I'm using Cassandra as my primary data store for a time series logging application. I receive a high-volume number of writes to this database, so Cassandra was a natural choice.
However, when I try showing statistics about the data on a web application, I make costly reads to this database and things start to slow down.
My initial idea is to run periodic cron jobs that pre-compute these statistics every hour. This would ensure no slow reads. I'm wondering if there's another way to read from a Cassandra database and what is the best solution?
You are on the right track with what your initial thinking.
How you store data in C*, and specifically how you select you Primary Key fields have a direct influence on how you can read data out. If you are hitting a single partition on a table reading data out of a C* cluster is very efficient and is an excellent choice for showing data on a website.
In your case if you want to show some level of aggregated data (e.g. by hour) I would suggest that you create your partition key in such as way as to make it so all the data you want to aggregate is contained in the same partition. Here is an example schema for what I mean:
CREATE TABLE data_by_hour (
day text,
hour int,
minute int,
data float,
PRIMARY KEY((day, hour), minute)
);
You can then use a cron job or some other mechanism to run a query and aggregate the data into another table to show on the website.
Related
I have a table in Cassandra where i am storing events as they are coming in , different processing are done on the events at different stages. The events are entered into the table with the event occurrence time. I need to get all the events whose event time is less than a certain time and do some processing on them. As its a select range query and its invariably will use scatter gather. Can some one suggest best way to do this. This process is going to happen in every 5 secs and scatter gather happening in Cassandra happening frequently is not a good idea as its an overhead on Cassandra itself which will degrade my overall application Performance.
The table is as below:
PAS_REQ_STAGE (PartitionKey = EndpointID, category ; clusterkey= Automation_flag,alertID)
AlertID
BatchPickTime: Timestamp
Automation_Threshold
ResourceID
ConditionID
category
Automation_time: Timestamp
Automation_flag
FilterValue
Eventtime which i have referred above is the BatchPickTime..
A scheduler wakes up at regular interval and gets all the records whose BatchPickTime is Less than the current scheduler wakeup time and sweeps them off from the table to process them.
Because of this usecase i cannot provide any specific Partition key for the query as it will have to get all data which has expired and is less than the current scheduler wake-up time.
Hi and welcome to Stackoverflow.
Please post your schema and maybe some example code with your question - you can edit it :)
The Cassandra-way of doing this is to denormalize data if necessary and build your schema around your queries. In your case I would suggest putting your events in to a table together with a time bucket:
CREATE TABLE events (event_source int, bucket timestamp,
event_time timestamp, event_text text PRIMARY KEY ((event_source, bucket),event_time));
The reason for this is that it is very efficent in cassandra to select a row by its so called partition key (in this example (event_source, bucket)) as such a query hits only one node. The reminder of the primary key is called clustering columns and defines the order of data, here all events for a day inside the bucket are sorted by event_time.
Try to model your event table in a way that you do not need to make multiple queries. There is a good and free data modeling course from DataStax available: https://academy.datastax.com/resources/ds220-data-modeling
One note - be careful when using cassandra as queue - this is maybe an antipattern and you might be better of with a message queue as ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ or similar.
I have a use case where data needs to be dumped into DB, that is not having any uniqueness. Say some random data, that can have repeated values, generated at very high speed.
Now Cassandra has constraint of having partition key per table mandatory.
Even though I can introduce a TimeUUID column, but again problem comes while retrieving. That again can be handled using ALLOW FILTER in Select clause.
I am looking for some better approach. Anyone can suggest some other approach. Only constraint is I can only dump data in Cassandra DB, File system not available.
It seems like you just want to store your data without knowing yet how to query it. With Cassandra, you typically need to know how to query it before you design your data model. If you want to retrieve the full data set, you will have poor performance. You might want to consider hdfs instead.
If you really need to store in Cassandra, try to think of a way to store it that makes sense. For example, you could store your data in timebucket. Try to size your bucket to store about 1MB worth of data. If you produce 1MB of data per minute, then a minute bucket is appropriate. You would have a partition key as the minute of the date, then a clustering column as timeUUID, then the rest of your data to store.
I have gone through Reading from Cassandra using Spark Streaming and through tutorial-1 and tutorial-2 links.
Is it fair to say that Cassandra-Spark integration currently does not provide anything out of the box to continuously get the updates from Cassandra and stream them to other systems like HDFS?
By continuously, I mean getting only those rows in a table which have changed (inserted or updated) since the last fetch by Spark. If there are too many such rows, there should be an option to limit the number of rows and the subsequent spark fetch should begin from where it left off. At-least once guarantee is ok but exactly-once would be a huge welcome.
If its not supported, one way to support it could be to have an auxiliary column updated_time in each cassandra-table that needs to be queried by storm and then use that column for queries. Or an auxiliary table per table that contains ID, timestamp of the rows being changed. Has anyone tried this before?
I don't think Apache Cassandra has this functionality out of the box. Internally [for some period of time] it stores all operations on data in sequential manner, but it's per node and it gets compacted eventually (to save space). Frankly, Cassandra's (as most other DB's) promise is to provide latest view of data (which by itself can be quite tricky in distributed environment), but not full history of how data was changing.
