select older versions of data after update in Cassandra - cassandra

This is my use-case.
I have inserted a row of data in Cassandra with the following query:
INSERT INTO TableWide1 (UID, TimeStampCol, Value, DateCol) VALUES ('id1','2016-03-24 17:54:36',45,'2015-03-24 00:00:00');
I update one row to have a new value.
update TableWide1 set Value = 46 where uid = 'id1' and datecol='2015-03-24 00:00:00' and timestampcol='2016-03-24 17:54:36';
Now, I would like to see all versions of this data from Cassandra. I know in HBase, this is pretty straightforward, but in Cassandra, is this even possible?
I explored a bit using writetime(), but it just gives the latest time of the newly updated data. And this cannot be used in where clause too.
This is how my schema looks like:
CREATE TABLE TableWide1(
UID varchar,
TimeStampCol timestamp,
Value double,
DateCol timestamp,
PRIMARY KEY ((UID,DateCol), TimeStampCol)
);
So is this technically possible, given the fact the old data still exists in Cassandra?

If your partitions wont get too wide you could exclude the time partitioning:
CREATE TABLE table_wide (
UID varchar,
TimeStampCol timestamp,
Value double,
PRIMARY KEY ((UID), TimeStampCol)
);
Thats generally bad though since eventually you will hit the limits of a partition.
But really you had it right. You wont be able to make a single statement, but under the covers you cant stream the entire set over anyway, and it will have to page through it. So you can just iterate through results of each day one at a time. If your dataset has days with no data and you dont want to waste reads, you can keep an additional table around to mark which days have data
CREATE TABLE table_wide_partition_list (
UID varchar,
DateCol timestamp,
PRIMARY KEY (UID)
);
And make one query to it first.
Really if you want HBase like behavior for scans, you are probably looking for more OLAP style of thing instead of normal C* usage. For this its almost universally recommended to use Spark with Cassandra currently.

Cassandra does not retain old data when updated.
It marks the old data into tombstone, and get rid of this, when compaction happens.
Hbase, was not made for handling real time application, and hot data from/for application server, though things have improved since the old times with Hbase.
People use Hbase, mainly because they already have a hadoop cluster.
Another noticeable and important difference is Cassandra is very fast on retrieval of single/multiple record based on key but not on range like >10 && <10 because data is stored based on hashed key. Hbase on the other hand stores data in sorted manner and is ideal candidate for range query.
Anyways, since cassandra doesn't retain old data. You cannot retrieve it.

Related

Regarding Cassandra's (sloppy, still confusing) documentation on keys, partitions

