Package: MsBackendSql
Authors: Johannes Rainer [aut, cre] (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6977-7147), Chong Tang [ctb], Laurent Gatto [ctb] (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1520-2268)
Compiled: Thu Apr 27 17:31:48 2023

1 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.

2 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.

3 Creating and using MsBackendSql SQL databases

MsBackendSql 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 r Biocpkg("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.

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/RtmpO55oNh/file125f4b19ef889e

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 [Thu Apr 27 17:31:56 2023]

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. We thus have to provide in addition also a connection to an (empty) database using the dbcon parameter. Below we create a new empty SQLite database and store all data from the Spectra object into this database using the setBackend method.

tmpcon <- dbConnect(SQLite(), tempfile())
sps2 <- setBackend(sps_mem, MsBackendSql(), dbcon = tmpcon)
## Warning in .create_from_spectra_data(dbcon, data = data, ...): Replacing
## original column "spectrum_id_"
sps2
## 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/RtmpO55oNh/file125f4b4dcb9714
## Processing:
##  Switch backend from MsBackendSql to MsBackendMemory [Thu Apr 27 17:31:56 2023]
##  Switch backend from MsBackendMemory to MsBackendSql [Thu Apr 27 17:31:57 2023]

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

spectraVariables(sps)
##  [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")
## 91.4 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")
## 106 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.

system.time(msLevel(sps))
##    user  system elapsed 
##   0.012   0.000   0.012
sps$msLevel <- msLevel(sps)
system.time(msLevel(sps))
##    user  system elapsed 
##   0.004   0.000   0.004

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(SQLite(), dbname = dbfile,
                   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/RtmpO55oNh/file125f4b19ef889e

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 use the backend (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.

library(microbenchmark)
microbenchmark(msLevel(sps), msLevel(sps_off))
## Unit: milliseconds
##              expr      min       lq     mean   median       uq      max neval
##      msLevel(sps) 10.00013 10.67776 11.15571 10.98648 11.27708 19.00268   100
##  msLevel(sps_off) 12.46476 13.22099 14.06408 13.61063 14.13634 29.33161   100
##  cld
##   a 
##    b

4 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")
## 91.4 Kb
print(object.size(sps_mzr), units = "KB")
## 386.2 Kb
print(object.size(sps_im), units = "KB")
## 54494.3 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.

library(microbenchmark)
microbenchmark(msLevel(sps),
               msLevel(sps_mzr),
               msLevel(sps_im))
## Unit: microseconds
##              expr       min         lq        mean     median         uq
##      msLevel(sps) 10139.849 10859.8560 11347.08714 11158.3320 11625.8595
##  msLevel(sps_mzr)   638.227   724.3315   754.22441   740.4875   769.8730
##   msLevel(sps_im)    17.463    23.2765    40.87028    42.0085    54.1315
##        max neval cld
##  19532.683   100 a  
##   1419.649   100  b 
##     81.353   100   c

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: milliseconds
##                                         expr        min         lq       mean
##      peaksData(sps, BPPARAM = SerialParam()) 156.374032 179.541786 355.597754
##  peaksData(sps_mzr, BPPARAM = SerialParam()) 751.672720 770.475260 914.161205
##   peaksData(sps_im, BPPARAM = SerialParam())   2.931984   3.040468   5.219877
##      median         uq        max neval cld
##  210.392839  613.96898  659.51349    10 a  
##  782.029190 1187.55105 1306.80990    10  b 
##    3.253259    3.39104   20.64424    10   c

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: milliseconds
##                              expr        min         lq        mean      median
##      peaksData(sps, BPPARAM = m2) 140.774066 161.865777  304.754113  189.356999
##  peaksData(sps_mzr, BPPARAM = m2) 658.169671 688.696227 1020.032470 1009.426242
##   peaksData(sps_im, BPPARAM = m2)   1.222055   1.295048    1.498815    1.483737
##           uq         max neval cld
##   503.073521  689.898631    10 a  
##  1370.788383 1386.822241    10  b 
##     1.608343    1.848674    10   c

