This question is about NoSQL (for instance take cassandra).
Is it true that when you use a NoSQL database without data replication that you have no consistency concerns? Also not in the case of access concurrency?
What happens in case of a partition where the same row has been written in both partitions, possible multiple times? When the partition is gone, which written value is used?
Let's say you use N=5 W=3 R=3. This means you have guaranteed consistency right? How good is it to use this quorum? Having 3 nodes returning the data isn't that a big overhead?
Can you specify on a per query basis in cassandra whether you want the query to have guaranteed consistency? For instance you do an insert query and you want to enforce that all replica's complete the insert before the value is returned by a read operation?
If you have: employees{PK:employeeID, departmentId, employeeName, birthday} and department{PK:departmentID, departmentName} and you want to get the birthday of all employees with a specific department name. Two problems:
you can't ask for all the employees with a given birthday (because you can only query on the primary key)
You can't join the employee and the department column families because joins are impossible.
So what you can do is create a column family:
departmentBirthdays{PK:(departmentName, birthday), [employees-whos-birthday-it-is]}
In that case whenever an employee is fired/hired it has to be removed/added in the departmentBirthdays column family. Is this process something you have to do manually? So you have to manually create queries to update all redundant/denormalized data?
I'll answer this from the perspective of cassandra, coz that's what you seem to be looking at (hardly any two nosql stores are the same!).
For a single node, all operations are in sequence. Concurrency issues can be orthogonal though...your web client may have made a request, and then another, but due to network load, cassandra got the second one first. That may or may not be an issue. There are approaches around such problems, like immutable data. You can also leverage "lightweight transactions".
Cassandra uses last write wins to resolve conflicts. Based on you replication factor and consistency level for your query, this can work well.
Quurom for reads AND writes will give you consistency. There is an edge case..if the coordinator doesn't know a quorum node is down, it sends the write requests, then the write would complete when quorum is re-established. The client in this case would get a timeout and not a failure. The subsequent query may get the stale data, but any query after that will get latest data. This is an extreme edge case, and typically N=5, R=3, W3= will give you full consistency. Reading from three nodes isn't actually that much of an overhead. For a query with R=3, the client would make that request to the node it's connected to (the coordinator). The coordinator will query replicas in parallel (not sequenctially). It willmerge up the results with LWW to get the result (and issue read repairs etc. if needed). As the queries happen in parallel, the overhead is greatly reduced.
Yes.
This is a matter of data modelling. You describe one approach (though partitioning on birthday rather than dept might be better and result in more even distribution of partitions). Do you need the employee and department tables...are they needed for other queries? If not, maybe you just need one. If you denormalize, you'll need to maintain the data manually. In Cassandra 3.0, global indexes will allow you to query on an index without being inefficient (which is the case when using a secondary index without specifying the partition key today). Yes another option is to partition employeed by birthday and do two queries, and do the join in memory in the client. Cassandra queries hitting a partition are very fast, so doing two won't really be that expensive.
Related
I'm creating a sync program to periodically copy our Cassandra data into another database. The database I'm copying from only gets INSERTs - data is never UPDATEd or DELETEd. I would like to address Cassandra's eventual consistency model in two ways:
1 - Each sync scan overlaps the last by a certain time span. For example, if the scan happens every hour, then each scan looks an hour and a half backwards. The data contains a unique key, so reading the same record in more than one scan is not an issue.
2 - I use a Consistency level of ALL to ensure that I'm scanning all of the nodes on the cluster for the data.
Is ALL the best Consistency for this situation? I just need to see a record on any node, I don't care if it appears on any other nodes. But I don't want to miss any INSERTed records either. But I also don't want to experience timeouts or performance issues because Cassandra is waiting for multiple nodes to see that record.
To complicate this a bit more, this Cassandra network is made up of 6 clusters in different geographic locations. I am only querying one. My assumption is that the overlap mentioned in #1 will eventually catch up records that exist on other clusters.
The query I'm doing is like this:
SELECT ... FROM transactions WHERE userid=:userid AND transactiondate>:(lastscan-overlap)
Where userid is the partioning key and transactiondate is a clustering column. The list of userId's is sourced elsewhere.
I use a Consistency level of All to ensure that I'm scanning all of the nodes on the cluster for the data
So consistency ALL has more to do with the number of data replicas read than it does with the number of nodes contacted. If you have a replication factor (RF) of 3 and query a single row at ALL, then Cassandra will hash your partition key to figure out the three nodes responsible for that row, contact all 3 nodes, and wait for all 3 to respond.
I just need to see a record on one node
So I think you'd be fine with LOCAL_ONE, in this regard.
The only possible advantage of using ALL, is that it actually does help to enforce data consistency by triggering a read repair 100% of the time. So if eventual consistency is a concern, that's a "plus." But *_ONE is definitely faster.
