Cassandra Query for a Specific Node - cassandra

I am using cassandra 1.2.15 cluster with 4 number of nodes and having a keyspace with a replication of 2 in Simple Network Topology. And I am using Murmur3Partitioner. I have used default configurations that are available in the yaml file. First node is the seed node, other 3 nodes pointed the first node as seed node.
First node yaml configuration is
initial_token: left empty
num_tokens: 256
auto_bootstrap: false
Other 3 nodes yaml configuration is
initial_token: left empty
num_tokens: 256
auto_bootstrap: true
I have three questions, My main question is Question1,
Question 1:
I need to query a specific node on the cluster. (ie) In a four node cluster I need to make a query to select all the rows in a column family for the node 2 alone.Is it possible? If yes how to proceed?
Question 2:
Whether my yaml configuration is correct or not for the above approach?
Question 3:
Whether this configuration will make any trouble in future, if I add two nodes in the cluster?

Q1 I need to query a specific node on the cluster. (ie) In a four node cluster I need to make a query to select all the rows in a column family for the node 2 alone.Is it possible? If yes how to proceed?
Nope, not possible. What you can do is query a specific datacenter using the LOCAL_QUORUM or EACH_QUORUM consistency levels. Or you can connect to a specific node and query the system KS which is specific to each node (by specifying the address in either cqlsh or your driver). There are some times where this can be useful, but it's not what you're after.
Q2 Whether my yaml configuration is correct or not for the above approach?
In 1.2 I think it might be a better idea to populate the tokens on your own for your initial nodes rather than leaving that to C*.
As for auto_bootstrap, false is the right choice for a fresh cluster node:
This setting has been removed from default configuration. It makes new (non-seed)
nodes automatically migrate the right data to themselves. When initializing a
fresh cluster with no data, add auto_bootstrap: false.
Q3 Whether this configuration will make any trouble in future, if I add two nodes in the cluster?
I'd advice you to move away from simple network topology simply because it complicates the process of expanding to multiple data centres. Another thin to remember is to enable auto-bootstrap for your new nodes and it should work quite nicely with v-nodes.

Related

Add nodes to existing Cassandra cluster

We currently have a 2 node Cassandra cluster. We want to add 4 more nodes to the cluster, using the rack feature. The future topology will be:
node-01 (Rack1)
node-02 (Rack1)
node-03 (Rack2)
node-04 (Rack2)
node-05 (Rack3)
node-06 (Rack3)
We want to use different racks, but the same DC.
But for now we use SimpleStrategy and replication factor is 1 for all keyspaces. My plan to switch from a 2 to a 6 node cluster is shown below:
Change Endpoint snitch to GossipingPropetyFileSnitch.
Alter keyspace to NetworkTopologyStrategy...with replication_factor 'datacenter1': '3'.
According to the docs, when we add a new DC to an existing cluster, we must alter system keyspaces, too. But in our case, we change only the snitch and keyspace strategy, not the Datacenter. Or should I change the system keyspaces strategy and replication factor too, in the case of adding more nodes and changing the snitch?
First, I would change the endpoint_snitch to GossipingPropertyFileSnitch on one node and restart it. You need to make sure that approach works, first. Typically, you cannot (easily) change the logical datacenter or rack names on a running cluster. Which technically you're not doing that, but SimpleStrategy may do some things under the hood to abstract datacenter/rack awareness, so it's a good idea to test it.
If it works, make the change and restart the other node, as well. If it doesn't work, you may need to add 6 new nodes (instead of 4) and decommission the existing 2 nodes.
Or should I change the system keyspaces strategy and replication factor too?
Yes, you should set the same keyspace replication definition on the following keyspaces: system_auth, system_traces, and system_distributed.
Consider this situation: If one of your 2 nodes crashes, you won't be able to log in as the users assigned to that node via the system_auth table. So it is very important to ensure that system_auth is replicated appropriately.
I wrote a post on this some time ago (updated in 2018): Replication Factor to use for system_auth
Also, I recommend the same approach on system_traces and system_distributed, as future node adds/replacements/repairs may fail if valid token ranges for those keyspaces cannot be located. Basically, using the same approach on them prevents potential problems in the future.
Edit 20200527:
Do I need to launch the nodetool cleanup on old cluster nodes after the snitch and keyspace topology changes? According to docs "yes," but only on old nodes?
You will need to run it on every node, except for the very last one added. The last node is the only node guaranteed to only have data which match its token range assignments.
"Why?" you may ask. Consider the total percentage ownership as the cluster incrementally grows from 2 nodes to 6. If you bump the RF from 1 to 2 (run a repair), and then from 2 to 3 and add the first node, you have a cluster with 3 nodes and 3 replicas. Each node then has 100% data ownership.
That ownership percentage gradually decreases as each node is added, down to 50% when the 6th and final node is added. But even though all nodes will have ownership of 50% of the token ranges:
The first 3 nodes will still actually have 100% of the data set, accounting for an extra 50% of the data that they should.
The fourth node will still have an extra 25% (3/4 minus 1/2 or 50%).
The fifth node will still have an extra 10% (3/5 minus 1/2).
Therefore, the sixth and final node is the only one which will not contain any more data than it is responsible for.