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)) 4424.377 4841.262 5274.283 5048.829
##  filterRt(sps_mzr, rt = c(50, 100)) 3285.140 3506.818 3906.495 3838.802
##   filterRt(sps_im, rt = c(50, 100))  690.171  780.248 1023.592  856.716
##         uq      max neval cld
##  5439.6470 10065.20   100 a  
##  4052.4185 10134.09   100  b 
##   977.7715 11529.98   100   c

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 cld
##      sps[idx] 189.409 208.7815  262.5136 231.4195  251.325 3304.174   100 a  
##  sps_mzr[idx] 970.325 985.7110 1013.0215 993.7000 1003.632 2500.763   100  b 
##   sps_im[idx] 293.168 313.3470  343.6076 331.3080  349.841 1560.046   100   c

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)  4454.859  5650.609  7136.7647  6793.306  8449.087
##  peaksData(sps_mzr_10) 77497.516 79826.256 82384.2169 81831.132 85981.229
##   peaksData(sps_im_10)   574.373   618.186   921.2787   951.269  1031.222
##        max neval cld
##  10582.847    10 a  
##  86813.335    10  b 
##   1491.842    10   c

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

5 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.

6 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.

7 Session information

sessionInfo()
## R version 4.3.0 RC (2023-04-13 r84269)
## Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
## Running under: Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS
## 
## Matrix products: default
## BLAS:   /home/biocbuild/bbs-3.17-bioc/R/lib/libRblas.so 
## LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lapack/liblapack.so.3.10.0
## 
## locale:
##  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
##  [3] LC_TIME=en_GB              LC_COLLATE=C              
##  [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: America/New_York
## tzcode source: system (glibc)
## 
## attached base packages:
## [1] stats4    stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods  
## [8] base     
## 
## other attached packages:
## [1] microbenchmark_1.4.9 RSQLite_2.3.1        MsBackendSql_1.0.1  
## [4] Spectra_1.10.0       ProtGenerics_1.32.0  BiocParallel_1.34.0 
## [7] S4Vectors_0.38.0     BiocGenerics_0.46.0  BiocStyle_2.28.0    
## 
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
##  [1] sandwich_3.0-2      sass_0.4.5          MsCoreUtils_1.12.0 
##  [4] lattice_0.21-8      hms_1.1.3           digest_0.6.31      
##  [7] grid_4.3.0          evaluate_0.20       bookdown_0.33      
## [10] mvtnorm_1.1-3       fastmap_1.1.1       blob_1.2.4         
## [13] Matrix_1.5-4        jsonlite_1.8.4      progress_1.2.2     
## [16] mzR_2.34.0          DBI_1.1.3           survival_3.5-5     
## [19] multcomp_1.4-23     BiocManager_1.30.20 TH.data_1.1-2      
## [22] codetools_0.2-19    jquerylib_0.1.4     cli_3.6.1          
## [25] rlang_1.1.0         crayon_1.5.2        Biobase_2.60.0     
## [28] splines_4.3.0       bit64_4.0.5         cachem_1.0.7       
## [31] yaml_2.3.7          tools_4.3.0         parallel_4.3.0     
## [34] memoise_2.0.1       ncdf4_1.21          vctrs_0.6.2        
## [37] R6_2.5.1            zoo_1.8-12          lifecycle_1.0.3    
## [40] fs_1.6.2            IRanges_2.34.0      bit_4.0.5          
## [43] clue_0.3-64         MASS_7.3-59         cluster_2.1.4      
## [46] pkgconfig_2.0.3     bslib_0.4.2         data.table_1.14.8  
## [49] Rcpp_1.0.10         xfun_0.39           knitr_1.42         
## [52] htmltools_0.5.5     rmarkdown_2.21      compiler_4.3.0     
## [55] prettyunits_1.1.1