Optimistic concurrency control clarification - multithreading

I am new to ES7 and trying to understand optimistic concurrency control.
I think I understand that when I get-request a document and send its _seq_no and _primary_term values in a later write-request to the same document, if the values differ, the write will be completely ignored.
But what happens to the document in the default case where I don't send the _seq_no and _primary_term values? Will the write go through even if it has older _seq_no and _primary_term values (therefore making the index inconsistent), or only be processed if the values are newer?
If the former, will the document eventually be consistent?
I'm trying to figure out if I need to send these values to get eventual consistency or if I get it for free without sending those values.

It's a great distributed system question. Let me break down the problem into sub-parts for readability and even before explain what is _seq_no and _primary_term as there isn't much explanation of those on the ES site.
_seq_no is the incremental counter which is assigned to ES document for each operation(update, delete, index), for example:- the first time you index a doc, it will have value 1, next update will have 2, next delete operation will have three and so on. Read operation doesn't update it.
_primary_term is the also an incremental counter, but change only when a replica shard is promoted as primary, due to network or any other failure, so if everything is excellent in your cluster it will not be changed, but in case of some failure and other replica promoted to primary then it would be increased.
Coming to the first question,
Q:- What happens to the document in the default case where I don't send the _seq_no and _primary_term values?
Ans:- you can have lost update issue, suppose you have a counter which you are updating, simultaneously 2 requests read the counter value to 1 and trying to increment by 1. now when you don't specify these above terms explicitly, then it's calculated by ES.
Now both the requests reach simultaneously to ES, then ES(primary shard) will process them one by one by increasing the sequence number, so at the end, your counter will have value 2, instead of 3. to make sure this doesn't happen, you pass these term values explicitly, and when ES tries to update them will see different sequence number and will reject your request.
To prevent such lost updates, use-cases, its always recommended sending explicit version number.
Q:- I'm trying to figure out if I need to send these values to get eventual consistency or if I get it for free without sending those values..
Answer:- These are related to concurrency control and nothing to deal with eventual consistency. In ES, write always happens to primary shards, but read can happen to any replicas(may contain obsolete data), which makes ES eventual consistent.
Important read
https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-sequence-ids-6-0

Related

Couchdb watch changes feed in clustered mode returning random changes for the same since value

According to the internet. You make a request to /_changes?since=0&limit=1 do what you want with the change, then use the last_seq value and pass to since and request again.
My problem is, this skips changes. You can keep requesting /_changes?since=0&limit=1 and get a different change over and over. Only occasionally actually getting the first change to the database. Sometimes you get the 7th change, or the 4th, etc. If you then repeat but using the last_seq value, it skips ahead further, far as I can tell, it never goes back and gets the changes it skipped.
Is there a proper way to periodically watch a couchdb changes feed without using the sockets method instead when using clusters?
What we have right now is a php script that runs on a cron task and requests the last 1000 changes, then it works through them and syncs up SQL databases to match what was in couchdb. With couchdb skipping changes, this is a big problem.
CouchDB 2.x doc states that (see):
"The results returned by _changes are partially ordered. In other words, the order is not guaranteed to be preserved for multiple calls."
So, when you call /_changes?since=0&limit=1 you obtain a different result as the order is not guaranteed.
The _changes response contains a pending attribute with the number of elements that are out of the response. If you take the last_seq value from the last request and use that value as the since attribute in the next request you'll get the next bunch of changes and the pending value is decreased consistently.
Also, you should be careful with the next documentation note:
If the specified replicas of the shards in any given since value are unavailable, alternative replicas are selected, and the last known checkpoint between them is used. If this happens, you might see changes again that you have previously seen. Therefore, an application making use of the _changes feed should be ‘idempotent’, that is, able to receive the same data multiple times, safely.
Read changes in batches is a recommendation of the CouchDB Replication Protocol (see) used by CouchDB compatible clients as Cloudant Sync, so the approach you described should be correct.
Please, don't use the numeric value of the change seq as a reference to infer that there are missed changes as this number is computed from cluster state which may vary between calls. You can check this answer for more detail.

Cassandra counter usage

I am finding some difficulties in the data modeling of an application which may involve the use of counters.
The app is basically a messaging app. Messages are bounded for free users, hence the initial plan of using a counter column to keep track of the total count.
I've discovered that batches (logged or not) cannot contain operations on both standard tables and counter ones. How do I ensure correctness if I cannot batch the operation I am trying to perform and the counter update together? Is the counter type really needed if there's basically no race condition on the column, being that associated to each individual user?
My second idea would be to use a standard int column to use only inside batches. Is this a viable option?
Thank you
If you can absolutely guarantee that each user will produce only one update at time then you could rely on plain ints to perform the job.
The problem however is that you will need to perform a read-before-write anti-pattern. You could solve this as well, eg skipping the read part by caching your ints and performing in-memory updates followed by writes only. This is viable by coupling your system with a caching server (e.g. Redis).
And thinking about it, you should still need to read these counters at some point, because if the number of messages a free user can send is bound to some value then you need to perform a check when they login/try to send a new message/look at the dashboard/etc and block their action.
Another option (if you store the messages sent by each user somewhere and don't want to add complexity to your system) could be to directly count them with a SELECT COUNT... type query, even if this could be become pretty inefficient very soon in the Cassandra world.

