How long will it take to delete a row? - cassandra

I have a 2 node cassandra cluster with RF=2.
When a delete from x where y cql statement is issued - is it known how long it will take all nodes to delete the row?
What I see in one of the integration tests:
A row is deleted, the result of the deletion is tested with a select * from y where id = xxx statement. What I see is that sometimes the result is not null as expected and the deleted row is still found.
Is the correct approch to read with CL=2 to get the result I am expecting?

make sure that the servers time are in synch if you are using server side timestamp.
Better use client side timestamp.
Is the correct approch to read with CL=2 to get the result I am
expecting?
i assume you are using default consistecy while delete ie 1 and as 1+2 > 2 (ie W+R > N) in your case hence it is ok.

Local to the replica it will be sub ms. The time is dominated in the time from app->coordinator->replica->coordinator->app network hops. Use quorum or local_quorum for consistency across sequential requests like that on both write and read.

Related

Cassandra - IN or TOKEN query for querying an entire partition?

I want to query a complete partition of my table.
My compound partition key consists of (id, date, hour_of_timestamp). id and date are strings, hour_of_timestamp is an integer.
I needed to add the hour_of_timestamp field to my partition key because of hotspots while ingesting the data.
Now I'm wondering what's the most efficient way to query a complete partition of my data?
According to this blog, using SELECT * from mytable WHERE id = 'x' AND date = '10-10-2016' AND hour_of_timestamp IN (0,1,...23); is causing a lot of overhead on the coordinator node.
Is it better to use the TOKEN function and query the partition with two tokens? Such as SELECT * from mytable WHERE TOKEN(id,date,hour_of_timestamp) >= TOKEN('x','10-10-2016',0) AND TOKEN(id,date,hour_of_timestamp) <= TOKEN('x','10-10-2016',23);
So my question is:
Should I use the IN or TOKEN query for querying an entire partition of my data? Or should I use 23 queries (one for each value of hour_of_timestamp) and let the driver do the rest?
I am using Cassandra 3.0.8 and the latest Datastax Java Driver to connect to a 6 node cluster.
You say:
Now I'm wondering what's the most efficient way to query a complete
partition of my data? According to this blog, using SELECT * from
mytable WHERE id = 'x' AND date = '10-10-2016' AND hour_of_timestamp
IN (0,1,...23); is causing a lot of overhead on the coordinator node.
but actually you'd query 24 partitions.
What you probably meant is that you had a design where a single partition was what now consists of 24 partitions, because you add the hour to avoid an hotspot during data ingestion. Noting that in both models (the old one with hotspots and this new one) data is still ordered by timestamp, you have two choices:
Run 1 query at time.
Run 2 queries the first time, and then one at time to "prefetch" results.
Run 24 queries in parallel.
CASE 1
If you process data sequentially, the first choice is to run the query for the hour 0, process the data and, when finished, run the query for the hour 1 and so on... This is a straightforward implementation, and I don't think it deserves more than this.
CASE 2
If your queries take more time than your data processing, you could "prefetch" some data. So, the first time you could run 2 queries in parallel to get the data of both the hours 0 and 1, and start processing data for hour 0. In the meantime, data for hour 1 arrives, so when you finish to process data for hour 0 you could prefetch data for hour 2 and start processing data for hour 1. And so on.... In this way you could speed up data processing. Of course, depending on your timings (data processing and query times) you should optimize the number of "prefetch" queries.
Also note that the Java Driver does pagination for you automatically, and depending on the size of the retrieved partition, you may want to disable that feature to avoid blocking the data processing, or may want to fetch more data preemptively with something like this:
ResultSet rs = session.execute("your query");
for (Row row : rs) {
if (rs.getAvailableWithoutFetching() == 100 && !rs.isFullyFetched())
rs.fetchMoreResults(); // this is asynchronous
// Process the row ...
}
where you could tune that rs.getAvailableWithoutFetching() == 100 to better suit your prefetch requirements.
You may also want to prefetch more than one partition the first time, so that you ensure your processing won't wait on any data fetching part.
CASE 3
If you need to process data from different partitions together, eg you need both data for hour 3 and 6, then you could try to group data by "dependency" (eg query both hour 3 and 6 in parallel).
If you need all of them then should run 24 queries in parallel and then join them at application level (you already know why you should avoid the IN for multiple partitions). Remember that your data is already ordered, so your application level efforts would be very small.

