.267
##      median         uq        max neval
##  123701.446 355393.080  519262.31    10
##  480928.205 680775.404 1137189.98    10
##     499.892    631.447   15869.12    10

As expected, the MsBackendMemory has the fasted access to the full peaks data. The MsBackendSql outperforms however the MsBackendMzR providing faster access to the m/z and intensity values.

Performance can be improved for the MsBackendMzR using parallel processing. Note that the MsBackendSql does not support parallel processing and thus parallel processing is (silently) disabled in functions such as peaksData().

m2 <- MulticoreParam(2)
microbenchmark(peaksData(sps, BPPARAM = m2),
               peaksData(sps_mzr, BPPARAM = m2),
               peaksData(sps_im, BPPARAM = m2), times = 10)
## Unit: microseconds
##                              expr        min         lq        mean      median
##      peaksData(sps, BPPARAM = m2)  93394.586 106092.096 197820.6386 126579.2235
##  peaksData(sps_mzr, BPPARAM = m2) 451848.725 455940.505 672688.6818 647837.4650
##   peaksData(sps_im, BPPARAM = m2)    297.425    595.831    584.7887    623.7235
##          uq         max neval
##  390127.320  401679.712    10
##  833967.947 1100080.824    10
##     634.844     879.711    10

We next compare the performance of subsetting operations.

microbenchmark(filterRt(sps, rt = c(50, 100)),
               filterRt(sps_mzr, rt = c(50, 100)),
               filterRt(sps_im, rt = c(50, 100)))
## Unit: microseconds
##                                expr      min        lq      mean   median
##      filterRt(sps, rt = c(50, 100)) 2556.087 2665.7520 2880.0727 2738.332
##  filterRt(sps_mzr, rt = c(50, 100)) 1993.798 2136.3040 2383.4112 2255.511
##   filterRt(sps_im, rt = c(50, 100))  456.861  492.5185  536.6532  519.694
##         uq       max neval
##  2872.3615 10694.755   100
##  2465.0825  7531.746   100
##   557.8255   874.060   100

The two on-disk backends MsBackendSql and MsBackendMzR show a comparable performance for this operation. This filtering does involves access to a spectra variables (the retention time in this case) which, for the MsBackendSql needs first to be retrieved from the backend. The MsBackendSql backend allows however also to cache spectra variables (i.e. they are stored within the MsBackendSql object). Any access to such cached spectra variables can eventually be faster because no dedicated SQL query is needed.

To evaluate the performance of a pure subsetting operation we first define the indices of 10 random spectra and subset the Spectra objects to these.

idx <- sample(seq_along(sps), 10)
microbenchmark(sps[idx],
               sps_mzr[idx],
               sps_im[idx])
## Unit: microseconds
##          expr     min      lq     mean   median       uq      max neval
##      sps[idx] 132.357 138.198 147.9079 147.3800 152.0040  256.128   100
##  sps_mzr[idx] 636.396 653.699 681.2952 669.0775 688.6845 1427.502   100
##   sps_im[idx] 230.239 238.049 247.6865 244.4060 250.7025  372.554   100

Here the MsBackendSql outperforms the other backends because it does not keep any data in memory and hence does not need to subset these. The two other backends need to subset the data they keep in memory which is in both cases a data frame with either a reduced set of spectra variables or the full MS data.

At last we compare also the extraction of the peaks data from the such subset Spectra objects.

sps_10 <- sps[idx]
sps_mzr_10 <- sps_mzr[idx]
sps_im_10 <- sps_im[idx]

microbenchmark(peaksData(sps_10),
               peaksData(sps_mzr_10),
               peaksData(sps_im_10),
               times = 10)
## Unit: microseconds
##                   expr       min        lq       mean    median        uq
##      peaksData(sps_10)  2677.463  2904.747  3357.0899  3479.534  3788.505
##  peaksData(sps_mzr_10) 72400.262 77544.196 77828.5970 78133.324 78870.479
##   peaksData(sps_im_10)   370.571   423.330   496.2246   456.186   605.289
##        max neval
##   3921.333    10
##  80249.130    10
##    629.113    10

The MsBackendSql outperforms the MsBackendMzR while, not unexpectedly, the MsBackendMemory provides fasted access.

Considerations for database systems/servers

The backends from the MsBackendSql package use standard SQL calls to retrieve MS data from the database and hence any SQL database system (for which an R package is available) is supported. SQLite-based databases would represent the easiest and most user friendly solution since no database server administration and user management is required. Indeed, performance of SQLite is very high, even for very large data sets. Server-based databases on the other hand have the advantage to enable a centralized storage and control of MS data (inclusive user management etc). Also, such server systems would also allow data set or server-specific configurations to improve performance.