Does CQL3 "IF" make my update not idempotent?

It seems to me that using IF would make the statement possibly fail if re-tried. Therefore, the statement is not idempotent. For instance, given the CQL below, if it fails because of a timeout or system problem and I retry it, then it may not work because another person may have updated the version between retries.
UPDATE users
SET name = 'foo', version = 4
WHERE userid = 1
IF version = 3
Best practices for updates in Cassandra are to make updates idempotent, yet the IF operator is in direct opposition to this. Am I missing something?
If your application is idempotent, then generally you wouldn't need to use the expensive IF clause, since all your clients would be trying to set the same value.
For example, suppose your clients were aggregating some values and writing the result to a roll up table. Each client would calculate the same total and write the same value, so it wouldn't matter if multiple clients wrote to it, or what order they wrote to it, since it would be the same value.
If what you are actually looking for is mutual exclusion, such as keeping a bank balance, then the IF clause could be used. You might read a row to get the current balance, then subtract some money and update the balance only if the balance hadn't changed since you read it. If another client was trying to add a deposit at the same time, then it would fail and would have to try again.
But another way to do that without mutual exclusion is to write each withdrawal and deposit as a separate clustered transaction row, and then calculate the balance as an idempotent result of applying all the transaction rows.
You can use the IF clause for idempotent writes, but it seems pointless. The first client to do the write would succeed and Cassandra would return the value "applied=True". And the next client to try the same write would get back "applied=False, version=4", indicating that the row had already been updated to version 4 so nothing was changed.
This question is more about linerizability(ordering) than idempotency I think. This query uses Paxos to try to determine the state of the system before applying a change. If the state of the system is identical then the query can be retried many times without a change in the results. This provides a weak form of ordering (and is expensive) unlike most Cassandra writes. Generally you should only use CAS operations if you are attempting to record state of a system (rather than a history or log)
Do not use many of these queries if you can help it, the guidelines suggest having only a small percentage of your queries rely on this behavior.