select count(*) runs into timeout issues in Cassandra

Maybe it is a stupid question, but I'm not able to determine the size of a table in Cassandra.
This is what I tried:
select count(*) from articles;
It works fine if the table is small but once it fills up, I always run into timeout issues:
cqlsh:
OperationTimedOut: errors={}, last_host=127.0.0.1
DBeaver:
Run 1: 225,000 (7477 ms)
Run 2: 233,637 (8265 ms)
Run 3: 216,595 (7269 ms)
I assume that it hits some timeout and just aborts. The actual number of entries in the table is probably much higher.
I'm testing against a local Cassandra instance which is completely idle. I would not mind if it has to do a full table scan and is unresponsive during that time.
Is there a way to reliably count the number of entries in a Cassandra table?
I'm using Cassandra 2.1.13.
Here is my current workaround:
COPY articles TO '/dev/null';
...
3568068 rows exported to 1 files in 2 minutes and 16.606 seconds.
Background: Cassandra supports to
export a table to a text file, for instance:
COPY articles TO '/tmp/data.csv';
Output: 3568068 rows exported to 1 files in 2 minutes and 25.559 seconds
That also matches the number of lines in the generated file:
$ wc -l /tmp/data.csv
3568068
As far as I see you problem connected to timeout of cqlsh: OperationTimedOut: errors={}, last_host=127.0.0.1
you can simple increase it with options:
--connect-timeout=CONNECT_TIMEOUT
Specify the connection timeout in seconds (default: 5
seconds).
--request-timeout=REQUEST_TIMEOUT
Specify the default request timeout in seconds
(default: 10 seconds).
Is there a way to reliably count the number of entries in a Cassandra table?
Plain answer is no. It is not a Cassandra limitation but a hard challenge for distributed systems to count unique items reliably.
That's the challenge that approximation algorithms like HyperLogLog address.
One possible solution is to use counter in Cassandra to count the number of distinct rows but even counters can miscount in some corner cases so you'll get a few % error.
This is a good utility for counting rows that avoids the timeout issues that happen when running a large COUNT(*) in Cassandra:
https://github.com/brianmhess/cassandra-count
The reason is simple:
When you're using:
SELECT count(*) FROM articles;
it has the same effect on the database as:
SELECT * FROM articles;
You have to query over all your nodes. Cassandra simply runs into a timeout.
You can change the timeout, but it isn't a good solution. (For one time it's fine but don't use it in your regular queries.)
There's a better solution: make your client count your rows. You can create a java app where you count your rows, when you inserting them, and insert the result using a counter column in a Cassandra table.
You can use copy to avoid cassandra timeout usually happens on count(*)
use this bash
cqlsh -e "copy keyspace.table_name (first_partition_key_name) to '/dev/null'" | sed -n 5p | sed 's/ .*//'

