Cassandra unpredictable failure depending on WHERE clause - cassandra

I am attempting to execute a SELECT statement against a large Cassandra table (10m rows) with various WHERE clauses. I am issuing these from the Datastax DevCenter application. The columns I am using in the where clause have secondary indexes.
The where clause looks like WHERE fileid = 18000 or alternatively WHERE fileid < 18000. In this example, the second where clause results in the error Unable to execute CQL script on 'connection1': Cassandra failure during read query at consistency ONE (1 responses were required but only 0 replica responded, 1 failed)
I have no idea why it is failing in this unpredictable manner. Any ideas?
NOTE: I am aware that this is a terrible idea, and Cassandra is not meant to be used in this way. I am issuing these queries and timing them to prove to others how inefficient Cassandra is for our use case compared to other solutions.

Your query is probably failing because of a READ timeout (the timeout on waiting to read data). You could try updating the Cassandra.yaml with a larger read timeout time with read_request_timeout_in_ms: 200000 (for 200s) to give an output rather than an error. However, if you're trying to prove the inefficiency of Cassandra in your use case, this error seems like a pretty good way to do it.

Related

ScyllaDB count(*) return difference result

I have a question about query in scylladb. I want to count the rows in a table with:
SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM tabledata;
First run returns a result of 5732 rows
Second run returns a result of 5432 rows
Always different result.
Any suggestions on how to count rows in scylla?
Consistency level?
(you can find on internet a very funny picture about eventual consistency)
IF you have RF=3
If you wrote all your rows with LOCAL_QUORUM
then I'd set CONSISTENCY LOCAL_QUORUM
and rerun the count
if you are not sure whether all your writes were properly done, use CL ALL
another option is to run a full repair and rerun the count
ALSO your table might have TTL, in such case having a different count every time is expected (and if you wrote it might be bigger, if you just read, then it will be smaller)
For efficient count look at https://github.com/scylladb/scylla-code-samples/tree/master/efficient_full_table_scan_example_code - but the same applies re consistency level (and of course this script will tell you with a timeout error that a token range couldn't queried and it means that node/shard was overloaded with other traffic, by default it doesn't retry, it's a simple script)
The problem you're running into is inherent in any distributed row store (Cassandra or Scylla). In order for that to work, a coordinator node needs to contact all other nodes, query them, and assemble the result set. That causes a lot of contention which may prevent some replicas from reporting properly.
I recommend (downloading) using DSBulk for this type of operation. It has a count feature designed just for this purpose.
dsbulk count -k ks1 -t table1 -h '10.200.1.3,10.200.1.4'

Increase request timeout for CQL from NiFi

I am using QueryCassandra processor in NiFi to fetch data from Cassandra but my query is getting timedoutexception. I want to increase the request time out while running the CQL query from the processor. Is there a way to do that or I will have to write a custom processor?
Most probably you're getting an exception because you're performing query on non-partition key - in this case, the query is distributed to the all nodes, and requires to go through all available data, and this is very slow if you have big data set.
In Cassandra queries are fast only when you're performing them on (at least) partition key. If you need to search on non-partition column, then you need to re-model your tables to match your queries. I recommend to take DS220 course on DataStax Academy for better understanding how Cassandra works.
As #Alex ott said, it is not recommended to query on non partition key. If you still want to do so and increase the timeout for the query, just property Max Wait Time to whatever timeout you want.
EDIT:
tl;dr: Apache's timeout wrapper doesn't really let you use the timeout option.
Now that you mentioned that this is a DataStax exception and not java.util.concurrent.TimeoutException, I can tell you that I've looked into QueryCassandra processor's source code and it seems like Apache just wrapped the query function with a Future to achieve a timeout instead of using DataStax's built-in timeout option. This results in a default non-changeable timeout by the DataStax driver. It should be reported to Apache as a bug.

