Cassandra design approach for my sample use case - cassandra

Question

Im learning cassandra from past few days. Tried to create a data model for the following use case..
"Each Zipcode in US has a list of stores sorted based on a defined rank"
"Each store/warehouse has millions of SKUs and the inventory is tracked"
"If I search using a zipcode and SKU, it should return the best possible 100 stores
with inventory, based on the rank"
Assume store count is 1000+ and sku count is in millions
Design tried
One table with
ZipCode
Rank
StoreID
primary key (ZipCode, Rank)
Another table with
Sku
Store
Inventory
Primary Key (Sku, Store)
Now, if I want to search top 100 stores for each ZipCode, SKU
combination..
I have to search in table 1 for the top 100 stores and
then pull inventory of each store from the second table.
Since the SKU count is in millions and store count is in 1000+, m not
sure if we can store all this in one table and have zipcode_sku as row
key and stores and inventory stored as wide row sorted by rank
Am I thinking right? What could be other possible data models for this use case?
UPDATE: Data Loader Code (as mentioned in below comments)
println "Loading data started.."
(1..1000000).each { // SKUs
sku = it.toString()
(1..42000).each { // Zip Codes
zipcode = it.toString().padLeft(5,"0")
(1..1500).each { // Stores
store = it.toString()
int inventory = Math.abs(new Random().nextInt() % 10000) + 1
session.execute("INSERT INTO ritz.rankedStoreByZipcodeAndSku(sku, zipcode, store, store_rank, inventory) " +
"VALUES('$sku','$zipcode','$store',$it,$inventory);")
}
}
}
println "Data Loaded"

Answer 1

Cassandra is a Columnar database, so you can have wide rows that you usually want to represent each kind of query you want to make. In this case
CREATE TABLE storeByZipcodeAndSku (
sku text,
zipcode int,
store text,
store_rank int,
inventory int,
PRIMARY KEY ((sku, zipcode), store)
);
This way the row key is sku + zipcode so its a very fast lookup and you can store up to 2 billion stores in it. When you update your inventory also update this table. To get the top 100 you just pull down all of them and sort (1000's is not many) but if this operation is super common and you need it faster you can instead use
CREATE TABLE rankedStoreByZipcodeAndSku (
...
PRIMARY KEY ((sku, zipcode), store_rank)
) WITH CLUSTERING ORDER BY (store_rank ASC);
to have it sorted for you automatically and you just grab the top 100. Then when you update it you will want to use the lightweight transactions to move things around atomically.

Answer 2

It sounds like you want to get a list of StoreID's from the first table based on ZipCode, and a list of StoreID's from the second table based on Sku, and then do a join. Since Cassandra is a simple key value store, it doesn't do join's. So you would have to either write code in your client to do the two queries and manually do the join, or connect Cassandra to spark which has a join function.
As you say, trying to denormalize the two tables into one table so that you could do this as one query might result in a very large and difficult to maintain table. If this is the only query pattern you will have, then that might be worth it, but if this is a general inventory system with a lot of different query patterns, then it might be too inflexible.
The other option would be to use an RDBMS instead of Cassandra, and then joins are super easy.