Added new nodes to cassandra cluster and data is missing

I have added new 4 nodes to existing 4 nodes cluster. Now some data are missing on cluster.
What can be the reason for it? what can I do for resolve it?
Data missing keyspace RF is 1 when I was adding to the cluster. It can be a issue?
Note: Once I added new nodes to cluster executed repair command to all nodes
You really shouldn't be running a RF of 1.
I imagine that if you added them all in a short timeframe with a low RF that the VNodes got shuffled from one node to another without settling. I'm suprised a full repair didn't do anything.
You might check the HDDs of the original nodes to see if the repair didn't delete the old data. If it's still there you may be able to remove the new nodes (temporarily) and then add each node back in 1 by 1 while repairing.
Edit: additionally probably use an odd number of nodes.

Cassandra seed values in a three node datacenter

We are deploying our application to production this month and our stack will include a 3 node, single datacenter Cassandra version 1.2 cluster. In anticipation of this, we have been getting our initial Cassandra.yaml settings worked out. While doing this I ran into a interesting situation for which I haven't been able to find an answer.
This has to do with setting the -seeds parameter in each of the nodes Cassandra.yaml files. All of the reading I've done say it is best practice to:
Have at least 2 seeds per datacenter. This makes sense so that one of the nodes can come down and other nodes can be seeded by the second seed.
These two seeds should be the same for all (in our case 3) nodes.
In the deployment I tested this on, I started out with all three nodes having a single seed, node 1's IP address. My intention was to change the seeds of all three nodes to the IP address of node1 and node2. First I did node 3 by:
decommissioning the node.
Shutting down Cassandra.
changing the -seeds value to ip_node1,ip_node2
starting up Cassandra.
running nodetool status to ensure the node was added back to the cluster.
Next I did node 2, following the exact same steps I did for node 3. But something unexpected happened. When I restarted Cassandra on node 2, it did not join the existing ring. Instead it started its own single node ring. It seems pretty obvious that of the two seed parameters I passed it, it used its own IP address and thus believed it was the first node in a new ring.
I was surprised Cassandra didn't select the seed argument of the other seed value I passed it (node 2's). The only way I could get it to join the existing datacenter was to set its seeds to one or both of the other nodes in the cluster.
An obvious work around to this is to configure each of my three nodes seeds value to the IP addresses of the other two nodes in the cluster. But since several sources have suggested this isn't a "Best Practice" I thought I'd ask how this should be handled. So my question is:
Is it normal for Cassandra to always use its own IP address as a seed if it is in the seed list?
Is configuring the cluster the way I've suggested, which goes against best practice a huge issue?
This might not be the solution to your question but did you compare all your cassandra.yaml files?
They should all be the same, apart from things like listen_address.
Is it possible you might have had a whitespace or typo in the cluster name also?
I just thought I'd mention it as something good to check.

