Query all and consistency - cassandra

This is a question regarding the behavior of cassandra for a select * query.
It's more for understanding, I know that normaly I should not execute such a query.
Assuming I have 4 Nodes with RF=2.
Following table (column family):
create table test_storage (
id text,
created_on TIMESTAMP,
location int,
data text,
PRIMARY KEY(id)
);
I inserted 100 entries into the table.
Now I do a select * from test_storage via cqlsh. Doing the query multiple times I get different results, so not all entries. When changing consistency to local_quorum I always get back the complete result. Why is this so?
I assumed, despite from the performance, that I also get for consistency one all entries since it must query the whole token range.
Second issue, when I add a secondary index in this case to location, and do a query like select * from test_storage where location=1 I also get random results wiht consistency one. And always correct results when changing to consistency level local_quorum. Also here I don't understand why this happens?

When changing consistency to local_quorum I always get back the complete result. Why is this so?
Welcome to the eventual consistency world. To understand it, read my slides: http://www.slideshare.net/doanduyhai/cassandra-introduction-2016-60292046/31
I assumed, despite from the performance, that I also get for consistency one all entries since it must query the whole token range
Yes, Cassandra will query all token ranges because of the non restricted SELECT * but it will only request data from one replicas out of 2 (RF=2)
and do a query like select * from test_storage where location=1 I also get random results wiht consistency one
Same answer as above, native Cassandra secondary index is just using a Cassandra table under the hood to store the reverse-index so the same eventual consistency rules apply there too

Related

Cassanda cql issue : "Batch too large","code":8704

I am getting the below error in select query.
{"error":{"name":"ResponseError","info":"Represents an error message from the server","message":"Batch too large","code":8704,"coordinator":"10.29.96.106:9042"}}
Ahh, I get it; you're using Dev Center.
If result is more than 1000 it is showing this error
Yes, that's Dev Center preventing you from running queries that can hurt your cluster. Like this:
select * from user_request_by_country_by_processworkflow
WHERE created_on <= '2022-01-08T16:19:07+05:30' ALLOW FILTERING;
ALLOW FILTERING is a way to force Cassandra to read multiple partitions in one query, even though it is designed to warn you against doing that. If you really need to run a query like this, then you'll want to build a table with a PRIMARY KEY designed to specifically support that.
In this case, I'd recommend "bucketing" your table data by whichever time component keeps the partitions within a reasonable size. For example, if the day keeps the rows-per-partition below 50k, the primary key definition would look like this:
PRIMARY KEY (day,created_on)
WITH CLUSTERING ORDER BY (created_on DESC);
Then, a query that would work and be allowed would look like this:
SELECT * FROM user_request_by_country_by_processworkflow
WHERE day=20220108
AND created_on <= '2022-01-08T16:19:07+05:30';
In summary:
Don't run multi-partition queries.
Don't use ALLOW FILTERING.
Do build tables to match queries.
Do use time buckets to keep partitions from growing unbounded.

Order of results in Cassandra

I have two questions about query results in Cassandra.
When I make a "full" select of a table in Cassandra (ie. select * from table) is it guaranteed that the results will be returned in increasing order of partition tokens?
For instance, having the following table:
create table users(id int, name text, primary key(id));
Is it guaranteed that the following query will return the results with increasing values in the token column?
select token(id), id from users;
If so, is it also guaranteed if the data is distributed to multiple nodes in the cluster?
If the anwer to the above question is 'yes', is it still valid if we use secondary index? For instance, if we would have the following index:
create index on users(name);
and we query the table by using the index:
select token(id), id from users where name = 'xyz';
is there any guarantee regarding the order of results?
The motivation for the above questions is if the token is the right thing to use in order in implement paging and/or resuming of broken longer "data exports".
EDIT: There are multiple resources on the net that state that the order matches the token order (eg. in description of partitioner results or this Datastax page):
Without a partition key specified in the WHERE clause, the actual order of the result set then becomes dependent on the hashed values of userid.
However the order of results is not specified in official Cassandra documentation, eg. of SELECT statement.
Is it guaranteed that the following query will return the results with increasing values in the token column?
Yes it is
If so, is it also guaranteed if the data is distributed to multiple nodes in the cluster?
The data distribution is orthogonal to the ordering of the retrieved data, no relationship
If the anwer to the above question is 'yes', is it still valid if we use secondary index?
Yes, even if you query data using a secondary index (be it SASI or the native implementation), the returned results will always be sorted by token order. Why ? The technical explanation is given in my blog post here: http://www.doanduyhai.com/blog/?p=13191#cluster_read_path
That's the main reason that explain why SASI is not a good fit if you want the search to return data ordered by some column values. Only a real search engine integration (like Datastax Enterprise Search) can yield you the correct ordering because it bypasses the cluster read path layer.