The CL documentation talks a lot about 'stale data', but I am interested in 'new data'
In your case, I don't see stale data as a possibility, so you should be ok there. The issue that you would face instead, is in the event that one or more replicas failed during the write operation, querying at LOCAL_ONE may or may not get you the only replica that actually exists. So your data wouldn't be stale vs. new, it'd be exists vs. does not exist. One point I talk about in the linked answer, is that perhaps writing at a higher consistency level and reading at LOCAL_ONE might work for your use case.
A few years ago, I wrote an answer about the different consistency levels, which you might find helpful in this case:
If lower consistency level is good then why we need to have a higher consistency(QUORUM,ALL) level in Cassandra?
Cassandra is positioned as scalable and fast database.
Why , I mean from technical details, above goals cannot be accomplished with secondary indexes?
Cassandra does indeed have secondary indexes. But secondary index usage doesn't work well with distributed databases, and it's because each node only holds a subset of the overall dataset.
I previously wrote an answer which discussed the underlying details of secondary index queries:
How do secondary indexes work in Cassandra?
While it should help give you some understanding of what's going on, that answer is written from the context of first querying by a partition key. This is an important distinction, as secondary index usage within a partition should perform well.
The problem is when querying only by a secondary index, that Cassandra cannot guarantee all of your data will be able to be served by a single node. When this happens, Cassandra designates a node as a coordinator, which in turn queries all other nodes for the specified indexed values.
Essentially, instead of performing sequential reads from a single node, secondary index usage forces Cassandra to perform random reads from all nodes. Now you don't have just disk seek time, but also network time complicating things.
The recommendation for Cassandra modeling, is to duplicate your data into new tables to support the desired query. This adds in some other complications with keeping data in-sync. But (when done correctly) it ensures that your queries can indeed be served by a single node. That's a tradeoff you need to make when building your model. You can have convenience or performance, but not both.
So yes cassandra does have secondary indexes and aaron's explaination does a great job of explaining why.
You see many people trying to solve this issue by writing their data to multiple tables. This is done so they can be sure that the data they need to answer the query that would traditionally rely on a secondary index is on the same node.
Some of the recent iterations of cassandra have this 'built in' via materialized views. I've not really used them since 3.0.11 but they are promising. The problems i had at the time were primarily adding them to tables with existing data and they had a suprisingly large amount of overhead on write (increased latency).
I currently have a table set up in Cassandra that has either text, decimal or date type columns with a composite partition key of a business_date and an account_number. For queries to this table, I need to be able to support look-ups for a single account, or for a list of accounts, for a given date.
Example:
select x,y,z from my_table where business_date = '2019-04-10' and account_number IN ('AAA', 'BBB', 'CCC')
//Note: Both partition keys are provided for this query
I've been struggling to resolve performance issues related to accessing this data because I'm noticing latency patterns that I am having trouble trying to understand / explain.
In many scenarios, the same exact query can be run a total of three times in a short period by the client application. For these scenarios, I see that two out of three requests will have really bad response times (800 ms), and one of them will have a really fast one (50 ms). At first I thought this would be due to key or row caches, however, I'm not so sure since I believe that if this were true, the third request out of the three should always be the fastest, which isn't the case.
The second issue I believed I was facing was the actual data model itself. Although the queries are being submitted with all the partition keys being provided, since it's an IN clause, the results would be separate partitions and can be distributed across the cluster and so, this would be a bad access pattern. However, I see these latency problems when even single account queries are run. Additionally, I see queries that come with 15 - 20 accounts performing really well (under 50ms), so I'm not sure if the data model is actually an issue.
Cluster setup:
Datacenters: 2
Number of nodes per data center: 3
Keyspace Replication:local_dc = 2, remote_dc = 2
Java Driver set:
Load-balancing: DCAware with LatencyAware
Protocol: v3
Queries are still set up to use "IN" clauses instead of async individual queries
Read_consistency: LOCAL_ONE
Does anyone have any ideas / clues of what I should be focusing on in terms of really identifying the root cause of this issue?
the use of IN on the partition key is always the bad idea, even for composite partition keys. The value of partition key defines the location of your data in cluster, and different values of partition key will most probably put data onto different servers. In this case, coordinating node (that received the query) will need to contact nodes that hold the data, wait that these nodes will deliver results, and only after that, send you results back.
If you need to query several partition keys, then it will be faster if you issue individual queries asynchronously, and collect result on client side.
Also, please note that TokenAware policy works best when you use PreparedStatement - in this case, driver is able to extract value of partition key, and find what server holds data for it.
I'm current using DB2 and planning to use cassandra because as i know cassandra have a read performance greater than RDBMS.
May be this is a stupid question but I have experiment that compare read performance between DB2 and Cassandra.
Testing with 5 million records and same table schema.
With query SELECT * FROM customer. DB2 using 25-30s and Cassandra using 40-50s.
But query with where condition SELECT * FROM customer WHERE cusId IN (100,200,300,400,500) DB2 using 2-3s and Cassandra using 3-5ms.
Why Cassandra faster than DB2 with where condition? So i can't prove which database is greater with SELECT * FROM customer right?
FYI.