cassandra cluster, 1 table, how to plan forward

I am planning to create an application that will use just 1 cassandra table. Replication factor will be probably 2 or 3. I might start initially with 2 cassandra server and then keep adding servers as needed. But I am not sure if I need to pre-plan anything so that the table is distributed uniformly when I add more servers. Are there any best practices or things I need to be aware? I read about tokens , http://www.datastax.com/docs/1.1/initialize/token_generation , but I am not sure what I need to do.
I suppose the keys have to be distrubuted uniformly in the cluster, so:
how will that happen i.e. when I add the 2nd server and say the 1st one already has 1 million keys
do I need to pre-plan the keyspace or tables?
I can suggest two things.
First, when designing your schema, pick a good partition key (1st column in the primary key). You need to ensure a couple of things:
There are enough values such that you can distribute it to an arbitrary amount of nodes. For example, sex would be a bad partition key, because you only have two values and therefore can only distribute it to two nodes.
The distribution across different partition key values is more or less uniform. For example, country might not be best, because you will most likely have most of your rows in just a few unique countries.
Secondly, to ease deployment of new nodes later consider setting up your cluster to use virtual nodes (vnodes). If you do that you will be able to skip a few steps when expanding your cluster.
To configure virtual nodes, set num_tokens in cassandra.yaml to more than 1. This will decide how many virtual nodes your node will have. A recommended value is 256.
Later, when you add new nodes, you need to make sure add_bootstrap is true in cassandra.yaml for your new nodes. Then you configure network parameters as usual to match your cluster, and finally start your node. It should automatically bootstrap and start streaming appropriate data. After everything is settled down, you can run cleanup (nodetool clean) on your other nodes to make sure they purge redundant data that they're no longer responsible for.
For more detailed documentation, please see http://www.datastax.com/documentation/cassandra/2.0/cassandra/operations/ops_add_node_to_cluster_t.html

DynamicSnitch Reads from empty new datacenter

When adding a new datacenter the dynamicSnitch causes us to read data from the new dc when the data is not there yet.
We have a cassandra (1.0.11) cluster running on 3 datacenters and we want to add a forth datacenter. The cluster is configured with PropertyFileSnitch and DynamicSnitch enabled with 0.0 badness factor. The relevant keyspaces replication factor are DC1:2, DC2:2, DC3:2. Our plan was to add the new datacenter to the ring, add it to the schema and run a rolling repair -pr on all the nodes so the new nodes will get all of their needed data.
Once we started the process we noticed that the new datacenter recieves read calls from the other data centers because it has a lower load and the DynamicSnitch decides it will be better to read from it. The problem is that the data center still doesn't have the data and returns no results.
We tried removing the DynamicSnitch entirely but once we did that every time a single server got a bit of load we experience extreme performance degredation.
Have anyone encountered this issue ?
Is there a way to directly influence the score of a specific data center so it won't be picked by the DynamicSnitch ?
Are there any better ways to add a datacenter in cassandra 1.0.11 ? Have anyone written a snitch that handles these issues ?
Thanks,
Izik.
You could bootstrap the nodes instead of adding to the ring without bootstrap and then repairing. The former ensures that no reads will be routed to it until it has all the data it needs. (That is why Cassandra defaults to auto_bootstrap: true and in fact disabling it is a sufficiently bad idea that we removed it from the example cassandra.yaml.)
The problem with this, and the reason that the documentation recommends adding all the nodes first without bootstrap, is that if you have N replicas configured for DC4, Cassassandra will try to replicate the entire dataset for that keyspace to the first N nodes you add, which can be problematic!
So here are the options I see:
If your dataset is small enough, go ahead and use the bootstrap plan
Increase ConsistencyLevel on your reads so that they will always touch a replica that does have the data, as well as one that does not
Upgrade to 1.2 and use ConsistencyLevel.LOCAL_ONE on your reads which will force it to never make cross-DC requests

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