Cassandra get latest entry for each element contained within IN clause

So, I have a Cassandra CQL statement that looks like this:
SELECT * FROM DATA WHERE APPLICATION_ID = ? AND PARTNER_ID = ? AND LOCATION_ID = ? AND DEVICE_ID = ? AND DATA_SCHEMA = ?
This table is sorted by a timestamp column.
The functionality is fronted by a REST API, and one of the filter parameters that they can specify to get the most recent row, and then I appent "LIMIT 1" to the end of the CQL statement since it's ordered by the timestamp column in descending order. What I would like to do is allow them to specify multiple device id's to get back the latest entries for. So, my question is, is there any way to do something like this in Cassandra:
SELECT * FROM DATA WHERE APPLICATION_ID = ? AND PARTNER_ID = ? AND LOCATION_ID = ? AND DEVICE_ID IN ? AND DATA_SCHEMA = ?
and still use something like "LIMIT 1" to only get back the latest row for each device id? Or, will I simply have to execute a separate CQL statement for each device to get the latest row for each of them?
FWIW, the table's composite key looks like this:
PRIMARY KEY ((application_id, partner_id, location_id, device_id, data_schema), activity_timestamp)
) WITH CLUSTERING ORDER BY (activity_timestamp DESC);
IN is not recommended when there are a lot of parameters for it and under the hood it's making reqs to multiple partitions anyway and it's putting pressure on the coordinator node.
Not that you can't do it. It is perfectly legal, but most of the time it's not performant and is not suggested. If you specify limit, it's for the whole statement, basically you can't pick just the first item out from partitions. The simplest option would be to issue multiple queries to the cluster (every element in IN would become one query) and put a limit 1 to every one of them.
To be honest this was my solution in a lot of the projects and it works pretty much fine. Basically coordinator would under the hood go to multiple nodes anyway but would also have to work more for you to get you all the requests, might run into timeouts etc.
In short it's far better for the cluster and more performant if client asks multiple times (using multiple coordinators with smaller requests) than to make single coordinator do to all the work.
This is all in case you can't afford more disk space for your cluster
Usual Cassandra solution
Data in cassandra is suggested to be ready for query (query first). So basically you would have to have one additional table that would have the same partitioning key as you have it now, and you would have to drop the clustering column activity_timestamp. i.e.
PRIMARY KEY ((application_id, partner_id, location_id, device_id, data_schema))
double (()) is intentional.
Every time you would write to your table you would also write data to the latest_entry (table without activity_timestamp) Then you can specify the query that you need with in and this table contains the latest entry so you don't have to use the limit 1 because there is only one entry per partitioning key ... that would be the usual solution in cassandra.
If you are afraid of the additional writes, don't worry , they are inexpensive and cpu bound. With cassandra it's always "bring on the writes" I guess :)
Basically it's up to you:
multiple queries - a bit of refactoring, no additional space cost
new schema - additional inserts when writing, additional space cost
Your table definition is not suitable for such use of the IN clause. Indeed, it is supported on the last field of the primary key or the last field of the clustering key. So you can:
swap your two last fields of the primary key
use one query for each device id

Is a read with one secondary index faster than a read with multiple in cassandra?

