Cassandra: backfilling new boolean field - cassandra

I added a new boolean column called subscribe to my email_subscriptions table in Cassandra. I noticed that it returns false for all rows' subscribe field.
I wanted to default all rows in the table with the subscribe field as true, but this StackOverflow answer says:
there is no default value in Cassandra.
So my question is, how do I set all rows in my email_subscriptions table to have their subscribe field set to true? Do I need to backfill via a batch update?

There is two way you can do this.
You can create a program, which will select all record from email_subscriptions and insert back along with subscribe = true value.
Or
When selecting subscribe field value, check the value is null with isNull() method (which will return true if the column is null, false otherwise). If true return, it means that subscribe is null and this value not yet inserted, you can treat it as subscribe = true

The only way is to fill back your whole table. Depending on size of your table, you could have problems at querying your table with a simple
SELECT * FROM mytable;
due to timeouts. Since the partition key is mandatory in an UPDATE statement, you have to find a way to spill your partition keys out from that table.
This is the perfect scenario for using the TOKEN function. Assuming you did your homework and don't have any too-wide partitions, you can scan all your dataset by splitting it into ranges of partitions. How wide is your range is up to your data. From a general point of view, you need to:
SELECT __partition_key_columns__ FROM mytable WHERE
TOKEN(__partition_key_columns__) >= min_range AND
TOKEN(__partition_key_columns__) < max_range;
and min_range and max_range go from -2^63 to 2^64-1 (IIRC, using Murmur3) in steps of a guessed window size W:
SELECT __partition_key_columns__ FROM mytable WHERE TOKEN(__partition_key_columns__) >= -2^63 AND TOKEN(__partition_key_columns__) < -2^63 + W;
SELECT __partition_key_columns__ FROM mytable WHERE TOKEN(__partition_key_columns__) >= -2^63 + W AND TOKEN(__partition_key_columns__) < -2^63 + 2*W;
...
until you covered all the range up to 2^64-1. If you get a timeout make W smaller and try again. And if you don't, expand your window W so you'll speed up the process. You will be able to extract all the partitions to issue the updates for each range.
EDIT: This blog post explains exactly how to perform such task.

Related

Is there anyway we could limit an update?

Generally, I see we can limit the select by select * from table where predicate = value limit by N Am currently in a situation where I have 200 records falling under a predicate, but I want to update the first 100 like update table set column = 1 where predicate = value limit...? and the second half by update table set column = 2 where predicate = value. I think it could be done by having ranges <=,>= in the predicate section, unfortunately, I have none of them.
Currently, I don't think we have this feature as WHERE clause must identify the row or rows to be updated by primary key as per. However, you could further limit the number of rows to be updated by using IF EXISTS condition. Details can be found here

filter for key-value pair in cassandra wide rows

I am trying to model time series data with many sensors (> 50k) with cassandra. As I would like to do filtering on multiple sensors at the same time, I thought using the following (wide row) schema might be suitable:
CREATE TABLE data(
time timestamp,
session_id int,
sensor text,
value float,
PRIMARY KEY((time, session_id), sensor)
);
If every sensor value was a column in an RDBMS, my query would ideally look like:
SELECT * FROM data WHERE sensor_1 > 10 AND sensor_2 < 2;
Translated to my cassandra schema, I assumed the query might look like:
SELECT * FROM data
WHERE
sensor = 'sensor_1' AND
value > 10 AND
sensor = 'sensor_2' AND
value < 2;
I now have two problems:
cassandra tells me that I can filter on the sensor column only
once:
sensor cannot be restricted by more than one relation if it
includes an Equal
Obviously, the filter on value doesn't make sense at the moment. I wouldn't know how to express the relationship
between sensor and value in the query in order to filter multiple
columns in the same (wide) row.
I do know that a solution to the first question would be to use CQL's IN clause. This however doesn't solve the second problem.
Is this scenario even suitable for cassandra?
Many thanks in advance.
You could try to use IN clause here.
So your query would be like this:
SELECT * FROM data
WHERE time = <time> and session_id = <session id>
AND sensor IN ('sensor_1', 'sensor_2')
AND value > 10 AND value < 2

Cassandra OperationTimedOut

select count (*) from my_table gives me OperationTimedOut: errors={}, last_host=127.0.0.1
I have already tried to change the values in request_timeout_in_ms in cassandra.yaml and request_timeout in cqlshrc.sample. (Both are in C:\Programs\DataStax-DDC\apache-cassandra\conf) But without success.
How can I increse timeout?
select count (*) is not doing what you think. It is actually expensive as it counts the rows one by one. You can track number of records using a separate column family with a counter, which you will need to increment for every insert you do into your table. For example
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS my_table_counter (
mykey text,
count counter,
PRIMARY KEY (mykey)
);
Then for every insert into your table, do counter update:
INSERT into my_table (mykey, mydata) VALUES (?, ?);
UPDATE my_table_counter SET count = count + 1 WHERE mykey = ?;
To get the count:
SELECT count FROM my_table_counter WHERE mykey = ?
Note that counters are not idempotent, so in a rare event of a failure your data might be under or over-counted. Also the code above assumes that you only insert with a new key.
If you need a precise counting, Cassandra may be not a good fit for that. Also if you are not inserting with unique keys you may need to consider using light weight transaction with insert (IF NOT EXISTS) and update a counter only if transaction was applied.

