cassandra primary key column cannot be restricted - cassandra

I am using Cassandra for the first time in a web app and I got a query problem.
Here is my tab :
CREATE TABLE vote (
doodle_id uuid,
user_id uuid,
schedule_id uuid,
vote int,
PRIMARY KEY ((doodle_id), user_id, schedule_id)
);
On every request, I indicate my partition key, doodle_id.
For example I can make without any problems :
select * from vote where doodle_id = c4778a27-f2ca-4c96-8669-15dcbd5d34a7 and user_id = 97a7378a-e1bb-4586-ada1-177016405142;
But on the last request I made :
select * from vote where doodle_id = c4778a27-f2ca-4c96-8669-15dcbd5d34a7 and schedule_id = c37df0ad-f61d-463e-bdcc-a97586bea633;
I got the following error :
Bad Request: PRIMARY KEY column "schedule_id" cannot be restricted (preceding column "user_id" is either not restricted or by a non-EQ relation)
I'm new with Cassandra, but correct me if I'm wrong, in a composite primary key, the first part is the PARTITION KEY which is mandatory to allow Cassandra to know where to look for data.
Then the others parts are CLUSTERING KEY to sort data.
But I still don't get why my first request is working and not the second one ?
If anyone could help it will be a great pleasure.

In Cassandra, you should design your data model to suit your queries. Therefore the proper way to support your second query (queries by doodle_id and schedule_id, but not necessarilly with user_id), is to create a new table to handle that specific query. This table will be pretty much the same, except the PRIMARY KEY will be slightly different:
CREATE TABLE votebydoodleandschedule (
doodle_id uuid,
user_id uuid,
schedule_id uuid,
vote int,
PRIMARY KEY ((doodle_id), schedule_id, user_id)
);
Now this query will work:
SELECT * FROM votebydoodleandschedule
WHERE doodle_id = c4778a27-f2ca-4c96-8669-15dcbd5d34a7
AND schedule_id = c37df0ad-f61d-463e-bdcc-a97586bea633;
This gets you around having to specify ALLOW FILTERING. Relying on ALLOW FILTERING is never a good idea, and is certainly not something that you should do in a production cluster.

The clustering key is also used to find the columns within a given partition. With your model, you'll be able to query by:
doodle_id
doodle_id/user_id
doodle_id/user_id/schedule_id
user_id using ALLOW FILTERING
user_id/schedule_id using ALLOW FILTERING
You can see your primary key as a file path doodle_id#123/user_id#456/schedule_id#789 where all data is stored in the deepest folder (ie schedule_id#789). When you're querying you have to indicate the subfolder/subtree from where you start searching.
Your 2nd query doesn't work because of how columns are organized within partition. Cassandra can not get a continuous slice of columns in the partition because they are interleaved.
You should invert the primary key order (doodle_id, schedule_id, user_id) to be able to run your query.

Related

Delete whole row based on one of clusturing column value in cassandra

Schema I am using is as follows:
CREATE TABLE mytable(
id int,
name varchar,
PRIMARY KEY ((id),name)
) WITH CLUSTERING ORDER BY (name desc);
I wanted to delete records by following command :
DELETE FROM mytable WHERE name = 'Jhon';
But gived error
[Invalid query] message="Some partition key parts are missing: name"
As I looked for the reason, I came to know that only delete in not possible only with clustering columns.
Then I tried
DELETE FROM mytable WHERE id IN (SELECT id FROM mytable WHERE name='Jhon') AND name = 'Jhon';
But obviously it did not work.
I then tried with setting TTL to 0 for deleting row. But TTL can be set only for particular column, not the entire row.
What are feasible alternates to perform this operation?
In Cassandra, you need to design your data model to support your query. When you query your data, you always have to provide the partition key (otherwise the query would be inefficient).
The problem is that you want to query your data without a partition key. You would need to denormalize your data to support this kind or request. For example, you could add an additional table, such as:
CREATE TABLE id_by_name(
name varchar,
id int,
name varchar,
PRIMARY KEY (name, id)
) WITH CLUSTERING ORDER BY (id desc);
Then, you would be able to do your delete with a few queries:
SELECT ID from id_by_name WHERE name='John';
let's assume this returns 4.
DELETE FROM mytable WHERE id=4;
DELETE FROM id_by_name WHERE name='John' and id=4;
You could try to leverage materialized view (instead of maintaining yourself id_by_name) but materialized views are currently marked as unstable.
Now, there are still a few issues you need to address in your data model, in particular, how do you handle multiple user with the same name etc...
You cannot delete primary key if not complete. Primary key decisions are for sharding and load balancing. Cassandra can get complex if you are not used to thinking in columns.
I don't like the above answer, which though is good, complicates your solution. If you are thinking relational but getting lost in Cassandra I suggest using something that simplifies and maps your thinking to relational views.

