I started reading Cassandra the definitive guide, which is based on Cassandra 0.7. Now, I'm trying to experiment with Cassandra 2.1.5 and it seems that there's a lot of differences which is really confusing.
For example, I see that in 0.7 version CQL did not exist. On the other hand, data model seems quite different. You can now define a schema with CQL, while in version 0.7 there was no schema.
Can anyone shortly explain the differences, especially about the data model?
I understand that in 0.7 version the idea was about different length rows, that is, rows that have different number of columns. But now I understand that each column is actually a field that contains a number of parameters, so you can have as much fields as you want within the same row (same key).
Can someone summarize the differences? Maybe I did not understand correctly.
An important point to consider, is that the underlying storage model remains the same. CQL is simply an abstraction layer on top of that model, to make it easier to work with and model your data. DataStax MVP John Berryman has a great article on this: Understanding How CQL3 Maps to Cassandra’s Internal Data Structure
In this article, Berryman observes that:
The value of the CQL primary key is used internally as the row key (which in the new CQL paradigm is being called a “partition key”).
The names of the non-primary key CQL fields are used internally as columns names. The values of the non-primary key CQL fields are then internally stored as the corresponding column values.
Additionally, he outlines the benefits of using the CQL-based approach:
It provides fast look-up by partition key and efficient scans and slices by cluster key.
It groups together related data as CQL rows. This means that you can do in one query what would otherwise take multiple queries into different column families.
It allows for individual fields to be added, modified, and deleted independently.
It is strictly better than the old Cassandra paradigm. Proof: you can coerce CQL Tables to behave exactly like old-style Cassandra ColumnFamilies. (See the examples here.)
It extends easily to implementation of sets lists and maps (which are super ugly if you’re working directly in old cassandra) — but that’s for another blog post.
The CQL protocol allows for asynchronous communication as compared with the synchronous, call-response communication required by Thrift. As a result, CQL is capable of being much faster and less resource intensive than Thrift – especially when using single threaded clients.
can have as much fields as you want within the same row (same key).
Actually, there is a hard limit of about 2 billion columns per partition (rowkey).
Related
I am new to Cassandra and coming from relational background. I learned Cassandra does not support JOINs hence no concept of foreign keys. Suppose I have two tables:
Users
id
name
Cities
id
name
In RDBMS world I should pass city_id into users table. Since there is no concept of joins and you are allowed to duplicate data, is it still work passing city_id into users table while I can create a table users_by_cities?
The main Cassandra concept is that you design tables based off of your queries (as writes to the table have no restrictions). The design is based off of the query filters. An application that queries a table by some ID is somewhat unnatural as the CITY_ID could be any value and typically is unknown (unless you ran a prior query to get it). Something more natural may be CITY_NAME. Anyway, assuming there are no indexes on the table (which are mere tables themselves), there are rules in Cassandra regarding the filters you provide and the table design, mainly that, at a minimum, one of the filters MUST be the partition key. The partition key helps direct cassandra to the correct node for the data (which is how the reads are optimized). If none of your filters are the partition key, you'll get an error (unless you use ALLOW FILTERING, which is a no-no). The other filters, if there are any, must be the clustering columns (you can't have a filter that is neither the partition key nor the clustering columns - again, unless you use ALLOW FILTERING).
These restrictions, coming from the RDBMS world, are unnatural and hard to adjust to, and because of them, you may have to duplicate data into very similar structures (maybe the only difference is the partition keys and clustering columns). For the most part, it is up to the application to manipulate each structure when changes occur, and the application must know which table to query based off of the filters provided. All of these are considered painful coming from a relational world (where you can do whatever you want to one structure). These "constraints" need to be weighed against the reasons why you chose Cassandra for your storage engine.
Hope this helps.
-Jim
I can't find much on the subject of dummy partition keys in Cassandra, but what I can find tends to side with the idea that you should avoid them altogether. By dummy, I mean a column whose only purpose is to contain the same value for all rows, thereby putting all data on 1 node and giving the lowest possible cardinality. For example:
dummy | id | name
-------------------------
0 | 01 | 'Oliver'
0 | 02 | 'James'
0 | 03 | 'Nicholls'
The two main points in regards to why you should avoid dummy partition keys are:
1) You end up with data "hot-spots". There is a lot of data stored on 1 node so there's more traffic around that node and you have poor distribution around the cluster.