A comparison between a SQLite-based with a MariaDB-based MsBackendSql database for a large data set comprising over 8,000 samples and over 15,000,000 spectra is available here. In brief, performance to extract data was comparable and for individual spectra variables even faster for the SQLite database. Only when more complex SQL queries were involved (combining several primary keys or data fields) the more advanced MariaDB database outperformed SQLite.

Other properties of the MsBackendSql

The MsBackendSql backend does not support parallel processing since the database connection can not be shared across the different (parallel) processes. Thus, all methods on Spectra objects that use a MsBackendSql will automatically (and silently) disable parallel processing even if a dedicated parallel processing setup was passed along with the BPPARAM method.

Some functions on Spectra objects require to load the MS peak data (i.e., m/z and intensity values) into memory. For very large data sets (or computers with limited hardware resources) such function calls can cause out-of-memory errors. One example is the lengths() function that determines the number of peaks per spectrum by loading the peak matrix first into memory. Such functions should ideally be called using the peaksapply() function with parameter chunkSize (e.g., peaksapply(sps, lengths, chunkSize = 5000L)). Instead of processing the full data set, the data will be first split into chunks of size chunkSize that are stepwise processed. Hence, only data from chunkSize spectra is loaded into memory in one iteration.

Summary

The MsBackendSql provides an MS data representations and storage mode with a minimal memory footprint (in R) that is still comparably efficient for standard processing and subsetting operations. This backend is specifically useful for very large MS data sets, that could even be hosted on remote (MySQL/MariaDB) servers. A potential use case for this backend could thus be to set up a central storage place for MS experiments with data analysts connecting remotely to this server to perform initial data exploration and filtering. After subsetting to a smaller data set of interest, users could then retrieve/download this data by changing the backend to e.g. a MsBackendMemory, which would result in a download of the full data to the user computer’s memory.

Session information

## R Under development (unstable) (2024-11-13 r87330)
## Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
## Running under: Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS
## 
## Matrix products: default
## BLAS:   /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libblas.so.3 
## LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libopenblasp-r0.3.26.so;  LAPACK version 3.12.0
## 
## locale:
##  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
##  [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
##  [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
##  [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                 
##  [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
## [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       
## 
## time zone: UTC
## tzcode source: system (glibc)
## 
## attached base packages:
## [1] stats4    stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods  
## [8] base     
## 
## other attached packages:
## [1] microbenchmark_1.5.0 RSQLite_2.3.8        MsBackendSql_1.7.1  
## [4] Spectra_1.17.0       BiocParallel_1.41.0  S4Vectors_0.45.2    
## [7] BiocGenerics_0.53.3  generics_0.1.3       BiocStyle_2.35.0    
## 
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
##  [1] sass_0.4.9             MsCoreUtils_1.19.0     stringi_1.8.4         
##  [4] hms_1.1.3              digest_0.6.37          evaluate_1.0.1        
##  [7] bookdown_0.41          fastmap_1.2.0          blob_1.2.4            
## [10] jsonlite_1.8.9         ProtGenerics_1.39.0    progress_1.2.3        
## [13] mzR_2.41.0             DBI_1.2.3              BiocManager_1.30.25   
## [16] codetools_0.2-20       textshaping_0.4.0      jquerylib_0.1.4       
## [19] cli_3.6.3              rlang_1.1.4            crayon_1.5.3          
## [22] Biobase_2.67.0         bit64_4.5.2            cachem_1.1.0          
## [25] yaml_2.3.10            tools_4.5.0            parallel_4.5.0        
## [28] memoise_2.0.1          ncdf4_1.23             vctrs_0.6.5           
## [31] R6_2.5.1               lifecycle_1.0.4        fs_1.6.5              
## [34] htmlwidgets_1.6.4      IRanges_2.41.1         bit_4.5.0             
## [37] clue_0.3-66            MASS_7.3-61            ragg_1.3.3            
## [40] cluster_2.1.6          pkgconfig_2.0.3        desc_1.4.3            
## [43] pkgdown_2.1.1.9000     bslib_0.8.0            Rcpp_1.0.13-1         
## [46] data.table_1.16.2      systemfonts_1.1.0      xfun_0.49             
## [49] knitr_1.49             htmltools_0.5.8.1      rmarkdown_2.29        
## [52] compiler_4.5.0         prettyunits_1.2.0      MetaboCoreUtils_1.15.0