I have to change the schema of one of my tables in Cassandra. It's cannot be done by simply using ALTER TABLE command, because there are some changes in primary key.
So the question is: How to do such a migration in the best way?
Using COPY command in cql is not an option in here because dump file can be really huge.
Can I solve this problem by not creating some custom application?
Like Guillaume has suggested in the comment - you can't do this directly in cassandra. Schema altering operations are very limited here. You have to perform such migration manually using one of suggested there tools OR if you have very large tables you can leverage Spark.
Spark can efficiently read data from your nodes, transform them locally and save them back to db. Remember that such migration requires reading whole db content, so might take a while. It might be the most performant solution, however needs some bigger preparation - Spark cluster setup.
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I am very new to Cassandra and any help here would be appreciated. I have a cluster of 6 nodes that spans 2 datacenters (3 nodes to each cluster). My client has decided that they do not want to renew their Cassandra license with Datastax anymore and want their data exported into a format that can be easily imported into another Database in the future. I was thinking of exporting the data as a CSV file, but since the data is distributed between all the nodes, I am not sure what is the best way to export all the data.
One option - You should be able to use the CQL COPY command - which copies the data into a CSV format. The nice thing about copy is that you can run it from a single node (i.e. it is not a "node" level tool). Command would be (once in cqlsh):
CQL> COPY . to '/path/to/file'
If there is a LOT of data, or a lot of tables, this tool may not be a great fit. But for small number of tables that don't have HUGE rowcounts (< several million), this works well. Hope that helps.
-Jim
Since 2018 you can use DSBulk with DSE to export or import data to/from CSV (by default), or JSON. Since the end of 2019 it's possible to use it with open source Cassandra as well.
It could be as simple as:
dsbulk unload -k keyspace -t table -u user -p password -url filename
DSBulk is heavily optimized for fast data export, without putting too much load onto the coordinator node that happens when you just run select * from table.
You can control what columns to export, and even provide your own query, etc. DataStax blog has a series of blog posts about different aspects of using DSBulk:
Introduction and Loading
More Loading
Common Settings
Unloading
Counting
Examples for Loading From Other Locations
You can use CQL COPY command for exporting the data from Cassandra cluster. However it is performant for small set of data if you are having big size of data this command is not useful cause it will give some error or timeout issue. Also, you may use sstabledump and export your node-wise date into JSON format. Hope, this will useful for you.
I have implemented small script for this purpose. It isn't the best way, since it slow and, in my experience, produces connection errors on system tables. But it could be useful for inspecting Cassandra on small datasets: https://github.com/kirillt/cassandra-utils
How can I export data, over a period of time (like hourly or daily) or updated records from a Cassandra database? It seems like using an index with a date field might work, but I definitely get timeouts in my cqlsh when I try that by hand, so I'm concerned that it's not reliable to do that.
If that's not the right way, then how do people get their data out of Cassandra and into a traditional database (for analysis, querying with JOINs, etc..)? It's not a java shop, so using Spark is non-trivial (and we don't want to change our whole system to use Spark instead of cassandra directly). Do I have to read sstables and try to keep track of them that way? Is there a way to say "get me all records affected after point in time X" or "get me all changes after timestamp X" or something similar?
It looks like Cassandra is really awesome at rapidly reading and writing individual records, but beyond that Cassandra seems to not be the right tool if you want to pull its data into anything else for analysis or warehousing or querying...
Spark is the most typical to do exactly that (as you say). It does it efficiently and is used often so pretty reliable. Cassandra is not really designed for OLAP workloads but things like spark connector help bridge the gap. DataStax Enterprise might have some more options available to you but I am not sure their current offerings.
You can still just query and page through the whole data set with normal CQL queries, its just not as fast. You can even use ALLOW FILTERING just be wary as its very expensive and can impact your cluster (creating a separate dc for the workload and using LOCOL_CL queries against it helps). You will probably also in that scenario add a < token() and > token() to the where clause to split up the query and prevent too much work on any one coordinator. Organizing your data so that this query is more efficient would be strongly recommended (ie if doing time slices, put things in a partition bucketed by time and clustering key timeuuids so its sequential read for each part of time).