I have a high-write table I'm moving from Oracle to Cassandra. In Oracle the PK is a (int: clientId, id: UUID). There are about 10 billion rows. Right off the bat I run into this nonsensical warning:
https://docs.datastax.com/en/cql/3.3/cql/cql_using/useWhenIndex.html :
"If you create an index on a high-cardinality column, which has many distinct values, a query between the fields will incur many seeks for very few results. In the table with a billion songs, looking up songs by writer (a value that is typically unique for each song) instead of by their artist, is likely to be very inefficient. It would probably be more efficient to manually maintain the table as a form of an index instead of using the Cassandra built-in index."
Not only does this seem to defeat efficient find by PK it fails to define what it means to "query between the fields" and what the difference is between a built-in index, a secondary-index, and the primary_key+clustering subphrases in a create table command. A junk description. This is 2019. Shouldn't this be fixed by now?
AFAIK it's misleading anyway:
CREATE TABLE dev.record (
clientid int,
id uuid,
version int,
payload text,
PRIMARY KEY (clientid, id, version)
) WITH CLUSTERING ORDER BY (id ASC, version DESC)
insert into record (id,version,clientid,payload) values
(d5ca94dd-1001-4c51-9854-554256a5b9f9,3,1001,'');
insert into record (id,version,clientid,payload) values
(d5ca94dd-1002-4c51-9854-554256a5b9e5,0,1002,'');
The token on clientid indeed shows they're in different partitions as expected.
Turning to the big point. If one was looking for a single row given the clientId, and UUID ---AND--- Cassandra allowed you to skip specifying the clientId so it wouldn't know which node(s) to search, then sure that find could be slow. But it doesn't:
select * from record where id=
d5ca94dd-1002-4c51-9854-554256a5b9e5;
InvalidRequest: ... despite the performance unpredictability,
use ALLOW FILTERING"
And ditto with other variations that exclude clientid. So shouldn't we conclude Cassandra handles high cardinality tables searches that return "very few results" just fine?
Anything that requires reading the entire context of the database wont work which is the case with scanning on id since any of your clientid partition key's may contain one. Walking through potentially thousands of sstables per host and walking through each partition of each of those to check will not work. If having hard time with data model and not totally getting difference between partition keys and clustering keys I would recommend you walk through some introduction classes (ie datastax academy), youtube videos or book etc before designing your schema. This is not a relational database and designing around your data instead of your queries will get you into trouble. When moving from oracle you should not just copy your tables over and move the data or it will not work as well.
The clustering key is the order in which the data for a partition is ordered on disk which is what it is referring to as "build-in index". Each sstable has an index component that contains the partition key locations for that sstable. This also includes an index of the clustering keys for each partition every 64kb (by default at least) that can be searched on. The clustering keys that exist between each of these indexed points are unknown so they all have to be checked. A long time ago there was a bloom filter of clustering keys kept as well but it was such a rare use case where it helped vs the overhead that it was removed in 2.0.
Secondary indexes are difficult to scale well which is where the warning comes from about cardinality, I would strongly recommend just denormalizing data and not using index in any form as using large scatter gather queries across a distributed system is going to have availability and performance issues. If you really need it check out http://www.doanduyhai.com/blog/?p=13191 to try to get the data right (not worth it in my opinion).

Cassandra data modeling - Do I choose hotspots to make the query easier?

Is it ever okay to build a data model that makes the fetch query easier even though it will likely created hotspots within the cluster?
While reading, please keep in mind I am not working with Solr right now and given the frequency this data will be accessed I didn’t think using spark-sql would be appropriate. I would like to keep this as pure Cassandra.
We have transactions, which are modeled using a UUID as the partition key so that the data is evenly distributed around the cluster. One of our access patterns requires that a UI get all records for a given user and date range, query like so:
select * from transactions_by_user_and_day where user_id = ? and created_date_time > ?;
The first model I built uses the user_id and created_date (day the transaction was created, always set to midnight) as the primary key:
CREATE transactions_by_user_and_day (
user_ id int,
created_date timestamp,
created_date_time timestamp,
transaction_id uuid,
PRIMARY KEY ((user_id, created_date), created_date_time)
) WITH CLUSTERING ORDER BY (created_date_time DESC);
This table seems to perform well. Using the created_date as part of the PK allows users to be spread around the cluster more evenly to prevent hotspots. However, from an access perspective it makes the data access layer do a bit more work that we would like. It ends up having to create an IN statement with all days in the provided range instead of giving a date and greater than operator:
select * from transactions_by_user_and_day where user_id = ? and created_date in (?, ?, …) and created_date_time > ?;
To simplify the work to be done at the data access layer, I have considered modeling the data like so:
CREATE transactions_by_user_and_day (
user_id int,
created_date_time timestamp,
transaction_id uuid,
PRIMARY KEY ((user_global_id), created_date_time)
) WITH CLUSTERING ORDER BY (created_date_time DESC);
With the above model, the data access layer can fetch the transaction_id’s for the user and filter on a specific date range within Cassandra. However, this causes a chance of hotspots within the cluster. Users with longevity and/or high volume will create quite a few more columns in the row. We intend on supplying a TTL on the data so anything older than 60 days drops off. Additionally, I’ve analyzed the size of the data and 60 days’ worth of data for our most high volume user is under 2 MB. Doing the math, if we assume that all 40,000 users (this number wont grow significantly) are spread evenly over a 3 node cluster and 2 MB of data per user you end up with a max of just over 26 GB per node ((13333.33*2)/1024). In reality, you aren’t going to end up with 1/3 of your users doing that much volume and you’d have to get really unlucky to have Cassandra, using V-Nodes, put all of those users on a single node. From a resources perspective, I don’t think 26 GB is going to make or break anything either.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Date Model 1:Something else you could do would be to change your data access layer to do a query for each ID individually, instead of using the IN clause. Check out this page to understand why that would be better.
https://lostechies.com/ryansvihla/2014/09/22/cassandra-query-patterns-not-using-the-in-query-for-multiple-partitions/
Data model 2: 26GB of data per node doesn't seem like much, but a 2MB fetch seems a bit large. Of course if this is an outlier, then I don't see a problem with it. You might try setting up a cassandra-stress job to test the model. As long as the majority of your partitions are smaller than 2MB, that should be fine.
One other solution would be to use Data Model 2 with Bucketing. This would give you more overhead on writes as you'd have to maintain a bucket lookup table as well though. Let me know if need me to elaborate more on this approach.

