One to many mapping in Cassandra - cassandra

Question

I am new to Cassandra and would like to do One to many mapping of User and its vehicle. One user may have multiple Vehicles. My User table will contain User details like name, surname, etc. And Vehicle table will have Vehicle details.
My select query will fetch all Vehicle details for particular User.
How should I design this in Cassandra?

Answer 1

You can easily model this in a single table:
CREATE TABLE userVehicles (
userid text,
vehicleid text,
name text static,
surname text static,
vehicleMake text,
vehicleModel text,
vehicleYear text,
PRIMARY KEY (userid,vehicleid)
);
This way you can query vehicles for a single user in one shot, and your user data can be static so that it is stored at the partition key level. As long as the cardinality of user to vehicle isn't too big (as-in, like a user has 1000 vehicles) this should work just fine.
The case I have considered above is very simple. But what if my User has lot of details around 20 to 30 fields and same for Vehicle. Still you would suggest to have a single table and copying User data for all vehicle?
It depends. Would your use case require returning all of them? If so, then "yes" I would still recommend this approach. The way to get the best query performance out of Cassandra, is to model your tables to fit your queries. Cassandra works best when it can read a single row by a specific key, or a range of rows (stored sequentially). You want to avoid performing multiple queries or writing queries that force Cassandra to perform random reads.
What are the consequences of having 2 different tables like User and Vehicle and Vehicle table will have primary key as User_Id and Vehicle_Id?
In a distributed system network time is the enemy. By having two tables, you are now making two queries...assuming a 1 to 1 ratio of users to vehicles. But if your user has 8 vehicles, you now need 9 queries to achieve your result. With the design above you can build your result set in 1 query (minimizing network time). Also with userid as a partition key, that query is guaranteed to be served by one node, as opposed to additional queries for vehicle data which will most likely require contacting multiple nodes.

Answer 2

This seems as simple as having two tables, one holding all of your vehicles data and another one for satisfying your query:
CREATE TABLE vehicles (
vehicle_id bigint,
vehicle_type int,
vehicle_name text,
...
PRIMARY KEY (vehicle_type)
)
CREATE TABLE vehicles_to_users (
user_id bigint,
vehicle_id bigint,
vehicle_type int,
vehicle_name text,
...
PRIMARY KEY (user_id, vehicle_type)
)
Then you would query by:
SELECT * FROM vehicles_to_users WHERE user_id = 9;
or something like that to get all specific vehicle type belonging to a particular user:
SELECT * FROM vehicles_to_users WHERE user_id = 9 AND vehicle_type = 1;
This is a solution with denormalized data, and you should always consider that approach instead of having something like:
CREATE TABLE vehicles (
vehicle_id bigint,
vehicle_type int,
vehicle_name text,
...
PRIMARY KEY (vehicle_type)
)
CREATE TABLE vehicles_to_users (
user_id bigint,
vehicle_id bigint,
PRIMARY KEY (user_id)
)
because it belongs to the relational databases world and you'd have to run N+1 queries to satisfy your requirements: one to get all the ids belonging to a particular user, and then N queries to get all the information for each vehicle:
SELECT * FROM vehicles_to_users WHERE user_id = 9;
SELECT * FROM vehicles WHERE vehicle_id = 115;
SELECT * FROM vehicles WHERE vehicle_id = 116;
SELECT * FROM vehicles WHERE vehicle_id = ...;
And don't be tempted to use the IN clausole like this:
SELECT * FROM vehicles WHERE vehicle_id IN (115,116,....);
because it would perform even worse due to extra work that a coordinator node have to do.