I am new to Cassandra, and found below in the wikipedia.
A column family (called "table" since CQL 3) resembles a table in an RDBMS (Relational Database Management System). Column families contain rows and columns. Each row is uniquely identified by a row key. Each row has multiple columns, each of which has a name, value, and a timestamp. Unlike a table in an RDBMS, different rows in the same column family do not have to share the same set of columns, and a column may be added to one or multiple rows at any time.[29]
It said that 'different rows in the same column family do not have to share the same set of columns', but how to implement it? I have almost read all the documents in the offical site.
I can create table and insert data like below.
CREATE TABLE Emp_record(E_id int PRIMARY KEY,E_score int,E_name text,E_city text);
INSERT INTO Emp_record(E_id, E_score, E_name, E_city) values (101, 85, 'ashish', 'Noida');
INSERT INTO Emp_record(E_id, E_score, E_name, E_city) values (102, 90, 'ankur', 'meerut');
It's very like I did in the relational database. So how to create multiply rows with different columns?
I also found the offical document mentioned 'Flexible schema', how to understand it here?
Thanks very much in advance.
Column family is from the original design of Cassandra, when the data model looked like the Google BigTable or Apache HBase, and Thrift protocol was used for communication. But this required that schema was defined inside the application, and that makes access to data from many applications more problematic, as you need to update the schema inside all of them...
The CREATE TABLE and INSERT is a part of the Cassandra Query Language (CQL) that was introduced long time ago, and replaced Thrift-based implementation (Cassandra 4.0 completely removed the Thrift support). In CQL you need to have schema defined for a table, where you need to provide column name & type. If you really need to have dynamic columns, there are several approaches to that (I'll link answers that I already wrote over the time, so there won't duplicates):
If you have values of the same type, you can use one column as a name of the attribute/column, and another to store the value, like described here
if you have values of different types, you can also use one column as a name of attribute/column, and define multiple columns for values - one for each of the data types: int, text, ..., and you insert value into the corresponding columns only (described here)
you can use maps (described here) - it's similar to first or second, but mostly designed for very small number of "dynamic columns", plus have other limitations, like, you need to read the full map to fetch one value, etc.)
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';
In a table the cluster key is an int column which is a system generated number - chrg Issue is
Since its defined as int datatype it can store values only uptil 2billion.
And since the data of the table is huge..by next two months load we will hit the max value that can be stored in the column beyond which loads will fail.
Hence the requirement is to change the datatype of the column to something like longint with least impact.
How can this be achieved with a minimal downtime?
You Cannot change the type of primary key.
So one of the approach I can think of is:
Create a separate table with modified datatype.
Modify your application to write data to both the tables.
Then you can use spark & cassandra to read data from older table and write it to new table.
Then again in your application you can stop writing to old table.
With above approach I don't think you will have major impact.
I have a situation where I have a large partition/row with many cells/values. I need to query this row for all the cells sorted by a value (one of the keys). This sort value is dynamic, and changes of often. You can't update any of the primary keys of cassandra because it changes how the data is stored. So, how do I do this? Does cassandra not support normalized queries that the sort can change at any given moment?
Cassandra does not support normalized queries where the sort can change at any given moment. You can do sort on the client or using additional tools like Spark.
We don't want to fix the columns definition when creating a column family, as we might have to insert new columns into the column family. Is it possible to achieve it? I am wondering whether it is possible to not to define the column metadata when creating a column family, but to specify the column when client updates data, for example:
CREATE COLUMN FAMILY products WITH default_validation_class= UTF8Type AND key_validation_class=UTF8Type AND comparator=UTF8Type;
set products['1001']['brand']= ‘Sony’;
Thanks,
Fan
Yes... it is possible to achieve this, without even taking any special effort. Per the DataStax documentation of the Cassandra data model (a good read, by the way, along with the CQL spec):
The Cassandra data model is a schema-optional, column-oriented data model. This means that, unlike a relational database, you do not need to model all of the columns required by your application up front, as each row is not required to have the same set of columns. Columns and their metadata can be added by your application as they are needed without incurring downtime to your application.