In Cassandra, how to implement a fixed number of rows in one partition?

All
I'm implementing a kind of history table using Cassandra 2.2.
My current schema has a row key for userid, and cluster key for timestamp, then in each row is a user behavior record. I want to keep only 10 latest rows for an given userid. How can I implement this smartly?
Thanks for any suggestion!
Given a Data model of:
CREATE TABLE history (
userid text,
activity_time timeuuid,
behavior text,
PRIMARY KEY ((userid),timeuuid)
);
The best I can think of would be to do the following:
Insert all "history" records with some reasonable TTL.
How long of a TTL depends on your particular use case
When querying by a userid, limit your returned result set to 10
SELECT * FROM history WHERE userid='fromanator' LIMIT 10;
However with this approach if a user hasn't had any history within the TTL then you will get no results back. Depending on your use case this may be acceptable.
If you absolutely need to keep at least the last 10 records, then you're going to have a much more complicated data model and application code to achieve this in Cassandra.
This may not be the most elegant solution and won't strictly adhere to only storing 10 records at any given time, but you could store the row data as a list (if there is structure to the row data, you'd have to handle this structuring yourself or use user defined types). If you already have this list available to you when you write to it, you'd just truncate it to the latest 10 values before writing, otherwise you could wait until the next time a read is done on that list, truncate it to 10 records, then write that back to Cassandra.
If you're not so much concerned with how much data is stored, but rather are only interested in retrieving the last 10 results, then fromanator's solution (with or without a TTL depending on whether you care more about the size of the data or ensuring 10 results) is the best.

An Approach to Cassandra Data Model

Please note that I am first time using NoSQL and pretty much every concept is new in this NoSQL world, being from RDBMS for long time!!
In one of my heavy used applications, I want to use NoSQL for some part of the data and move out from MySQL where transactions/Relational model doesn't make sense. What I would get is, CAP [Availability and Partition Tolerance].
The present data model is simple as this
ID (integer) | ENTITY_ID (integer) | ENTITY_TYPE (String) | ENTITY_DATA (Text) | CREATED_ON (Date) | VERSION (interger)|
We can safely assume that this part of application is similar to Logging of the Activity!
I would like to move this to NoSQL as per my requirements and separate from Performance Oriented MySQL DB.
Cassandra says, everything in it is simple Map<Key,Value> type! Thinking in terms of Map level,
I can use ENTITY_ID|ENTITY_TYPE|ENTITY_APP as key and store the rest of the data in values!
After reading through User Defined Types in Cassandra, can I use UserDefinedType as value which essentially leverage as One Key and multiple values! Otherwise, Use it as normal column level without UserDefinedType! One idea is to use the same model for different applications across systems where it would be simple logging/activity data can be pushed to the same, since the key varies from application to application and within application each entity will be unique!
No application/business function to access this data without Key, or in simple terms no requirement to get data randomly!
References: http://www.ebaytechblog.com/2012/07/16/cassandra-data-modeling-best-practices-part-1/
Let me explain the cassandra data model a bit (or at least, a part of it). You create tables like so:
create table event(
id uuid,
timestamp timeuuid,
some_column text,
some_column2 list<text>,
some_column3 map<text, text>,
some_column4 map<text, text>,
primary key (id, timestamp .... );
Note the primary key. There's multiple columns specified. The first column is the partition key. All "rows" in a partition are stored together. Inside a partition, data is ordered by the second, then third, then fourth... keys in the primary key. These are called clustering keys. To query, you almost always hit a partition (by specifying equality in the where clause). Any further filters in your query are then done on the selected partition. If you don't specify a partition key, you make a cluster wide query, which may be slow or most likely, time out. After hitting the partition, you can filter with matches on subsequent keys in order, with a range query on the last clustering key specified in your query. Anyway, that's all about querying.
In terms of structure, you have a few column types. Some primitives like text, int, etc., but also three collections - sets, lists and maps. Yes, maps. UDTs are typically more useful when used in collections. e.g. A Person may have a map of addresses: map. You would typically store info in columns if you needed to query on it, or index on it, or you know each row will have those columns. You're also free to use a map column which would let you store "arbitrary" key-value data; which is what it seems you're looking to do.
One thing to watch out for... your primary key is unique per records. If you do another insert with the same pk, you won't get an error, it'll simply overwrite the existing data. Everything in cassandra is an upsert. And you won't be able to change the value of any column that's in the primary key for any row.
You mentioned querying is not a factor. However, if you do find yourself needing to do aggregations, you should check out Apache Spark, which works very well with Cassandra (and also supports relational data sources....so you should be able to aggregate data across mysql and cassandra for analytics).
Lastly, if your data is time series log data, cassandra is a very very good choice.