fetching timeseries/range data in cassandra

I am new to Cassandra and trying to see if it fits my data query needs. I am populating test data in a table and fetching them using cql client in Golang.
I am storing time series data in Cassandra, sorted by timestamp. I store data on a per-minute basis.
Schema is like this:
parent: string
child: string
bytes: int
val2: int
timestamp: date/time
I need to answer queries where a timestamp range is provided and a childname is given. The result needs to be the bytes value in that time range(Single value, not series) I made a primary key(child, timestamp). I followed this approach rather than the column-family, comparator-type with timeuuid since that was not supported in cql.
Since the data stored in every timestamp(every minute) is the accumulated value, when I get a range query for time t1 to t2, I need to find the bytes value at t2, bytes value at t1 and subtract the 2 values before returning. This works fine if t1 and t2 actually had entries in the table. If they do not, I need to find those times between (t1, t2) that have data and return the difference.
One approach I can think of is to "select * from tablename WHERE timestamp <= t2 AND timestamp >= t1;" and then find the difference between the first and last entry in this array of rows returned. Is this the best way to do it? Since MIN and MAX queries are not supported, is there is a way to find the maximum timestamp in the table less than a given value? Thanks for your time.
Are you storing each entry as a new row with a different partition key(first column in the Primary key)? If so, select * from x where f < a and f > b is a cluster wide query, which will cause you problems. Consider adding a "fake" partition key, or use a partition key per date / week / month etc. so that your queries hit a single partition.
Also, your queries in cassandra are >= and <= even if you specify > and <. If you need strictly greater than or less than, you'll need to filter client side.

Does an UPDATE become an implied INSERT

For Cassandra, do UPDATEs become an implied INSERT if the selected row does not exist? That is, if I say
UPDATE users SET name = "Raedwald" WHERE id = 545127
and id is the PRIMARY KEY of the users table, and the table has no row with a key of 545127, will that be equivalent to
INSERT INTO users (id, name) VALUES (545127, "Raedwald")
I know that the opposite is true: an INSERT for an id that already exists becomes an UPDATE of the row with that id. Older Cassandra documentation talked about inserts actually being "upserts" for that reason.
I'm interested in the case for CQL3, Cassandra version 1.2+.
Yes, for Cassandra UPDATE is synonymous with INSERT, as explained in the CQL documentation where it says the following about UPDATE:
Note that unlike in SQL, UPDATE does not check the prior existence of the row: the row is created if none existed before, and updated otherwise. Furthermore, there is no mean to know which of creation or update happened. In fact, the semantic of INSERT and UPDATE are identical.
For the semantics to be different, Cassandra would need to do a read to know if the row already exists. Cassandra is write optimized, so you can always assume it doesn't do a read before write on any write operation. The only exception is counters (unless replicate_on_write = false), in which case replication on increment involves a read.
Unfortunately the accepted answer is not 100% accurate. inserts are different than updates:
cqlsh> create table ks.t (pk int, ck int, v int, primary key (pk, ck));
cqlsh> update ks.t set v = null where pk = 0 and ck = 0;
cqlsh> select * from ks.t where pk = 0 and ck = 0;
pk | ck | v
----+----+---
(0 rows)
cqlsh> insert into ks.t (pk,ck,v) values (0,0,null);
cqlsh> select * from ks.t where pk = 0 and ck = 0;
pk | ck | v
----+----+------
0 | 0 | null
(1 rows)
Scylla does the same thing.
In Scylla and Cassandra rows are sequences of cells. Each column gets a corresponding cell (or a set of cells in the case of non-frozen collections or UDTs). But there is one additional, invisible cell - the row marker (in Scylla at least; I suspect Cassandra has something similar).
The row marker makes a difference for rows in which all other cells are dead: a row shows up in a query if and only if there's at least one alive cell. Thus, if the row marker is alive, the row will show up, even if all other columns were previously set to null using e.g. updates.
inserts create a live row marker, while updates don't touch the row marker, so clearly they are different. The example above illustrates that.
One could argue that row markers are "internal" to Cassandra/Scylla, but as you can see, their effects are visible. Row markers affect your life whether you like it or not, so it may be useful to remember about them.
It's sad that no documentation mentions row markers (well, I found this: https://docs.scylladb.com/architecture/sstable/sstable2/sstable-data-file/#cql-row-marker but it's in the context of explaining SSTable internals, which is probably dedicated to Scylla developers more than to users).
Bonus: a cell delete:
delete v from ks.t where pk = 0 and ck = 0
is the same as a null update:
update ks.t set v = null where pk = 0 and ck = 0
indeed, a cell delete also doesn't touch the row marker. It only sets the specified cell to null.
This is different from a row delete:
delete from ks.t where pk = 0 and ck = 0
because row deletes insert a row tombstone, which kills all cells in the row (including the row marker). You could say that row deletes are the opposite of an insert. Updates and cell deletes are somewhere in between.
What one can do is this however:
UPDATE table_name SET field = false WHERE key = 55 IF EXISTS;
This will ensure that your update is a true update and not an upsert.

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