how to rapidly increment counters in Cassandra w/o staleness

I have a Cassandra question. Do you know how Cassandra does updates/increments of counters?
I want to use a storm bolt (CassandraCounterBatchingBolt from storm-contrib repo on github) which writes into cassandra. However, I'm not sure how some of the implementation of the incrementCounterColumn() method works .. and there is also the limitations with cassandra counters (from: http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/Counters) which makes them useless for my scenario IMHO:
If a write fails unexpectedly (timeout or loss of connection to the coordinator node) the client will not know if the operation has been performed. A retry can result in an over count CASSANDRA-2495.
Counter removal is intrinsically limited. For instance, if you issue very quickly the sequence "increment, remove, increment" it is possible for the removal to be lost
Anyway, here is my scenario:
I update the same counter faster than the updates propagate to other Cassandra nodes.
Example:
Say I have 3 cassandra nodes. The counters on each of these nodes are 0.
Node1:0, node2:0, node3:0
An increment comes: 5 -> Node1:0, node2:0, node3:0
Increment starts at node 2 – still needs to propagate to node1 and node3
Node1:0, node2:5, node3:0
In the meantime, another increment arrives before previous increment
is propagated: 3 -> Node1:0, node2:5, node3:0
Assuming 3 starts at a different node than where 5 started we have:
Node1:3, node2:5, node3:0
Now if 3 gets propagated to the other nodes AS AN INCREMENT and not as a new value
(and the same for 5) then eventually the nodes would all equal 8 and this is what I want.
If 3 overwrites 5 (because it has a later timestamp) this is problematic – not what I want.
Do you know how these updates/increments are handled by Cassandra?
Note, that a read before a write is still susceptible to the same problem depending from which replica node the read executes (Quorum can still fail if propagation is not far along)
I'm also thinking that maybe putting a cache b/w my storm bolt and Cassandra might solve this issue but that's a story for another time.
Counters in C* have a complex internal representation that avoids most (but not all) problems of counting things in a leaderless distributed system. I like to think of them as sharded counters. A counter consists of a number of sub-counters identified by host ID and a version number. The host that receives the counter operation increments only its own sub-counter, and also increments the version. It then replicates its whole counter state to the other replicas, which merge it with their states. When the counter is read the node handling the read operation determines the counter value by summing up the total of the counts from each host.
On each node a counter increment is just like everything else in Cassandra, just a write. The increment is written to the memtable, and the local value is determined at read time by merging all of the increments from the memtable and all SSTables.
I hope that explanation helps you believe me when I say that you don't have to worry about incrementing counters faster than Cassandra can handle. Since each node keeps its own counter, and never replicates increment operations, there is no possibility of counts getting lost by race conditions like a read-modify-write scenario would introduce. If Cassandra accepts the write, your're pretty much guaranteed that it will count.
What you're not guaranteed, though, is that the count will appear correct at all times unless. If an increment is written to one node but the counter value read from another just after, there is not guarantee that the increment has been replicated, and you also have to consider what would happen during a network partition. This more or less the same with any write in Cassandra, it's in its eventually consistent nature, and it depends on which consistency levels you used for the operations.
There is also the possibility of a lost acknowledgement. If you do an increment and loose the connection to Cassandra before you can get the response back you can't know whether or not your write got though. And when you get the connection back you can't tell either, since you don't know what the count was before you incremented. This is an inherent problem with systems that choose availability over consistency, and the price you pay for many of the other benefits.
Finally, the issue of rapid remove, increment, removes are real, and something you should avoid. The problem is that the increment operation will essentially resurrect the column, and if these operations come close enough to each other they might get the same timestamp. Cassandra is strictly last-write-wins and determines last based on the timestamp of the operation. If two operations have the same time stamp, the "greater" one wins, which means the one which sorts after in a strict byte order. It's real, but I wouldn't worry too much about it unless you're doing very rapid writes and deletes to the same value (which is probably a fault in your data model).
Here's a good guide to the internals of Cassandra's counters: http://www.datastax.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/cassandra_sf_counters.pdf
The current version of counters are just not a good fit for a use case that requires guarantees of no over-counting and immediate consistency.
There are increment and decrement operations, and those will not collide with each other, and, barring any lost mutations or replayed mutations, will give you a correct result.
The rewrite of Cassandra counters (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-6504) might be interesting to you, and it should address all of the current concerns with getting a correct count.
In the meantime, if I had to implement this on top of a current version of Cassandra, and an accurate count was essential, I would probably store each increment or decrement as a column, and do read-time aggregation of the results, while writing back a checkpoint so you don't have to read back to the beginning of time to calculate subsequent results.
That adds a lot of burden to the read side, though it is extremely efficient on the write path, so it may or may not work for your use case.
To understand updates/increments i.e write operations, i will suggest you to go through Gossip, protocol used by Cassandra for communication. In Gossip every participant(node) maintains their state using the tuple σ(K) = (V*N) where σ(K) is the state of K key with V value and N as version number.
To maintain the single version of truth for a data packet Gossip maintains a Reconciliation mechanism namely Precise & Scuttlebutt(current). According to Scuttlebutt Reconciliation, before updating any tuple they communicate with each other to check who is holding the highest version (newest value) of the key. Whosoever is holding the highest version is responsible for the write operation.
For further information read this article.

Cassandra: rotating lists

Suppose I store a list of events in a Cassandra row, implemented with composite columns:
{
event:123 => 'something happened'
event:234 => 'something else happened'
}
It's almost fine by me, and, as far as I understand, that's a common pattern. Comparing to having a single column event with the jsonized list, that scales better since it's easy to add a new item to the list without reading it first and then writing back.
However, now I need to implement these two requirements:
I don't want to add a new event if the last added one is the same,
I want to keep only N last events.
Is there any standard way of doing that with the best possible performance? (Any storage schema changes are ok).
Checking whether or not things already exist, or checking how many that exist and removing extra items, are both read-modify-write operations, and they don't fit very well with the constraints of Cassandra.
One way of keeping only the N last events is to make sure they are ordered so that you can do a range query and read the N last (for example prefixing the column key with a timestamp/TimeUUID). This wouldn't remove the outdated events, that you need to do as a separate process, but by doing it this way the code that queries the data will only see the last N, which is the real requirement if I interpret things correctly. The garbage collection of old events is just an optimization to avoid keeping things that will never be needed again.
If the requirement isn't a strict N events, but events that are not older than T you can of course use the TTL feature, but I assume that it's not an option for you.
The first requirement is trickier. You can do a read before ever write and check if you have an item, but that would be slow, and unless you do some kind of locking outside of Cassandra there is no guarantee that two writers won't do both do a read and then both do a write, so that neither sees the other's write. Maybe that's not a problem for you, but there's no good way around it. Cassandra doesn't do CAS.
The way I've handled similar situations when using Cassandra is to keep a cache in the application nodes of what has been written, and check that before writing. You then need to make sure that each application node sees all events for the same row, and that events for the same row aren't distributed over multiple application nodes. One way of doing that is to have a message queue system in front of your application nodes, and divide the event stream over several queues by the same key as you use as row key in the database.

Resources