Cassandra trigger to Kafka on TTL expire - cassandra

I'm trying to implement a trigger on Cassandra to catch delete operations on TTL expire by implementing
public Collection augment(Partition partition)
on ITrigger interface.
But event is not triggering to kafka on ttl expire.

There is no such thing in Cassandra as a trigger on the data expiration... TTL is just a timestamp associated with piece of data that is used when reading the data, or performing compaction to decide if this piece of data will be included into result set, or written into a new SSTable.

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Moving a record after TTL expiry

I have two tables, a normal table and it's archived version. The rows in the normal table need to be moved to the archived version after TTL expires on the row. How can I accomplish this?
Is there a native trigger feature in Cassandra that I can use to move the record over to the audit table?
I know how to do this using code, but I thought that a batch process or even an event driven process to move it is unnecessarily complex.
Short answer, no, there is no way to achieve this without writing code for it.
When TTL is expired and when the record is read after that, the record will be marked as tombstone and once the gc grace period is finished, it is removed from the disk. There is no control over these operations/events and hence there is no way, including triggers, to instruct cassandra to insert this row into some other table.

capturing data expired through Time to Live cassandra

I have a specific usecase where i want to perform some operations with the data that gets expired as a reason of providing TTL while inserting a row in cassandra.Currently i am not able to find any such provision where i can fetch the data that expired as a reason of TTL.
You can change your data model to have the ttl'd date as part you can query on. You can than make a bulk job that processes them at intervals.
Or you can make a custom compaction strategy that triggers something when reading a column that has expired. It wont be "as it happens" but more as the columns are cleaned up/turned into tombstones.

How do we track the impact expired entries have on a time series table?

We are processing the oldest data as it comes into the time-series table. I am taking care to make sure that the oldest entries expire as soon as they are processed. Expectation is to have all the deletes at the bottom part of the clustering column of TimeUUID. So query will always read time slot without any deleted entries.
Will this scheme work? Are there any impacts of the expired columns that I should be aware of?
So keeping the timeuuid as part of clustering key guarantee the sort order to provide the most recent data.
If Cassandra 3.1 (DSE 5.x) and above :-
Now regarding the deletes, "avoid manual and use TWCS": Here is how
Let's say every X minutes your job process the data. Lets say X = 5min, (hopefully less than 24hours). Set the compaction to TWCS: Time Window Compaction Strategy and lets assume with TTL of 24hours.
WITH compaction= {
'compaction_window_unit': 'HOURS',
'compaction_window_size': '1',
};
Now there are 24buckets created in a day, each with one hour of data. These 24 buckets simply relates to 24 sstables (after compaction) in your Cassandra data directory. Now during the 25hour, the entire 1st bucket/sstable would automatically get dropped by TTL. Hence instead of coding for deletes, let Cassandra take care of the cleanup. The beauty of TWCS is to TTL the entire data within that sstable.
Now the READs from your application always goes to the recent bucket, 24th sstable in this case always. So the reads would never have to scan through the tombstones (caused by TTL).
If Cassandra 2.x or DSE 4.X, if TWCS isn't available yet :-
A way out till you upgrade to Cassandra 3.1 or above is to use artificial buckets. Say you introduce a time bucket variable as part of the partition key and keep the bucket value to be date and hour. This way each partition is different and you could adjust the bucket size to match the job processing interval.
So when you delete, only the processed partition gets deleted and will not come in the way while reading unprocessed ones. So scanning of tombstones could be avoided.
Its an additional effort on application side to start writing to the correct partition based on the current date/time bucket. But its worth it in production scenario to avoid Tombstone scan.
You can use TWCS to easily manage expired data, and perform filtering by some timestamp column on query time, to ensure that your query always getting the last results.
How do you "taking care" about oldest entries expiry? Cassandra will not show records with expired ttl, but they will persist in sstables until next compaction for this sstable. If you are deleting the rows by yourself, you can't make sure that your query will always read latest records, since Cassandra is eventually consistent, and theoretically there's can be some moments, when you will read stale data (or many such moments, based on your consistency settings).

Performance - TTL vs Deleting a row in Cassandra

We have a massive set of data that is written in to millions of rows in cassandra. We also have a scheduler that needs to process these records and remove them after processing them successfully.
Was wondering if Deleting the row after processing vs Marking a row with a TTL (essentially delaying its deletion).
Are there any pros / cons with Deletion vs TTL w.r.t Cassandra performance ?.
Thanks much
_DD
When using TTL the record is not removed from storage immediately, it is marked as tombstone. It gets physically removed only when the compaction occurs. Till that time the data impacts the nodes processing as it consumes the resources till the compaction happens. When you do a range query event the deleted(marked as tombstone) records are scanned by Cassandra. So using TTL to delete too many entries is considered as anti-pattern. The recommendation is to use temporary tables so that individual rows need not be removed. Just drop the entire table.
From what little information you have given here it sounds to me that you are using Cassandra as a queue which is a well known anti-pattern. You can read more about that here:
http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/cassandra-anti-patterns-queues-and-queue-like-datasets
However to answer your basic question there is little difference in performance between using TTL and deletes. TTL's in C* are handled as tombstones which is the same as a delete. The major difference is that a tombstone is not written to a record who's TTL has expired until that record is read again. When a delete is called a tombstone is immediately created. Tombstones in general cause significant performance problems within C* and while there are some methods to mitigate the issues that they create having large numbers of them usually point to a poor data model or poor use case for C*. If you are really looking at using C* as a queue why not look at using something more fit for that purpose such as Redis?
Based on what I've read, TTL will probably be as fast as your fastest delete process could be. The reason for this is that TTL doesn't have to seek the data in order to mark it with a tombstone. The TTL lives on the record and when the record is read and the TTL has expired, then it is marked with a tombstone.
http://docs.datastax.com/en/cql/3.1/cql/cql_using/use_expire_c.html

Cassandra batch isolation guarantee

I have a question regarding Cassandra batch isolation:
Our cluster consist of a single datacenter, replication factor of 3, reading and writing in LOCAL_QUORUM.
We must provide a news feed resembling an 'after' trigger, to notify clients about CRUD events of data in the DB.
We thought of performing the actual operation, and inserting an event on another table (also in another partition), within a batch. Asynchronously, some process would read events from event table and send them through an MQ.
Because we're writing to different partitions, and operation order is not necessarily maintained in a batch operation; is there a chance our event is written, and our process read it before our actual data is persisted?
Could the same happen in case our batch at last fails?
Regards,
Alejandro
From ACID properties, Cassandra can provide ACD. Therefore, don't expect Isolation in its classical sense.
Batching records will provide you with Atomicity. So it does guarantee that all or none of the records within a batch are written. However, because it doesn't guarantee Isolation, you can end up having some of the records persisted and others not (e.g. wrote to your queue table, but not master table).
Cassandra docs explain how it works:
To achieve atomicity, Cassandra first writes the serialized batch to the batchlog system table that consumes the serialized batch as blob data. When the rows in the batch have been successfully written and persisted (or hinted) the batchlog data is removed. There is a performance penalty for atomicity.
Finally, using Cassandra table as MQ is considered anti-pattern.

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