2) Partition space is finite. If you put all data on one partition, it will eventually be incapable of storing any more data.
I can understand these points and I agree that you definitely want to avoid those situations, so I put this idea out of my mind and tried to think of a good partition key for my table. The table in question stores sites and there are two common ways that table gets queried in our system. Either a single site is requested or all sites are requested.
This puts me in a bit of an awkward situation, because the table is either queried on nothing or the site ID, and making a unique field the partition key would give me very high cardinality and high latency on queries that request all sites.
So I decided that I'd just choose an arbitrary field that would give relatively low cardinality, even though it doesn't reflect how the data will actually be queried, just because it's better than having a cardinality that is either excessively high or excessively low. This approach also has problems though.
I could partition my data on column x, but we have numerous clients, all of whom use our system differently, so x for 1 client could give the results I'm after, but could give awful results for another.
At this point I'm running out of options. I need a field in my table that will be consistent for all clients, however this field doesn't exist, so I'm now considering having a new field that will contain a random number from 1-3 and then partitioning on that field, which is essentially just a dummy field. The only difference is that I want to randomise the values a little bit as to avoid hot-spots and unbounded row growth.
I know this is a data-modelling question and it varies from system to system, and of course there are going to be situations where you have to choose the lesser of two evils (there is no perfect solution), but what I'm really focussed on with this question is:
Are dummy partition keys something that should outright never be a consideration in Cassandra, or are there situations in which they're seen as acceptable? If you think the former, then how would you approach this situation?
I can't find much on the subject of dummy partition keys in Cassandra, but what I can find tends to side with the idea that you should avoid them altogether.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that your search has yielded my article We Shall Have Order!, where I made my position on the use of "dummy" partition keys quite clear. Bearing that in mind, I'll try to provide some alternate solutions.
I see two potential problems to solve here. The first:
I need a field in my table that will be consistent for all clients, however this field doesn't exist
Typically this is solved by duplicating your data into another query table. That's the best way to serve multiple, varying query patterns. If you have one client (service?) that needs to query that table by site id, then you could have that table duplicated into a table called sites_by_id.
CREATE TABLE sites_by_id (
id BIGINT,
name TEXT,
PRIMARY KEY (id));
The other problem is this query pattern:
all sites are requested
Another common Cassandra anti-pattern is that of unbound SELECTs (SELECT query without a WHERE clause). I am sure you understand why these are bad, as they require all nodes/partitions to be read for completion (which is probably why you are looking into a "dummy" key). But as the table supporting these types of queries increases in size, they will only get slower and slower over time...regardless of whether you execute an unbound SELECT or use a "dummy" key.
The solution here is to perform a re-examination of your data model, and business requirements. Perhaps your data can be split up into sites by region or country? Maybe your client really only needs the sites that have been updated for this year? Obtaining some more details on the client's query requirements may help you find a good partitioning key for them to use. Otherwise, if they really do need all of them all of the time, then doanduyhai's suggestion of using Spark will better fit your use case.
or all sites are requested
So basically you have a full table scan scenario. Isn't Apache Spark over Cassandra a better fit for this use-case ? I suspect it's an analytics use-case, isn't it ?
As far as I understand, you want to access a single site by its id, in which case lookup by partition key is ideal. The other use-case which requires to fetch all the sites is best suited with Spark
We're investigating options to store and read a lot of immutable data (events) and I'd like some feedback on whether Cassandra would be a good fit.
Requirements:
We need to store about 10 events per seconds (but the rate will increase). Each event is small, about 1 Kb.
A really important requirement is that we need to be able to replay all events in order. For us it would be fine to read all data in insertion order (like a table scan) so an explicit sort might not be necessary.
Querying the data in any other way is not a prime concern and since Cassandra is a schema db I don't suppose it's possible when the events come in many different forms? Would Cassandra be a good fit for this? If so is there something one should be aware of?
