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Time window join

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Applies to: ✅ Microsoft Fabric ✅ Azure Data Explorer ✅ Azure Monitor ✅ Microsoft Sentinel

It's often useful to join between two large datasets on some high-cardinality key, such as an operation ID or a session ID, and further limit the right-hand-side ($right) records that need to match up with each left-hand-side ($left) record by adding a restriction on the "time-distance" between datetime columns on the left and on the right.

The above operation differs from the usual Kusto join operation, since for the equi-join part of matching the high-cardinality key between the left and right datasets, the system can also apply a distance function and use it to considerably speed up the join.

Note

A distance function doesn't behave like equality (that is, when both dist(x,y) and dist(y,z) are true it doesn't follow that dist(x,z) is also true.) Internally, we sometimes refer to this as "diagonal join".

For example, if you want to identify event sequences within a relatively small time window, assume that you have a table T with the following schema:

  • SessionId: A column of type string with correlation IDs.
  • EventType: A column of type string that identifies the event type of the record.
  • Timestamp: A column of type datetime indicates when the event described by the record happened.
let T = datatable(SessionId:string, EventType:string, Timestamp:datetime)
[
    '0', 'A', datetime(2017-10-01 00:00:00),
    '0', 'B', datetime(2017-10-01 00:01:00),
    '1', 'B', datetime(2017-10-01 00:02:00),
    '1', 'A', datetime(2017-10-01 00:03:00),
    '3', 'A', datetime(2017-10-01 00:04:00),
    '3', 'B', datetime(2017-10-01 00:10:00),
];
T

Output

SessionId EventType Timestamp
0 A 2017-10-01 00:00:00.0000000
0 B 2017-10-01 00:01:00.0000000
1 B 2017-10-01 00:02:00.0000000
1 A 2017-10-01 00:03:00.0000000
3 A 2017-10-01 00:04:00.0000000
3 B 2017-10-01 00:10:00.0000000

Problem statement

Our query should answer the following question:

Find all the session IDs in which event type A was followed by an event type B within a 1min time window.

Note

In the sample data above, the only such session ID is 0.

Semantically, the following query answers this question, albeit inefficiently.

T 
| where EventType == 'A'
| project SessionId, Start=Timestamp
| join kind=inner
    (
    T 
    | where EventType == 'B'
    | project SessionId, End=Timestamp
    ) on SessionId
| where (End - Start) between (0min .. 1min)
| project SessionId, Start, End

Output

SessionId Start End
0 2017-10-01 00:00:00.0000000 2017-10-01 00:01:00.0000000

To optimize this query, we can rewrite it as described below so that the time window is expressed as a join key.

Rewrite the query to account for the time window

Rewrite the query so that the datetime values are "discretized" into buckets whose size is half the size of the time window. Use Kusto's equi-join to compare those bucket IDs.

let lookupWindow = 1min;
let lookupBin = lookupWindow / 2.0; // lookup bin = equal to 1/2 of the lookup window
T 
| where EventType == 'A'
| project SessionId, Start=Timestamp,
          // TimeKey on the left side of the join is mapped to a discrete time axis for the join purpose
          TimeKey = bin(Timestamp, lookupBin)
| join kind=inner
    (
    T 
    | where EventType == 'B'
    | project SessionId, End=Timestamp,
              // TimeKey on the right side of the join - emulates event 'B' appearing several times
              // as if it was 'replicated'
              TimeKey = range(bin(Timestamp-lookupWindow, lookupBin),
                              bin(Timestamp, lookupBin),
                              lookupBin)
    // 'mv-expand' translates the TimeKey array range into a column
    | mv-expand TimeKey to typeof(datetime)
    ) on SessionId, TimeKey 
| where (End - Start) between (0min .. lookupWindow)
| project SessionId, Start, End

Runnable query reference (with table inlined)

let T = datatable(SessionId:string, EventType:string, Timestamp:datetime)
[
    '0', 'A', datetime(2017-10-01 00:00:00),
    '0', 'B', datetime(2017-10-01 00:01:00),
    '1', 'B', datetime(2017-10-01 00:02:00),
    '1', 'A', datetime(2017-10-01 00:03:00),
    '3', 'A', datetime(2017-10-01 00:04:00),
    '3', 'B', datetime(2017-10-01 00:10:00),
];
let lookupWindow = 1min;
let lookupBin = lookupWindow / 2.0;
T 
| where EventType == 'A'
| project SessionId, Start=Timestamp, TimeKey = bin(Timestamp, lookupBin)
| join kind=inner
    (
    T 
    | where EventType == 'B'
    | project SessionId, End=Timestamp,
              TimeKey = range(bin(Timestamp-lookupWindow, lookupBin),
                              bin(Timestamp, lookupBin),
                              lookupBin)
    | mv-expand TimeKey to typeof(datetime)
    ) on SessionId, TimeKey 
| where (End - Start) between (0min .. lookupWindow)
| project SessionId, Start, End

Output

SessionId Start End
0 2017-10-01 00:00:00.0000000 2017-10-01 00:01:00.0000000

5M data query

The next query emulates a dataset of 5M records and ~1M IDs and runs the query with the technique described above.

let T = range x from 1 to 5000000 step 1
| extend SessionId = rand(1000000), EventType = rand(3), Time=datetime(2017-01-01)+(x * 10ms)
| extend EventType = case(EventType < 1, "A",
                          EventType < 2, "B",
                          "C");
let lookupWindow = 1min;
let lookupBin = lookupWindow / 2.0;
T 
| where EventType == 'A'
| project SessionId, Start=Time, TimeKey = bin(Time, lookupBin)
| join kind=inner
    (
    T 
    | where EventType == 'B'
    | project SessionId, End=Time, 
              TimeKey = range(bin(Time-lookupWindow, lookupBin), 
                              bin(Time, lookupBin),
                              lookupBin)
    | mv-expand TimeKey to typeof(datetime)
    ) on SessionId, TimeKey 
| where (End - Start) between (0min .. lookupWindow)
| project SessionId, Start, End 
| count

Output

Count
3344