Cassandra Update query | timestamp column as clustering key

I have a table in cassandra with following schema:
CREATE TABLE user_album_entity (
userId text,
albumId text,
updateDateTimestamp timestamp,
albumName text,
description text,
PRIMARY KEY ((userId), updateDateTimestamp)
);
The query required to get data would have a where userId = xxx order by updateTimestamp. Hence the schema had updateDateTimestamp.
Problem comes in updating the column of table.The query is: Update the album information for user where user id = xxx. But as per specs,for update query I would need the exact value of updateDateTimestamp which in normal world scenario, an application would never send.
What should be the answer to such problems since I believe this a very common use case where select query requires ordering on timestamp. Any help is much appreciated.
The problem is that your table structure allows the same album to have multiple records with the only difference being the timestamp (the clustering key).
Three possible solutions:
Remove the clustering key and sort your data at application level.
Remove the clustering key and add a Secondary Index to the timestamp field.
Remove the clustering key and create a Materialized View to perform the query.
If your usecase is such that each partition will contain exactly one row,
then you can model your table like:
CREATE TABLE user_album_entity (
userId text,
albumId text static,
updateDateTimestamp timestamp,
albumName text static,
description text static,
PRIMARY KEY ((userId), updateDateTimestamp)
);
modelling the table this way enables Update query to be done in following way:
UPDATE user_album_entity SET albumId = 'updatedAlbumId' WHERE userId = 'xyz'
Hope this helps.

Order by created date In Cassandra

i have problem with ordering data in cassandra Database.
this is my table structure:
CREATE TABLE posts (
id uuid,
created_at timestamp,
comment_enabled boolean,
content text,
enabled boolean,
meta map<text, text>,
post_type tinyint,
summary text,
title text,
updated_at timestamp,
url text,
user_id uuid,
PRIMARY KEY (id, created_at)
) WITH CLUSTERING ORDER BY (created_at DESC)
and when i run this query, i got the following message:
Query:
select * from posts order by created_at desc;
message:
ORDER BY is only supported when the partition key is restricted by an EQ or an IN.
Or this query return data without sorting:
select * from posts
There are couple of things you need to understand,
In your case the partition key is "id" and the clustering key is "created_at".
what that essentially means is any row will be stored in a partition based on the hash of "id"(depending on your hashing scheme by default it is Murmur3), now inside that partition the data is sorted based on your clustering key, in your case "created_at".
So if you query some data from that table by default the results which come are sorted based on your clustering order and the default sort order is the one which you specify while creating the table. However there is a gotcha there.
If yo do not specify the partition key in the WHERE clause, the actual order of the result set then becomes dependent on the hashed values of partition key(in your case id).
So in order to get the posts by that specific order. you have to specify the partition key like this
select * from posts WHERE id=1 order by created_at desc;
Note:
It is not necessary to specify the ORDER BY clause on a query if your desired sort direction (“ASCending/DESCending”) already matches the CLUSTERING ORDER in the table definition.
So essentially the above query is same as
select * from posts WHERE id=1
You can read more about this here http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/we-shall-have-order
The error message is pretty clear: you cannot ORDER BY without restricting the query with a WHERE clause. This is by design.
The data you get when running without a WHERE clause actually are ordered, not with your clustering key, but by applying the token function to your partition key. You can verify the order by issuing:
SELECT token(id), id, created_at, user_id FROM posts;
where the token function arguments exactly match your PARTITION KEY.
I suggest you to read this and this to understand what you can/can't do.

How to choose proper tables structure in cassandra?