I've had the exact same requirements for a "project" (rather a tool) a year ago, and I used Cassandra and I didn't regret. In general it fits very well. You can fit quite a lot of data in a Cassandra cluster and the performance is impressive (although you might need tweaking) and the natural ordering is a nice thing to have.
Rather than expressing the benefits of using it, I'll rather concentrate on possible pitfalls you might not consider before starting.
You have to think about your schema. The data is naturally ordered within one row by the clustering key, in your case it will be the timestamp. However, you cannot order data between different rows. They might be ordered after the query, but it is not guaranteed in any way so don't think about it. There was some kind of way to write a query before 2.1 I believe (using order by and disabling paging and allowing filtering) but that introduced bad performance and I don't think it is even possible now. So you should order data between rows on your querying side.
This might be an issue if you have multiple variable types (such as temperature and pressure) that have to be replayed at the same time, and you put them in different rows. You have to get those rows with different variable types, then do your resorting on the querying side. Another way to do it is to put all variable types in one row, but than filtering for only a subset is an issue to solve.
Rowlength is limited to 2 billion elements, and although that seems a lot, it really is not unreachable with time series data. Especially because you don't want to get near those two billions, keep it lower in hundreds of millions maximum. If you put some parameter on which you will split the rows (some increasing index or rounding by day/month/year) you will have to implement that in your query logic as well.
Experiment with your queries first on a dummy example. You cannot arbitrarily use <, > or = in queries. There are specific rules in SQL with filtering, or using the WHERE clause..
All in all these things might seem important, but they are really not too much of a hassle when you get to know Cassandra a bit. I'm underlining them just to give you a heads up. If something is not logical at first just fall back to understanding why it is like that and the whole theory about data distribution and the ring topology.
Don't expect too much from the collections within the columns, their length is limited to ~65000 elements.
Don't fall into the misconception that batched statements are faster (this one is a classic :) )
Based on the requirements you expressed, Cassandra could be a good fit as it's a write-optimized data store. Timeseries are quite a common pattern and you can define a clustering order, for example, on the timestamp of the events in order to retrieve all the events in time order. I've found this article on Datastax Academy very useful when wanted to learn about time series.
Variable data structure it's not a problem: you can store the data in a BLOB, then parse it internally from your application (i.e. store it as JSON and read it in your model), or you could even store the data in a map, although collections in Cassandra have some caveats that it's good to be aware of. Here you can find docs about collections in Cassandra 2.0/2.1.
Cassandra is quite different from a SQL database, and although CQL has some similarities there are fundamental differences in usage patterns. It's very important to know how Cassandra works and how to model your data in order to pursue efficiency - a great article from Datastax explains the basics of data modelling.
In a nutshell: Cassandra may be a good fit for you, but before using it take some time to understand its internals as it could be a bad beast if you use it poorly.
I have a 40 column RDBMS table which I am porting to Cassandra.
Using the estimator at http://docs.datastax.com/en/cassandra/2.1/cassandra/planning/architecturePlanningUserData_t.html
I created a excel sheet with column names, data types, size of each column etc.
The Cassandra specific overhead for each RDBMS row is a whopping 1KB when the actual data is only 192 bytes.
Since the overheads are proportional to number of columns, I thought it would be much better if I just create a UDT for the fields that are not part of the primary key. That way, I would incur the column overhead only once.
Also, I don't intend to run queries on inner fields of the UDT. Even if I did want that, Cassandra has very limited querying features that work on non PK fields.
Is this a good strategy to adopt? Are there any pitfalls? Are all these overheads easily eliminated by compression or some other internal operation?
On the surface, this isn't a bad idea at all. You are essentially abstracting your data by another level, but in a way that it is still manageable to meet your needs. It's actually good thinking.
I have a 40 column RDBMS table
This part slightly worries me. Essentially, you'd be creating a UDT with 40 properties. Not a huge deal in and of itself. Cassandra should handle that just fine.
But while you may not be querying on the inner fields of the UDT, you need to ask yourself how often you plan to update them. Cassandra stores UDTs as "frozen" types in a single column. This is important to understand for two reasons:
You cannot read a single property of a UDT without reading all properties of the UDT.