Cassandra or Hbase?

I have a requirement, where I want to store the following:
Mac Address // PKEY
TimeStamp // PKEY
LocationID
ownerName
Signal Strength
The insertion logic is as follows:
Store the above statistics for each active device (MacAddress) once every hour at each location (LocationID)
The entries are created at end of each hour, so the primary key will always be MAC+TimeStamp
There are no updates, only insertions
The queries which can be performed are as follows:
Give me all the entries for last 'N' hours Where MacAddress = "...."
Give me all the entries for last 'N' hours Where LocationID IN (locID1, locID2, ..);
Needless to say, there are billions of entries, and I want to use either HBASE or Cassandra. I've tried to explore, and it seems that Cassandra may not be correct choice.
The reasons for that is if I have the following in cassandra:
< < RowKey > MacAddress:TimeStamp > >
+ LocationID
+ OwnerName
+ Signal Strength
Both the queries will scan the whole database, right? Even if I add an index on LocationID, that is only going to help in the second query to some extent, because there is no index on timestamp (I believe that seaching on timestamp is not fast, as the MacAddress:TimeStamp composite Key would not allow us to search only on timestamp, and instead, a full scan would happen, is that correct?).
I'm stuck here big time, and any insights would really help, if we should opt HBase or Cassandra.
The right way to model this with Cassandra is to use a table partitioned by mac address, ordered by timestamp, and indexed on location id. See the Cassandra data model documentation, especially the section on clustering [predefined sorting]. None of your queries will require a full table scan.
You have to remember that NoSql instances like Cassandra allow horizontal scaling and make it a lot easier to shard the data. By developing a shard strategy (identifying shard key, etc) you could dramatically reduce the size of the data on a single instance and make queries (even when trying to query massive data sets) doable.
Either one would work for this query:
Give me all the entries for last 'N' hours Where MacAddress = "...."
In cassandra you would want to use an ordered partitioner so you can do easy scans. That way you would not have to scan the entire table. (I'm a little rusty on Cassandra).
In hbase it is always ordered by the rowkey so the scan becomes easy. You would just set a start and stop rowkey. Conceptually it would be:
scan.setStartRow(mac+":"+timestamp);
scan.setStopRow(mac+":"+endtimestamp);
And then it would only scan over the rows for the given mac address for the given time period--only a small subset of the data.
This query is much harder:
Give me all the entries for last 'N' hours Where LocationID IN
(locID1, locID2, ..);
Cassandra does have secondary indexes so it seems like it would be "easy" but I don't know how much data it would scan through. I haven't looked at Cassandra since it added secondary indexes.
In hbase you'd have to scan the entire table or create a second table. I would recommend creating a second table where the rowkey would be < location:timestamp > and you'd duplicate the data. Then you'd use that table to lookup the data by location using a scan and setting the start and end keys.

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