Suppose I have table with the following structure
create table tasks (
user_id uuid,
name text,
task_id uuid,
description text,
primary key ((user_id), name, task_id)
);
It allows me to get all tasks for user sorted by name ascending. Also I added task_id to primary key to avoid upserts. The following query holds
select * from tasks where user_id = ?
as well as
select * from tasks where user_id = ? and name > ?
However, I cannot get task with specific task_id. For example, following query crashes
select * from tasks where user_id = ? and task_id = ?
with this error
PRIMARY KEY column "task_id" cannot be restricted as preceding column "name" is not restricted
It requires name column to be specified, but at the moment I have only task_id (from url, for example) and user_id (from session).
How should I create this table to perform both queries? Or I need create separate table for second case? What is the common pattern in this situation?
You could simply add one more redundant column taskId with same value as task_id and create a secondary index on taskId.
Then you can query user_id=? and tsakId=?
PRIMARY KEY column "task_id" cannot be restricted as preceding
column "name" is not restricted
You are seeing this error because CQL does not permit queries to skip primary key components.
How should I create this table to perform both queries? Or I need create separate table for second case? What is the common pattern in this situation?
As you suspect, the typical way that problems like this are solved with Cassandra is that an additional table is created for each query. In this case, recreating the table with a PRIMARY KEY designed to match your additional query pattern would simply look like this:
create table tasks_by_user_and_task (
user_id uuid,
name text,
task_id uuid,
description text,
primary key ((user_id), task_id)
);
You could simply add one more redundant column taskId with same value as task_id and create a secondary index on taskId.
While I am usually not a fan of using secondary indexes, in this case it may perform ok. Reason being, is that you would still be restricting your query by partition key, which would eliminate the need to examine additional nodes. The drawback (as Undefined_variable pointed out) is that you cannot create a secondary index on a primary key component, so you would need to duplicate that column (and apply the index to the non-primary key column) to get that solution to work.
It might be a good idea to model and test both solutions for performance.
If you have the extra disk space, the best method would be to replicate the data in a second table. You should avoid using secondary indexes in production. Your application would, of course, need to write to both these tables. But Cassandra is darn good at making that efficient.
create table tasks_by_name (
user_id uuid,
name text,
task_id uuid,
description text,
primary key ((user_id), name, task_id)
);
create table tasks_by_id (
user_id uuid,
name text,
task_id uuid,
description text,
primary key ((user_id), task_id)
);

Data modeling easy table in Cassandra not working

I have to design a web page where a group leader can invite people to join his/her group. My requirements are really simple.
No sending duplicate emails out, if person was already contacted.
Show the group leader a list of invites sorted by invite date in ascending order.
Seems easy. I created this table.
CREATE TABLE invites (
email_address text,
invite_date timeuuid,
PRIMARY KEY (email_address, invite_date)
) WITH CLUSTERING ORDER BY (invite_date ASC);
Problem 1: LWT no use with invite_date as a Cluster column.
I figured I'd use LWT to ensure email_address is unique, only to find out IF NOT EXISTS only seems to work on the whole PRIMARY KEY, so LWT in C* does not work for me.
Problem 2: I cannot get an ordered list of invites back to save me life even with invite_date as a Cluster column.
If I take invite_date out, I cannot issue an 'order by' in CQL. That said, having invite_date out of the PK let's me use LWT...
I can't even get a 2 column table to fulfill 2 easy requirements! Any help on data modeling design for this problem is much appreciated.
New Dec. 4, 2015:
Additional to business requirements, a technical requirement I have is:
I want to make sure I model this correctly in Cassandra, so that it allows me to use CQL's LIMIT and pagingState capabilities in the Java driver. This means, I cannot just read all the rows in, sort on Java side and return the results.
Problem 1:
I think that the easiest way to handle this might be to have two separate tables, one for the emails_in_group and one for invites_by_group. This will allow each query to be fulfilled independantly. The emails_in_group table would look something like this:
CREATE TABLE emails_in_group (
email_address text,
group_id text,
PRIMARY KEY (email_address , group_id));
Then this, combined with the table as defined in Problem 2 below could be updated using a conditional batch statement as shown here:
http://docs.datastax.com/en/cql/3.1/cql/cql_using/use-batch-static.html
Problem 2:
So the basic problem here is that as you have your data currently modeled each email_address value will be in it's own partition and then within that partition the invite_date will be ordered. #bydsky is right when he said that you need to add something like a group_id to your table and make it the partition key portion of your Primary Key. If you do this and then add invite_date as a cluster column to the partition key then all records for that group_id will be stored in the same partition and the Order By will work. Order By only works within the same partiton, not across partitions which is what you were asking it to do.
CREATE TABLE invites_by_group (
group_id text,
email_address text,
invite_date timestamp,
PRIMARY KEY (group_id, invite_date));
I think you should use group_id and email as primary key.
For ordering, maybe you could do it in your application.
CREATE TABLE invites ( group_id text,
email_address text,
invite_date timestamp,
PRIMARY KEY (group_id, email_address) );
For cassandra data modeling, it's a good start to watch DS220

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