Update the column I searched for - cassandra

is there any possibility to update a column-value in cassandra that I searched for (is part of my primary key)?
I have a (huge) list of items with a field calld "LastUpdateDateTime" and from time to time I search for columns that haven't updated for a while.
So, the reason i searched for this columns is cause I want to update them and after I update them I want to set the timestamp to the current date.
How to do this with cassandra?

You can't update primary key column, It will insert another record.
That's how cassandra work.
May be you will have to use spark-cassandra connector OR Delete the records with old values and insert new values.
Note: Deleting and inserting is not recommended if you have many records as it will create corresponding number of tombstones

Related

Cassandra Altering the table

I have a table in Cassandra say employee(id, email, role, name, password) with only id as my primary key.
I want to ...
1. Add another column (manager_id) in with a default value in it
I know that I can add a column in the table but there is no way i can provide a default value to that column through CQL. I can also not update the value for manager_id later since I need to know the id (Partition key and the values are randomly generated unique values which i don't know) to update the row. Is there any way I can achieve this?
2. Rename this table to all_employee.
I also know that its not allowed to rename a table in cassandra. So I am trying to copy the data of table(employee) to csv and copy from csv to new table (all_employee) and deleting the old table(employee). I am doing this through an automated script with cql queries in it and script works fine but will fail if it gets executed again(Which i can not restrict) since the table employee will not be there once its deleted. Essentially I am looking for "If exists" clause in COPY query which is not supported in cql. Is there any other way I can achieve the outcome?
Please note that the amount of data in the table is very small so performance in not an issue.
For #1
I dont think cassandra support default column . You need to do that from your appliaction. Write some default value every time you insert a row.
For #2
you can check if the table exists before trying to copy from it.
SELECT your_table_name FROM system_schema.tables WHERE keyspace_name='your_keyspace_name';

How to retrieve a very big cassandra table and delete some unuse data from it?

I hava created a cassandra table with 20 million records. Now I want to delete the expired data decided by one none primary key column. But it doesn't support the operation on the column. So I try to retrieve the table and get the data line by line to delete the data.Unfortunately,it is too huge to retrieve. Otherwise,I couldn't delete the whole table, how could I achieve my goal?
Your question is actually, how to get the data from the table in bulks (also called pagination).
You can do that by selecting different slices from your primary key: For example, if your primary key is some sort of ID, select a range of IDs each time, process the results and do whatever you want to do with them, then get the next range, and so on.
Another way, which depends on the driver you're working with, will be to use fetch_size. You can see a Python example here and a Java example here.

Cassandra add TTL to existing entries

How can I update an entire table and set a TTL for every entry?
Current Scenario (Cassandra 2.0.11):
table:
CREATE TABLE external_users (
external_id text,
type int,
user_id text,
PRIMARY KEY (external_id, type)
)
currently there are ~40mio entries in this table and i want to add a TTL for lets say 86 400 seconds (1day).
It's no problem for new entries with USING TTL(86400) or UPDATE current entries, but how do i apply a ttl for every already existing entry?
My idea was to select all data and update every single row with a little script. I was just wondering if there is an easier way to achieve this (because even with batch updates this is gonna take a while and is a big effort)
Thanks in advance
There is no way to alter TTL of existing data in C*. TTL is just an internal column attribute which is written together with all other column data into immutable SSTable. A quote from the docs:
If you want to change the TTL of expiring data, you have to re-insert the data with a new TTL. In Cassandra, the insertion of data is actually an insertion or update operation, depending on whether or not a previous version of the data exists.

how to get last n results by updated time in cassandra?

I want to fetch last n, say last 5 updated rows i.e. order by updated_time desc in cassandra. Is there any good way of doing it?
Exact use case is like, I want to update the count of event whenever it occurs in the event table and fetch the last five events by updated time along with the count.
table structure:-
event_name text, updated_time timestamp, count counter
In Cassandra you can retrieve the editing time with writetime (cell_name). But as you have multiple columns and Cassandra is fast-reads only you may consider doing another view providing exactly the data needed in an ordered manner. On that new table you want to limit read results and periodically trim it down.
It may be possible doing it with writetime() -- but this was not the Cassandra way as it is too slow in production. Another table with just your data is the denormalized Cassandra way of solving it.

Cassandra ttl on a row

I know that there are TTLs on columns in Cassandra. But is it also possible to set a TTL on a row? Setting a TTL on each column doesn't solve my problem as can be seen in the following usecase:
At some point a process wants to delete a complete row with a TTL (let's say row "A" with TTL 1 week). It could do this by replacing all existing columns with the same content but with a TTL of 1 week.
But there may be another process running concurrently on that row "A" which inserts new columns or replaces existing ones without a TTL because that process can't know that the row is to be deleted (it runs concurrently!). So after 1 week all columns of row "A" will be deleted because of the TTL except for these newly inserted ones. And I also want them to be deleted.
So is there or will there be Cassandra support for this use case or do I have to implement something on my own?
Kind Regards
Stefan
There is no way of setting a TTL on a row in Cassandra currently. TTLs are designed for deleting individual columns when their lifetime is known when they are written.
You could achieve what you want by delaying your process - instead of wanting to insert a TTL of 1 week, run it a week later and delete the row. Row deletes have the following semantics: any column inserted just before will get deleted but columns inserted just after won't be.
If columns that are inserted in the future still need to be deleted you could insert a row delete with a timestamp in the future to ensure this but be very careful: if you later wanted to insert into that row you couldn't, columns would just disappear when written to that row (until the tombstone is garbage collected).
You can set ttl for a row in Cassandra 3 using
INSERT INTO Counter(key,eventTime,value) VALUES ('1001',dateof(now()),100) USING ttl 10;
Although I do not recommend such, there is a Cassandra way to fix the problem:
SELECT TTL(value) FROM table WHERE ...;
Get the current TTL of a value first, then use the result to set the TTL in an INSERT or UPDATE:
INSERT ... USING TTL ttl-of-value;
So... I think that the SELECT TTL() is slow (from experience with TTL() and WRITETIME() in some of my CQL commands). Not only that, the TTL is correct at the time the select results are generated on the Cassandra node, but by the time the insert happens, it will be off. Cassandra should have offered a time to delete rather than a time to live...
So as mentioned by Richard, having your own process to delete data after 1 week is probably safer. You should have one column to save the date of creation or the date when the data becomes obsolete. Then a background process can read that date and if the data is viewed as obsolete, drop the entire row.
Other processes can also use that date to know whether that row is considered valid or not! (so even if it was not yet deleted, you can still view the row as invalid if the date is passed.)

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