From where cassandra fetch data for select? - cassandra

I understand the concept of SSTable in Cassandra. I have also tested the different version of files create with insert after nodetool flush.
I have also setup a snapshot backup and incremental back and tested it's working fine.
For testing purpose i deleted all the sstable files from all the nodes. Strangely , am still able to select the data.
Can someone please explain me from where cassandra is fetching the data ?
Regards
Sid

The record you queried was available in the ROW cache aka memtables(memory).
So once you restart your node strangely you will again get back the result because the commit logs got replayed eventually building those SSTables for you.
Clear all the SSTables and commit logs and restart your node .And then you can observe that you get no records for your query .

Related

Cassandra back up and recovery - drop table / schema alter

I am working on a cassandra backup and recovery strategy for our cassandra system and am trying to understand how the backup and sstable recovery works in cassandra. Here are of my observations and related questions (my need is to setup a standby/backup cluster which would become active if the primary cluster goes down.. so I want to keep them in sync in terms of data, so I want to take periodic backups at my active cluster and recover to the standby cluster)
Took a snapshot backup. Dropped a table in cassandra. Stopped cassandra, recovered from the snapshot backup (copied the sstables to the data/ folder), started cassandra. Ran cqlsh on the node, and I still do not see the table created. Should this work? Am I missing any step ?
In the above scenario, I then tried to re-setup the schema (I take backup of the schema in the snapshot) using the cql commant source . This created the table for me. However it creates a "new version" of table for me. When I recover the snapshot has the older version (different uuid labelled folders for table). After recovery, I still see no data in the table. Possibly because I created a new table?
I was finally able to recover data after running nodetool repair and using sstableloader to restore table data from another node in the cluster.
My question is
a. what is the right way to setup a new (blank- no schema) cluster from a snapshot? How do you setup the schema and recover data?
b. how do you restore a cluster from a backup with table alterations. How do you bring a cluster running an older version of schema to a newer version of schema when recovering from a backup (snapshot or incremental)?
(NOTE: cassandra newbie here)
So if you want to restore a snapshot, you need to copy the snapshot files back to the sstable directory and then run: nodetool refresh. You can read:
https://docs.datastax.com/en/dse/5.1/dse-admin/datastax_enterprise/operations/opsBackupSnapshotRestore.html
for more information. Also, there are 3rd party tools that can back up your data and then restore it as it was at the time of the backup. We use a tool: Cohesity (formally Talena/Imanis). It has a lot of capabilities (refreshing A to B, restore/rename, etc.). There are other popular ones as well. All of them have costs associated with them.
Hopefully that helps?
-Jim

Cassandra data recovery from Commitlog file

I have below cassandra query ;
Few days ago i have developed application using c# and Single node Cassandra db. While the application in production, power failure occurred and cassandra commitlog got corrupt. Because of it cassandra node not starting, so i have shifted all commitlog files to another directory and started the cassandra node.
Recently i noticed the power failure day's data not available in database, I have all commitlog files with corrupted commitlog file name.
Can you please suggest, is there a way to recover data using commitlog files.
As well how to avoid commitlog file corruption issue, so that in production data loss can be avoid.
Thank you.
There is no way to restore back the node to the previous state if your commit logs have got corrupted and you have no SSTables with you.
If your commit logs are healthy (meaning it's not corrupted), then you just need to restart your node . It will be replayed,as a result will rebuild the memtable(s) and flush generation-1 SSTables on the disk.
What you can ideally do is to forcibly create SSTables.
You can do that under the apache-cassandra/bin directory by
nodetool flush
So if you are wary of losing commit logs .You can rebuild your node to previous states using SSTables so created above using
nodetool.bat refresh [keyspace] [columnfamily].
Alternatively you can also try creating snapshots.
nodetool snapshot
This command will take a snapshot of all keyspaces on the node.You also have the option of creating backups but this one will only keep record of the latest operations.
For more info try reading
https://docs.datastax.com/en/cassandra/2.1/cassandra/tools/toolsNodetool_r.html
I suggest you can also try having more nodes and thus increase the replication factor to avoid such scenarios in future.
Hope it helps!

Cassandra Presto synchronization issue

We have been using Cassandra in our current live project for almost a year. We are using Cassandra 2.1.14 and sometimes we get to see that there is some synchronization problem between Cassandra and Presto. When there is some update in database using Cassandra and I am going to fire any query from presto then it doesn’t return data while data exists in the database.
Second issue is that sometimes delete and update statements don’t get executed. It shows no error but transaction is not committed.
The metadata caching in Cassandra doesn't update immediately, which means you might not see some changes. I suggest you change cassandra.schema-cache-ttl to 0s; we're going to remove caching in Cassandra altogether soon.

Cassandra: Unable to read keyspace from data directory

I have a single-node Cassandra setup for my application. To reclaim disk space occupied by deleted records (tombstoned records), I triggered a nodetool compact for my keyspace. Unfortunately, this compaction process got interrupted. Now, when I try to re-start the service, it does not recognise the keyspace (from the data directory configured in cassandra.yaml) for which compaction was in progress when it got interrupted. Other keyspaces like system and system_traces are successfully initiated from the same data directory.
Has anybody encountered a similar issue before? Also, pointers to restore a keyspace only from data files would be of great help (for the lack of maintenance of snapshots).
PS: Upon analysing further it was found that an rm command on the cassandra data directory was issued but immediately cancelled. Most of the data seems to be in place, but there is a chance that the Data.db file of the system keyspace was lost. Is there a way to recover from this state?
Seems like you have corrupted your setup by deleting System keyspace files, hence Cassandra might not be checking the same at boot time.
Try this:
Download same version of cassandra again.
Create your keyspace & cf schemas
Move whatever old data is left to new data directory(cassandra will only load the non-corrupted data) -
sudo mv /data/cassandra_old/data/[keyspace]/[cf]-[md5-old]/* /data/cassandra_new/data/[keyspace]/[cf]-[md5-new]/
It should solve it if I understand the problem correctly.

Is it possible to recover a Cassandra node without a snapshot?

Offsite backups for Cassandra seem like a challenging thing. You basically have to make yet another copy of ALL your data, including the copies of data that exist due to the replication factor. Snapshots make backups easy when you don't mind storing it on the same disk that your node already uses. I'm curious - in the event of a catastrophic failure of this disk, is it possible to recover the node using the nodes that the data was replicated to?
Yes, you can restore data on crashed node using a procedure in documentation - Replacing a dead node or dead seed node. It's for Cassandra 3.x, please pick your Cassandra version from a drop-down menu on the top of the page.
But please note that you still need to do backups if your data is valuable. If you using AWS you can use this project to backup Cassandra to S3 storage.
If you are looking for offsite or off-host backups, you can also look at opscenter from Datastax or Talena software (my company). Both provide you the ability to backup your database locally or to S3. As you may expect, you also have the ability to restore data in case of hardware failures, user errors or logical corruptions which the replicas will not protect you against.
Yes, it is possible. Just execute in terminal "nodetool repair" on the node with missed data. It can take a lot of time. Also I would recommend execute repair operation on each node every month to keep your data always replicated because cassandra does not repairs data automatically (for example after node(s) falling).

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