Cassandra - Write doesn't fail, but values aren't inserted

I have a cluster of 3 Cassandra 2.0 nodes. My application I wrote a test which tries to write and read some data into/from Cassandra. In general this works fine.
The curiosity is that after I restarted my computer, this test will fail, because after writting I read the same value I´ve write before and there I get null instead of the value, but the was no exception while writing.
If I manually truncate the used column family, the test will pass. After that I can execute this test how often I want, it passes again and again. Furthermore it doesn´t matter if there are values in the Cassandra or not. The result is alwalys the same.
If I look at the CLI and the CQL-shell there are two different views:
Does anyone have an ideas what is going wrong? The timestamp in the CLI is updated after re-execution, so it seems to be a read-problem?
A part of my code:
For inserts I tried
Insert.Options insert = QueryBuilder.insertInto(KEYSPACE_NAME,TABLENAME)
.value(ID, id)
.value(JAHR, zonedDateTime.getYear())
.value(MONAT, zonedDateTime.getMonthValue())
.value(ZEITPUNKT, date)
.value(WERT, entry.getValue())
.using(timestamp(System.nanoTime() / 1000));
and
Insert insert = QueryBuilder.insertInto(KEYSPACE_NAME,TABLENAME)
.value(ID, id)
.value(JAHR, zonedDateTime.getYear())
.value(MONAT, zonedDateTime.getMonthValue())
.value(ZEITPUNKT, date)
.value(WERT, entry.getValue());
My select looks like
Select.Where select = QueryBuilder.select(WERT)
.from(KEYSPACE_NAME,TABLENAME)
.where(eq(ID, id))
.and(eq(JAHR, zonedDateTime.getYear()))
.and(eq(MONAT, zonedDateTime.getMonthValue()))
.and(eq(ZEITPUNKT, Date.from(instant)));
Consistencylevel is QUORUM (for both) and replicationfactor 3
I'd say this seems to be a problem with timestamps since a truncate solves the problem. In Cassandra last write wins and this could be a problem caused by the use of System.nanoTime() since
This method can only be used to measure elapsed time and is not related to any other notion of system or wall-clock time.
...
The values returned by this method become meaningful only when the difference between two such values, obtained within the same instance of a Java virtual machine, is computed.
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/System.html#nanoTime()
This means that the write that occured before the restart could have been performed "in the future" compared to the write after the restart. This would not fail the query, but the written value would simply not be visible due to the fact that there is a "newer" value available.
Do you have a requirement to use sub-millisecond precision for the insert timestamps? If possible I would recommend using System.currentTimeMillis() instead of nanoTime().
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/System.html#currentTimeMillis()
If you have a requirement to use sub-millisecond precision it would be possible to use System.currentTimeMillis() with some kind of atomic counter that ranged between 0-999 and then use that as a timestamp. This would however break if multiple clients insert the same row at the same time.

RPC timeout in cqlsh - Cassandra

I have 5 nodes in my ring with SimpleTopologyStrategy and replication_factor=3. I inserted 1M rows using stress tool . When am trying to read the row count in cqlsh using
SELECT count(*) FROM Keyspace1.Standard1 limit 1000000;
It fails with error:
Request did not complete within rpc_timeout.
It fetches for limit 100000. Fails even for 500000.
All my nodes are up. Do I need to increase the rpc_timeout?
Please help.
You get this error because the request is timing out on the server side. One should know that this is a very expensive operation in Cassandra as others have pointed out.
Still, if you really want to do this you should update your /etc/cassandra/cassandra.yaml file and change the range_request_timeout_in_ms parameter. This will be valid for all your range queries.
Example to set a 40 second timeout:
range_request_timeout_in_ms: 40000
You will probably have to adjust at the client side as well. When using cqlsh as a client this is accomplished by creating/updating your configuration file for cqlsh under ~/.cassandra/cqlshrc and add the client_timeout parameter to the connection section.
Example to set a 40 second timeout:
[connection]
client_timeout=40
It takes a long time to read in 1M rows so that is probably why it is timing out. You shouldn't use count like this, it is very expensive since it has to read all the data. Use Cassandra counters if you need to count lots of items.
You should also check your Cassandra logs to confirm there aren't any other issues - sometimes exceptions in Cassandra lead to timeouts on the client.
If you can live with an approximate row count, take a look at this answer to Row count of a column family in Cassandra.

Strange data access time in Azure Table Storage while using .Take()

this is our situation:
We store user messages in table Storage. The Partition key is the UserId and the RowKey is used as a message id.
When a users opens his message panel we want to just .Take(x) number of messages, we don't care about the sortOrder. But what we have noticed is that the time it takes to get the messages varies very much by the number of messages we take.
We did some small tests:
We did 50 * .Take(X) and compared the differences:
So we did .Take(1) 50 times and .Take(100) 50 times etc.
To make an extra check we did the same test 5 times.
Here are the results:
As you can see there are some HUGE differences. The difference between 1 and 2 is very strange. The same for 199-200.
Does anybody have any clue how this is happening? The Table Storage is on a live server btw, not development storage.
Many thanks.
X: # Takes
Y: Test Number
Update
The problem only seems to come when I'm using a wireless network. But I'm using the cable the times are normal.
Possibly the data is collected in batches of a certain number x. When you request x+1 rows, it would have to take two batches and then drop a certain number.
Try running your test with increments of 1 as the Take() parameter, to confirm or dismiss this assumption.

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