Concept for temporary data in Apache Cassandra - cassandra

I have a question regarding the usage of Cassandra for temporary data (Data which is written once to the database, which is read once from the database and then deleted).
We are using Cassandra, to exchange data between processes which are running on different machines / different containers. Process1 is writing some data to the Cassandra, Process2 is reading this data. After that, data can be deleted.
As we learned that Cassandra doesn't like writing and deleting data very often in one table because of tombestones and performance issues, we are creating temporary tables for this.
Process1 : Create table, write data to table.
Process2 : Read data from table, drop table.
But doing this in a very high number (500-1000 tables create and drop per hour) we are facing problems on our schema synchronization between our nodes (we have cluster with 6 nodes).
The Cassandra cluster got very slow, we got a lot of timeout warnings, we got errors about different schemas on the nodes, the CPU load on the cluster nodes grew up to 100% and then the cluster was dead :-).
Is Cassandra the right database for this usecase ?
Is it a problem of how we configured our cluster ?
Will it be a better solution to create temporary keyspaces for this ?
Has anyone experience of how to handle such usecase with Cassandra ?

You don't need any database here. Your use case is to enable your applications to handshake with each other to share data asynchronously. There are two possible solutions:
1) For Batch based writes and reads consider using something like HDFS for intermediate storage. Process 1 writes data files in HDFS directories and Process 2 reads it from HDFS.
2) For message based system consider something like Kafka. Process 1 process the data stream and writes into Kafka Topics and Process 2 consumers reads data from Kafka Topics. Kafka do provides Ack/Nack features.
Continuously creating and deleting number of tables in Cassandra is not a good practice and is never recommended.

Related

Does spark tables keep data permanently stored as RDBMS does and data is available all the time? [duplicate]

This question already has an answer here:
Difference between createTempview and createGlobaltempview and CreateorReplaceTempview in spark 2.1?
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Closed 4 years ago.
I'm quit new to Spark and was trying to understand it's functionality. Basically I'm from database background, and was confused with Spark databases & tables. So my confusion is does spark also stores data permanently on it's own and make it available all the time as RDBMS or other no-sql store does ?
Or it just create a reference point to the incoming data till the duration of processing and once process is over data went off.
SO basically how spark is being utilized where we've to process data on regularly in batches or in continuous streaming. What is the time to live for data in spark tables ?
Spark is not a database. It does not store data permanently by itself. Its a cluster computing framwork/engine which can also work in a standalone environment. What spark exactly does is it pulls the data from various sources like HDFS,S3,local filesystem,rdbms,nosql etc... and do any analysis or transformation in the memory(RAM) of various worker nodes. It has the capability to spill the data to local disk if the data does not fit in the RAM. Once action is finished the data will be flushed out. Though you can cache or persists and it will available till the spark context is running, sometimes even if you cache the data and the memory is full it calculates the LRU(least recently used) rdd and flush it out for storing other rdd. The memory management is an interesting concept in spark.

Spark Direct Stream Kafka order of events

I have a question regarding reading data with Spark Direct Streaming (Spark 1.6) from Kafka 0.9 saving in HBase.
I am trying to do updates on specific row-keys in an HBase table as recieved from Kafka and I need to ensure the order of events is kept (data received at t0 is saved in HBase for sure before data received at t1 ).
The row key, represents an UUID which is also the key of the message in Kafka, so at Kafka level, I am sure that the events corresponding to a specific UUID are ordered at partition level.
My problem begins when I start reading using Spark.
Using the direct stream approach, each executor will read from one partition. I am not doing any shuffling of data (just parse and save), so my events won't get messed up among the RDD, but I am worried that when the executor reads the partition, it won't maintain the order so I will end up with incorrect data in HBase when I save them.
How can I ensure that the order is kept at executor level, especially if I use multiple cores in one executor (which from my understanding result in multiple threads)?
I think I can also live with 1 core if this fixes the issue and by turning off speculative execution, enabling spark back pressure optimizations and keeping the maximum retries on executor to 1.
I have also thought about implementing a sort on the events at spark partition level using the Kafka offset.
Any advice?
Thanks a lot in advance!

What is the best way to store incoming streaming data?