Kinda cheesy sounding but the CSV dump from cqlsh is actually fast and might work for you if your data set is small enough.
I would not recommend going to the sstables directly unless you are familiar with internals and using hadoop or spark.
I am looking for Cassandra/CQL's cousin of the common SQL idiom of INSERT INTO ... SELECT ... FROM ... and have been unable to find anything to do such an operation programmatically or in CQL. Is it just not supported?
My use case is to do a reasonably bulky copy from one table to another. I don't need any particular concurrent guarantees, but it's a lot of data so I'd like to avoid the additional network overhead of writing a client that retrieves data from one table, then issues batches of inserts into the other table. I understand that the changes will still need to be transported between nodes of the Cassandra cluster according to the replication set-up, but it seems reasonable for there to be an "internal" option to do a bulk operation from one table to another. Is there such a thing in CQL or elsewhere? I'm currently using Hector to talk to Cassandra.
Edit: it looks like sstableloader might be relevant, but is awfully low-level for something that I'd expect to be a fairly common use case. Taking just a subset of rows from one table to another also seems less than trivial in that framework.
Correct, this is not supported natively. (Another alternative would be a map/reduce job.) Cassandra's API focuses on short requests for applications at scale, not batch or analytical queries.
I am using Cassandra database for large scale application. I am new to using Cassandra database. I have a database schema for a particular keyspace for which I have created columns using Cassandra Command Line Interface (CLI). Now when I copied dataset in the folder /var/lib/cassandra/data/, I was not able to access the values using the key of a particular column. I am getting message zero rows present. But the files are present. All these files are under extension, XXXX-Data.db, XXXX-Filter.db, XXXX-Index.db. Can anyone tell me how to access the columns for existing datasets.
(a) Cassandra doesn't expect you to move its data files around out from underneath it. You'll need to restart if you do any manual surgery like that.
(b) if you didn't also copy the schema definition it will ignore data files for unknown column families.
For what you are trying to achieve it may probably be better to export and import your SSTables.
You should have a look at bin/sstable2json and bin/json2sstable.
Documentation is there (near the end of the page): Cassandra Operations
I'm looking for a tool to load CSV into Cassandra. I was hoping to use RazorSQL for this but I've been told that it will be several months out.
What is a good tool?
Thanks
1) If you have all the data to be loaded in place you can try sstableloader(only for cassandra 0.8.x onwards) utility to bulk load the data.For more details see:cassandra bulk loader
2) Cassandra has introduced BulkOutputFormat bulk loading data into cassandra with hadoop job in latest version that is cassandra-1.1.x onwards.
For more details see:Bulkloading to Cassandra with Hadoop
I'm dubious that tool support would help a great deal with this, since a Cassandra schema needs to reflect the queries that you want to run, rather than just being a generic model of your domain.
The built-in bulk loading mechanism for cassandra is via BinaryMemtables: http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/BinaryMemtable
However, whether you use this or the more usual Thrift interface, you still probably need to manually design a mapping from your CSV into Cassandra ColumnFamilies, taking into account the queries you need to run. A generic mapping from CSV-> Cassandra may not be appropriate since secondary indexes and denormalisation are commonly needed.
For Cassandra 1.1.3 and higher, there is the CQL COPY command that is available for importing (or exporting) data to (or from) a table. According to the documentation, if you are importing less than 2 million rows, roughly, then this is a good option. Is is much easier to use than the sstableloader and less error prone. The sstableloader requires you to create strictly formatted .db files whereas the CQL COPY command accepts a delimited text file. Documenation here:
http://www.datastax.com/docs/1.1/references/cql/COPY
For larger data sets, you should use the sstableloader.http://www.datastax.com/docs/1.1/references/bulkloader. A working example is described here http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/bulk-loading.