Likewise, you cannot update a single property in a UDT without rewriting all of them, either.
So you should keep that in mind while designing your application. As long as you won't be writing frequent updates to individual properties of the UDT, this should be a good solution for you.
We have some entity uniquely identified by generated UUID. We need to support find by name query. Also we need to support sorting to be by name.
We know that there will be no more than 1000 of entities of that type which can perfectly fit in one row. Is it viable idea to hardcode primary key, use name as clustering key and id as clustering key there to satisfy uniqueness. Lets say we need school entity. Here is example:
CREATE TABLE school (
constant text,
name text,
id uuid,
description text,
location text,
PRIMARY KEY ((constant), name, id)
);
Initial state would be give me all schools and then filtering by exact name will happen. Our reasoning behind this was to place all schools in single row for fast access, have name as clustering column for filtering and have id as clustering column to guaranty uniqueness. We can use constant = school as known hardcoded value to access this row.
What I like about this solution is that all values are in one row and we get fast reads. Also we can solve sorting easy by clustering column. What I do not like is hardcoded value for constant which seams odd. We could use name as PK but then we would have 1000 records spread across couple of partitions, probably find all without name would be slower and would not be sorted.
Question 1
Is this viable solution and are there any problems with it which we do not see? I did not see any example on Cassandra data modelling with hardcoded primary key probably for the reason so we are doubting this solution.
Question 2
Name is editable field, it will probably be changed rarely (someone can make typo or school can change name) but it can change. What is best way to achieve this? Delete insert inside batch (LTE can be applied to same row with conditional clause)?
Yes this is a good approach for such a small dataset. Just because Cassandra can partition large datasets across multiple nodes does not mean that you need to use that ability for every table. By using a constant for the partition key, you are telling Cassandra that you want the data to be stored on one node where you can access it quickly and in sorted order. Relational databases act on data in a single node all the time, so this is really not such an unusual thing to do.
For safety you will probably want to use a replication factor higher than one so that there are at least two copies of the single partition. In that way you will not lose access to the data if the one node where it is stored went down.
This approach could cause problems if you expect to have a lot of clients (i.e. thousands of clients) frequently reading and writing to this table, since it could become a hot spot. With only 1000 records you can probably keep all the rows cached in memory by setting the table to cache all keys and rows.
You probably won't find a lot of examples where this is done because people move to Cassandra for the support of large datasets where they want the scalability that comes from using multiple partitions. So examples are geared towards that.
Is this viable solution and are there any problems with it which we do not see? I did not see any example on Cassandra data modelling with hardcoded primary key probably for the reason so we are doubting this solution.
I briefly addressed this type of modeling solution earlier this year in my article: We Shall Have Order! This is what is known as a "dummy key," where each row has the same partition key. This is a shortcut that allows you to easily order all of your rows (on an unbound SELECT *) by clustering column(s).
Problems with this solution:
Cassandra allows a maximum of 2 billion column values per partition key. When using a dummy partition key, you will approach this limit with each value that you add.
Your data will all be stored in the same partition, which will create a "hot spot" (large groupings of data) in your cluster. This means that your data model will immediately void one of Cassandra's main benefits...data distribution. This will also complicate load balancing (the same nodes and ranges will keep serving all of your requests).
I can see that your model is designed around a SELECT * query. Cassandra works best when you can give it specific keys to query by. Unbound SELECT * queries (queries without WHERE clauses) are not a good idea to be doing with Cassandra, as they can lead to timeouts (as your data grows).
From reading through your question, I know that you're going to say that you're only using it for 1000 rows. That your dataset won't ever grow much beyond those 1000 rows, so you won't hit any of the roadblocks that I have mentioned.
So then I have to wonder, why are you using Cassandra? As a Cassandra MVP, that's a question I don't ask often. But you don't have an especially large data set (which is what Cassandra is designed to work with). Relying on that fact as a reason to use a product incorrectly is not really the best solution.
Honestly, I am going to recommend that you save yourself some complexity, and use a RDBMS instead. That will fit your use case significantly better than Cassandra will. Then you can update and order by whatever fields you wish.