I have this structure that I want a user to see the other user's feeds.
One way of doing it is to fan out an action to all interested parties's feed.
That would result in a query like select from feeds where userid=
otherwise i could avoid writing so much data and since i am already doing a read I could do:
select from feeds where userid IN (list of friends).
is the second one slower? I don't have the application yet to test this with a lot of data/clustering. As the application is big writing code to test a single node is not worth it so I ask for your knowledge.
If your title is correct, and userid is a secondary index, then running a SELECT/WHERE/IN is not even possible. The WHERE/IN clause only works with primary key values. When you use it on a column with a secondary index, you will see something like this:
Bad Request: IN predicates on non-primary-key columns (columnName) is not yet supported
Also, the DataStax CQL3 documentation for SELECT has a section worth reading about using IN:
When not to use IN
The recommendations about when not to use an index apply to using IN
in the WHERE clause. Under most conditions, using IN in the WHERE
clause is not recommended. Using IN can degrade performance because
usually many nodes must be queried. For example, in a single, local
data center cluster with 30 nodes, a replication factor of 3, and a
consistency level of LOCAL_QUORUM, a single key query goes out to two
nodes, but if the query uses the IN condition, the number of nodes
being queried are most likely even higher, up to 20 nodes depending on
where the keys fall in the token range.
As for your first query, it's hard to speculate about performance without knowing about the cardinality of userid in the feeds table. If userid is unique or has a very high number of possible values, then that query will not perform well. On the other hand, if each userid can have several "feeds," then it might do ok.
Remember, Cassandra data modeling is about building your data structures for the expected queries. Sometimes, if you have 3 different queries for the same data, the best plan may be to store that same, redundant data in 3 different tables. And that's ok to do.
I would tackle this problem by writing a table geared toward that specific query. Based on what you have mentioned, I would build it like this:
CREATE TABLE feedsByUserId
userid UUID,
feedid UUID,
action text,
PRIMARY KEY (userid, feedid));
With a composite primary key made up of userid as the partitioning key you will then be able to run your SELECT/WHERE/IN query mentioned above, and achieve the expected results. Of course, I am assuming that the addition of feedid will make the entire key unique. if that is not the case, then you may need to add an additional field to the PRIMARY KEY. My example is also assuming that userid and feedid are version-4 UUIDs. If that is not the case, adjust their types accordingly.

Cassandra CQL3 order by clustered key efficiency (with limit clause?)

I have the following table (using CQL3):
create table test (
shard text,
tuuid timeuuid,
some_data text,
status text,
primary key (shard, tuuid, some_data, status)
);
I would like to get rows ordered by tuuid. But this is only possible when I restrict shard - I get this is due to performance.
I have shard purely for sharding, and I can potentially restrict its range of values to some small range [0-16) say. Then, I could run a query like this:
select * from test where shard in (0,...,15) order by tuuid limit L;
I may have millions of rows in the table, so I would like to understand the performance characteristics of such a order by query. It would seem like the performance could be pretty bad in general, BUT with a limit clause of some reasonable number (order of 10K), this may not be so bad - i.e. a 16 way merge but with a fairly low limit.
Any tips, advice or pointers into the code on where to look would be appreciated.
Your data is sorted according to your column key. So the performance issue in your merge in your query above does not happen due to the WHERE clause but because of your LIMIT clause, afaik.
Your columns are inserted IN ORDER according to tuuid so there is no performance issue there.
If you are fetching too many rows at once, I recommended creating a test_meta table where you store the latest timeuuid every X-inserts, to get an upper bound on the rows your query will fetch. Then, you can change your query to:
select * from test where shard in (0,...,15) and tuuid > x and tuuid < y;
In short: make use of your column keys and get rid of the limit. Alternatively, in Cassandra 2.0, there will be pagination which will help here, too.
Another issue I stumbled over, you say that
I may have millions of rows in the table
But according to your data model, you will have exactly shard number of rows. This is your row key and - together with the partitioner - will determine the distribution/sharding of your data.
hope that helps!
UPDATE
From my personal experience, cassandra performances quite well during heavy reads as well as writes. If the result sets became too large, I rather experienced memory issues on the receiving/client side rather then timeouts on the server side. Still, to prevent either, I recommend having a look a the upcoming (2.0) pagination feature.
In the meanwhile:
Try to investigate using the trace functionality in 1.2.
If you are mostly reading the "latest" data, try adding a reversed type.
For general optimizations like caches etc, first, read how cassandra handles reads on a node and then, see this tuning guide.

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