What is a better choice for a long-term store (many writes, few reads) of data processed through Spark Streaming: Parquet, HBase or Cassandra? Or something else? What are the trade-offs?
In my experience we have used Hbase as datastore for spark streaming data(we also has same scenario many writes and few reads), since we are using hadoop, hbase has native integration with hadoop and it went well..
Above we have used tostore hight rate of messages coming over from solace.
HBase is well suited for doing Range based scans. Casandra is known for availablity and many other things...
However, I can also observe one general trend in many projects, they are simply storing rawdata in hdfs (parquet + avro) in partitioned structure through spark streaming with spark dataframe(SaveMode.Append) and they are processing rawdata with Spark
Ex of partitioned structure in hdfs :
completion ofbusinessdate/environment/businesssubtype/message type etc....
in this case there is no need for going to Hbase or any other data store.
But one common issue in above approach is when you are getting small and tiny files, through streaming then you would need to repartion(1) or colelese or FileUtils.copymerge to meet block size requirements to single partitioned file. Apart from that above approach also would be fine.
Here is some thing called CAP theorm based on which decision can be taken.
Consistency (all nodes see the same data at the same time).
Availability (every request receives a response about whether it
succeeded or failed).
Partition tolerance (the system continues to
operate despite arbitrary partitioning due to network failures)
Casandra supports AP.
Hbase supports CP.
Look at detailed analysis given here

Apache Spark node asking master for more data?

I'm trying to benchmark a few approaches to putting an image processing algorithm into apache spark. For one step in this algorithm, a computation on a pixel in the image will depend on an unknown amount of surrounding data, so we can't partition the image with guaranteed sufficient overlap a priori.
One solution to that problem I need to benchmark is for a worker node to ask the master node for more data when it encounters a pixel with insufficient surrounding data. I'm not convinced this is the way to do things, but I need to benchmark it anyway because of reasons.
Unfortunately, after a bunch of googling and reading docs I can't find any way for a processingFunc called as part of sc.parallelize(partitions).map(processingFunc) to query the master node for more data from a different partition mid-computation.
Does a way for a worker node to ask the master for more data exist in spark, or will I need to hack something together that kind of goes around spark?
Master Node in Spark is for allocating the resources to a particular job and once the resources are allocated, the Driver ships the complete code with all its dependencies to the various executors.
The first step in every code is to load the data to the Spark cluster. You can read the data from any underlying data repository like Database, filesystem, webservices etc.
Once data is loaded it is wrapped into an RDD which is partitioned across the nodes in the cluster and further stored in the workers/ Executors Memory. Though you can control the number of partitions by leveraging various RDD API's but you should do it only when you have valid reasons to do so.
Now all operations are performed over RDD's using its various methods/ Operations exposed by RDD API. RDD keep tracks of partitions and partitioned data and depending upon the need or request it automatically query the appropriate partition.
In nutshell, you do not have to worry about the way data is partitioned by RDD or which partition stores which data and how they communicate with each other but if you do care, then you can write your own custom partitioner, instructing Spark of how to partition your data.
Secondly if your data cannot be partitioned then I do not think Spark would be an ideal choice because that will result in processing of everything in 1 single machine which itself is contrary to the idea of distributed computing.
Not sure what is exactly your use case but there are people who have been leveraging Spark for Image processing. see here for the comments from Databricks

Cassandra Fast Read Configuration

I have 4 Cassandra nodes with 1 seed in a single data center. I have about 5M records in which Cassandra takes around 4 mins to read where with MySQL, it takes only 17 seconds. So my guess is that there is something wrong in my configuration. So kindly will anyone let me know what configuration attributes so I have to check in Cassandra.yaml.
You may be doing an apples to oranges comparison if you are reading all 5M records from one client.
With MySQL all the data is local and optimized for reads since data is updated in place.
Cassandra is distributed and optimized for writes. Writes are simple appends, but reads are expensive since all the appends need to be read and merged to get the current value of each column.
Since the data is distributed across multiple nodes, there is a lot of overhead of accessing and retrieving the data over the network.
If you were using Spark with Cassandra and loading the data into Spark workers in parallel without shuffling it across the network to a single client, then it would be a more similar comparison.
Cassandra is generally good at ingesting large amounts of data and then working on small slices of it (i.e. partitions) rather than doing table scan operations such as reading the entire table.

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