Cassandra: RF=3 and CL=1 with 3 nodes each node run on 3 computers (VM-Ubuntu)
DB2: Run on windows
Table schema:
cusId int PRIMARY KEY, cusName varchar
If you look at the types of problems that Cassandra is good at solving, then the reasons behind why unbound ("Select All") queries suck become quite apparent.
Cassandra was designed to be a distributed data base. In many Cassandra storage patterns, the number of nodes is greater than the replication factor (I.E., not all nodes contain all of the data). Therefore, limiting the number of network hops becomes essential to modeling high-performing queries. Cassandra performs very well with specific queries (which utilize the partition/clustering key structure), because it can quickly locate the node primarily responsible for the data.
Unbound queries (A.K.A. multi-key queries) incur the extra network time because a coordinator node is required. So one node acts as the coordinator, queries all other nodes, collates data, and returns the result set. Specifying a WHERE clause (with at least a partition key) and while using a "Token Aware" load balancing policy, performs well for two reasons:
A coordinator node is not required.
The node primarily responsible for the range is queried, returning the result set in a single netowrk hop.
tl;dr;
Querying Cassandra with an unbound query, causes it to incur a lot of extra processing and network time that it normally wouldn't have to do, had the query been specified with a WHERE clause.
Even as a troublesome query like a no-condition range query, 40-50s is pretty extreme for C*. Is the coordinator hitting GCs with the coordination? Can you include code used for your test?
When you make a select * vs millions of records, it wont fetch them all at once, it will grab the fetchSize at a time. If your just iterating through this, the iterator will actually block even if you used executeAsync initially. This means that every 10k (default) records it will issue a new query that you will block on. The serialized nature of this will take time just from a network perspective. http://docs.datastax.com/en/developer/java-driver/3.1/manual/async/#async-paging explains how to do it in a non-blocking way. You can use this to to kick off the next page fetch while processing the current which would help.
Decreasing the limit or fetch size could also help, since the coordinator may walk token ranges (parallelism is possible here but its heuristic is not perfect) one at a time until it has read enough. If it has to walk too many nodes to respond it will be slow, this is why empty tables can be very slow to do a select * on, it may serially walk every replica set. With 256 vnodes this can be very bad.
I need a NoSQL database that will run on Windows Azure that works well for the following parameters. Right now Azure Table Storage, HBase and Cassandra seems to be the most promising options.
1 billion entities
up to 100 reads per second, though caching will mostly make it much less
around 10 - 50 writes per second
Strong consistency would be a plus, so perhaps HBase would be better than Cassandra in that regard.
Querying will often be done on a secondary in-memory database with various indexes in addition to ElasticSearch or Windows Azure Search for fulltext search and perhaps some filtering.
Azure Table Storage looks like it could be nice, but from what I can tell, the big difference between Azure Table Storage and HBase is that HBase supports updating and reading values for a single property instead of the whole entity at once. I guess there must be some disadvantages to HBase however, but I'm not sure what they would be in this case.
I also think crate.io looks like it could be interesting, but I wonder if there might be unforseen problems.
Anyone have any other ideas of the advantages and disadvantages of the different databases in this case, and if any of them are really unsuited for some reason?
I currently work with Cassandra and I might help with a few pros and cons.
Requirements
Cassandra can easily handle those 3 requirements. It was designed to have fast reads and writes. In fact, Cassandra is blazing fast with writes, mostly because you can write without doing a read.
Also, Cassandra keeps some of its data in memory, so you could even avoid the secondary database.
Consistency
In Cassandra you choose the consistency in each query you make, therefore you can have consistent data if you want to. Normally you use:
ONE - Only one node has to get or accept the change. This means fast reads/writes, but low consistency (You can have other machine delivering the older information while consistency was not achieved).
QUORUM - 51% of your nodes must get or accept the change. This means not as fast reads and writes, but you get FULL consistency IF you use it in BOTH reads and writes. That's because if more than half of your nodes have your data after you inserted/updated/deleted, then, when reading from more than half your nodes, at least one node will have the most recent information, which would be the one to be delivered.
Both this options are the ones recommended because they avoid single points of failure. If all machines had to accept, if one node was down or busy, you wouldn't be able to query.
Pros
Cassandra is the solution for performance, linear scalability and avoid single points of failure (You can have machines down, the others will take the work). And it does most of its management work automatically. You don't need to manage the data distribution, replication, etc.
Cons
The downsides of Cassandra are in the modeling and queries.
With a relational database you model around the entities and the relationships between them. Normally you don't really care about what queries will be made and you work to normalize it.
With Cassandra the strategy is different. You model the tables to serve the queries. And that happens because you can't join and you can't filter the data any way you want (only by its primary key).
So if you have a database for a company with grocery stores and you want to make a query that returns all products of a certain store (Ex.: New York City), and another query to return all products of a certain department (Ex.: Computers), you would have two tables "ProductsByStore" and "ProductsByDepartment" with the same data, but organized differently to serve the query.
Materialized Views can help with this, avoiding the need to change in multiple tables, but it is to show how things work differently with Cassandra.
Denormalization is also common in Cassandra for the same reason: Performance.