Select All Performance in Cassandra

I'm current using DB2 and planning to use cassandra because as i know cassandra have a read performance greater than RDBMS.
May be this is a stupid question but I have experiment that compare read performance between DB2 and Cassandra.
Testing with 5 million records and same table schema.
With query SELECT * FROM customer. DB2 using 25-30s and Cassandra using 40-50s.
But query with where condition SELECT * FROM customer WHERE cusId IN (100,200,300,400,500) DB2 using 2-3s and Cassandra using 3-5ms.
Why Cassandra faster than DB2 with where condition? So i can't prove which database is greater with SELECT * FROM customer right?
FYI.
Cassandra: RF=3 and CL=1 with 3 nodes each node run on 3 computers (VM-Ubuntu)
DB2: Run on windows
Table schema:
cusId int PRIMARY KEY, cusName varchar
If you look at the types of problems that Cassandra is good at solving, then the reasons behind why unbound ("Select All") queries suck become quite apparent.
Cassandra was designed to be a distributed data base. In many Cassandra storage patterns, the number of nodes is greater than the replication factor (I.E., not all nodes contain all of the data). Therefore, limiting the number of network hops becomes essential to modeling high-performing queries. Cassandra performs very well with specific queries (which utilize the partition/clustering key structure), because it can quickly locate the node primarily responsible for the data.
Unbound queries (A.K.A. multi-key queries) incur the extra network time because a coordinator node is required. So one node acts as the coordinator, queries all other nodes, collates data, and returns the result set. Specifying a WHERE clause (with at least a partition key) and while using a "Token Aware" load balancing policy, performs well for two reasons:
A coordinator node is not required.
The node primarily responsible for the range is queried, returning the result set in a single netowrk hop.
tl;dr;
Querying Cassandra with an unbound query, causes it to incur a lot of extra processing and network time that it normally wouldn't have to do, had the query been specified with a WHERE clause.
Even as a troublesome query like a no-condition range query, 40-50s is pretty extreme for C*. Is the coordinator hitting GCs with the coordination? Can you include code used for your test?
When you make a select * vs millions of records, it wont fetch them all at once, it will grab the fetchSize at a time. If your just iterating through this, the iterator will actually block even if you used executeAsync initially. This means that every 10k (default) records it will issue a new query that you will block on. The serialized nature of this will take time just from a network perspective. http://docs.datastax.com/en/developer/java-driver/3.1/manual/async/#async-paging explains how to do it in a non-blocking way. You can use this to to kick off the next page fetch while processing the current which would help.
Decreasing the limit or fetch size could also help, since the coordinator may walk token ranges (parallelism is possible here but its heuristic is not perfect) one at a time until it has read enough. If it has to walk too many nodes to respond it will be slow, this is why empty tables can be very slow to do a select * on, it may serially walk every replica set. With 256 vnodes this can be very bad.

Select All Records From Cassandra

I am trying to select all records from one Cassandra table (~10M records) which should be distributed over 4 nodes using CQL shell, but every time I do that it partitions the output to 1K records Max. So my question is, it is possible to select all records at once as I am trying to see how much time it takes Cassandra to retrieve all records.
When you write "SELECT * from CF" CQL client will never select everything at once. It's just a stupid action for large data. Instead it will load only first page and give you an iterator. Cassandra from 2.0 version supports automatic query paging. So you should call your select all query and ITERATE over pages to load full column family. See an example for python client. There is no way to load all in one action in CQL now and it shouldn't be.
While it was already pointed out that it's a bad idea to try and load all data in cqlsh, what you're trying to do is still somewhat possible. You just need to set a limit and probably increase the timeout for cqlsh.
user#host:~# cqlsh --request-timeout=600
This will start the shell with a request timeout of 10 minutes.
select * from some_table limit 10000000;
Please do not use this in a production environment, as it might have terrible implications for performance and cluster availability!

RPC Timeout in Cassandra

I get the following error:
cqlsh:dev> SELECT DISTINCT id FROM raw_data;
Request did not complete within rpc_timeout.
This is a special query that I'll never make again, I don't care how long it takes, and I don't want to change my schema (since I'll never make the query again...).
How can I increase rpc_timeout for this one query?
I have tried adding LIMIT 9999 and ALLOW FILTERING, and it doesn't help. I expect less than 1000 rows in the result. The query works on another Cassandra cluster with half as much data.
Edit: as it turns out, this particular command succeeded after I ran nodetool compact, but what I'm more interested in the general case of temporarily increasing rpc_timeout for one query.
increase the read request time in cassandra.yaml file under /cassandra/conf
read_request_timeout_in_ms: 30000
change this restart server and execute your query, might be your problem get resolved.

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