So if you still want to have such info in Cassandra (and process it in Spark), you'll have to do some additional work yourself: design dedicated table(s) (or add synthetic columns), take care of partitioning, save offset to keep track of progress, etc.
Cassandra is ok for time series data, but in your case I would consider just using streaming solution (like Kafka) instead of inventing it.
I agree with what Ralkie stated but wanted to propose one more solution if you're tied to C* with this use case. This solution assumes you have full control over the schema and ingest as well. This is not a streaming solution though it could awkwardly be shoehorned into one.
Have you considered using composite key composed of the timebucket along with a murmur_hash_of_one_or_more_clustering_columns % some_int_designed_limit_row_width? In this way, you could set your timebuckets to 1 minute, 5 minutes, 1 hour, etc depending on how "real-time" you need to analyze/archive your data. The murmur hash based off of one or more of the clustering columns is needed to help located data in the C* cluster (and is a terrible solution if you're often looking up specific clustering columns).
For example, take an IoT use case where sensors report in every minute and have some sensor reading that can be represented as an integer.
create table if not exists iottable {
timebucket bigint,
sensorbucket int,
sensorid varchar,
sensorvalue int,
primary key ((timebucket, sensorbucket), sensorid)
} with caching = 'none'
and compaction = { 'class': 'com.jeffjirsa.cassandra.db.compaction.TimeWindowedCompaction' };
Note the use of TimeWindowedCompaction. I'm not sure what version of C* you're using; but with the 2.x series, I'd stay away from DateTieredCompaction. I cannot speak to how well it performs in 3.x. Any any rate, you should test and benchmark extensively before settling on your schema and compaction strategy.
Also note that this schema could result in hotspotting as it is vulnerable to sensors that report more often than others. Again, not knowing the use case it's hard to provide a perfect solution -- it's just an example. If you don't care about ever reading C* for a specific sensor (or column), you don't have to use a clustering column at all and you can simply use a timeUUID or something random for the murmur hash bucketing.
Regardless of how you decide to partition the data, a schema like this would then allow you to use repartitionByCassandraReplica and joinWithCassandraTable to extract the data written during a given timebucket.
The Cassandra database is not very good for aggregation and that is why I decided to do the aggregation before write. I am storing some data (eg. transaction) for each user which I am aggregating by hour. That means for one user there will be only one row for each our.
Whenever I receive new data, I read the row for current hour, aggregate it with received data and write it back.I use this data to generate hourly reports.
This works fine with low velocity data but I observed considerably high data loss when velocity is very high (eg 100 records for 1 user in a min). This is because reads and writes are happening very fast and because of "delayed write", I am not getting updated data.
I think my approach "aggregate before write" itself is wrong. I was thinking about UDF but I am not sure how will it impact on performance.
What is the best way to store aggregated data in Cassandra ?
My idea would be:
Model data in Cassandra on hour-by-hour buckets.
Store plain data into Cassandra immediately when they arrive.
Process at X all the data of the X-1 hour and store the aggregate result on another table
This would allow you to have very fast incoming rates, process data only once, store the aggregates into another table to have fast reads.
I use Cassandra to pre-aggregate also. I have different tables for hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly. I think you are probably getting data loss as you are selecting the data before your last inserts have replicated to other nodes.
Look into the counter data type to get around this.
You may also be able to specify a higher consistency level in either the inserts or selects to ensure you're getting the most recent data.
I have a Job_Status table with 3 columns:
Job_ID (numeric)
Job_Time (datetime)
Machine_ID (numeric)
Other few fields containing stats (like memory, CPU utilization)
At a regular interval (say 1 min), entries are inserted in the above table for the Jobs running on each Machines.
I want to design the data model in Cassandra.
My requirement is to get list (pair) of jobs which are running at the same time on 2 or more than 2 machines.
I have created table with Job_Id and Job_Time as primary key for row but in order to achieve the desired result I have to do lots of parsing of data after retrieval of records.
Which is taking a lot of time when the number of records reach around 500 thousand.
This requirement expects the operation like inner join of SQL, but I can’t use SQL due to some business reasons and also SQL query with such huge data set is also taking lots of time as I tried that with dummy data in SQL Server.
So I require your help on below points:
Kindly suggest some efficient data model in Cassandra for this requirement.
How the join operation of SQL can be achieved/implemented in Cassandra database?
Kindly suggest some alternate design/algorithm. I am stuck at this problem for a very long time.
That's a pretty broad question. As a general approach you might want to look at pairing Cassandra with Spark so that you could do the large join in parallel.
You would insert jobs into your table when they start and delete them when they complete (possibly with a TTL set on insert so that jobs that don't get deleted will auto delete after some time).
When you wanted to update your pairing of jobs, you'd run a spark batch job that would load the table data into an RDD, and then do a map/reduce operation on the data, or use spark SQL to do a SQL style join. You'd probably then write the resulting RDD back to a Cassandra table.