Composite key vs Composite column in cassandra - cassandra

I want to know where and when to use composite column and composite key in Cassandr

Composite-key usage can be useful in many scenario.
Imagine a table users in which you have a user id (uuid) as primary key (single-key)
You can't query this table unless you know the id of the user (ignore secondary indexes at the moment).
Now let's consider a table in which you doesn't use anymore the id as primary key, but you use a composite key made of (name, surname, email)
Now you can query your users by knowing
name
name - surname
name - surname - emails
primary key must be unique and in this scenario the email should guarantee that the user is unique. Take care, to query by email you must know both name and surname, to query for the surname you must know the name (this is true unless you don't use a particular way to model yours data).
CREATE TABLE users (
name text,
surname text,
email text,
age int,
address text,
id uuid,
PRIMARY KEY (name, surname, email)
)
Another useful scenario can be for data-sorting.
Imagine you have a table in which you keep tweets (identified by a time uuid) made from a tweeter (identified by a uuid).
In cassandra the first part of the key is known as Partition key, the remaining is known as clustering key. For the same partition key data can be sorted by a clustering key
CREATE TABLE tweets (
tweeter_id uuid,
tweet_id timeuuid,
content text,
PRIMARY KEY (tweeter_id, tweet_id)
) WITH CLUSTERING ORDER BY (tweet_id DESC)
In this scenario once you ask cassandra the tweets made by a tweeter they will be time-sorted for free.
Cheers,
Carlo

Related

How to create Cassandra primary key in correct way

I have the following table structure:
CREATE TABLE test_keyspace.persons (
id uuid,
country text,
city text,
address text,
phone_number text,
PRIMARY KEY (id, country, address)
);
My main scenario is to get person by id. But sometimes I want to get all cities inside country and all persons inside city as well.
I know that Cassandra must have at least one partition key and zero or more clustering keys, but I don't understand how to organize it to work most effectively (and generally work).
Can anybody give me advice?
So it sounds like you want to be able to query by both id and country. Typically in Cassandra, the way to build your data models is a "one table == one query" approach. In that case, you would have two tables, just keyed differently:
CREATE TABLE test_keyspace.persons_by_id (
id uuid,
country text,
city text,
address text,
phone_number text,
PRIMARY KEY (id));
TBH, you don't really to cluster on country and address, unless a person can have multiple addresses. But a single PK is a completely legit approach.
For the second table:
CREATE TABLE test_keyspace.persons_by_country (
id uuid,
country text,
city text,
address text,
phone_number text,
PRIMARY KEY (country,city,id));
This will allow you to query by country, with persons grouped/sorted by city and sorted by id. In theory, you could also serve the query by id approach here, as long as you also had the country and city. But that might not be possible in your scenario.
Duplicating data in Cassandra (NoSQL) to help queries perform better is ok. The trick becomes keeping the tables in-sync, but you can use the BATCH functionality to apply writes to both tables atomically.
In case you haven't already, you might benefit from DataStax's (free) course on data modeling - Data Modeling with Apache Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise.

CQL query delete if not in list

I am trying to delete all rows in the table where the partition key is not in a list of guids.
Here's my table definition.
CREATE TABLE cloister.major_user (
user_id uuid,
user_handle text,
avatar text,
created_at timestamp,
email text,
email_verified boolean,
first_name text,
last_name text,
last_updated_at timestamp,
profile_type text,
PRIMARY KEY (user_id, user_handle)
) WITH CLUSTERING ORDER BY (user_handle ASC)
I want to retain certain user_ids and delete the rest. The following options have failed.
delete from juna_user where user_id ! in (0d70272c-8d24-43d0-9b2d-c62100b0e28e,0b7c0841-3a18-4c03-a211-f75690c93815,e96ba860-72cf-44d5-a6bd-5a9ec58827e3,729d7973-d4c4-42fb-94c4-d1ffd03b74cd,3bffa0c6-8b98-4f0c-bd7c-22d0662ab0a2)
delete from juna_user where user_id not in (0d70272c-8d24-43d0-9b2d-c62100b0e28e,0b7c0841-3a18-4c03-a211-f75690c93815,e96ba860-72cf-44d5-a6bd-5a9ec58827e3,729d7973-d4c4-42fb-94c4-d1ffd03b74cd,3bffa0c6-8b98-4f0c-bd7c-22d0662ab0a2)
delete from juna_user where user_id not in (0d70272c-8d24-43d0-9b2d-c62100b0e28e,0b7c0841-3a18-4c03-a211-f75690c93815,e96ba860-72cf-44d5-a6bd-5a9ec58827e3,729d7973-d4c4-42fb-94c4-d1ffd03b74cd,3bffa0c6-8b98-4f0c-bd7c-22d0662ab0a2) ALLOW FILTERING
What am I doing wrong?
CQL supports only IN condition (see docs). You need to explicitly specify which primary key or partition keys to delete, you can't use condition not in, because it's potentially could be a huge amount of data. If you need to do that, you need to generate the list of entries to delete - you can do that using Spark Cassandra Connector, for example.

Cassandra Order By Updated At

I'm trying to build a cassandra schema to represent chat.
The one thing i can't seem to figure out is how to query most recently updated rooms (similar to most chat app list view)
Fields desired in list view ordered by updated_at desc
*room id
room title
room image
*user
*updated_at
*message entry
*message type
*metadata
Current Tables
Create TYPE user(
id uuid,
name text,
avatar text
);
CREATE TABLE rooms(
id uuid,
"name" text,
image text,
users set<user>,
archived boolean,
created_at timestampz,
updated_at timestampz,
PRIMARY KEY(id)
);
CREATE TABLE messages(
room_id uuid,
message_id timeuuid,
user user,
message_type int,
entry text,
metadata map<text, text>,
PRIMARY KEY(room_id, message_id)
) WITH CLUSTERING ORDER BY (message_id DESC);
CREATE TABLE rooms_by_user(
user_id uuid,
room_id uuid,
PRIMARY KEY(user_id, room_id)
);
Possible solutions that i can come up with.
Duplicate all room details to each message
allows easy query with SELECT * FROM messages PER PARTITION LIMIT 1
this would be a lot of duplicate data per message...
Query latest messages which user belongs to get room ids then query rooms
This doesn't seem to be the cassandra way?
Is there a better way to model my data?
By looking at the schema it looks like you need relational database.
In Cassandra usually you use one table per query, it means you you should design your table by how you will structure query.
Also you can query by partition key or clustering column (second one should be partition key + clustering column).
So in order to query by updater_at, you need to make that column as clustering column. And keep in mind that in Cassandra you cannot alter keys.

how to handle search by unique id in Cassandra

I have a table with a composite primary key. name,description, ID
PRIMARY KEY (id, name, description)
whenever searching Cassandra I need to provide the three keys, but now I have a use case where I want to delete, update, and get just based on ID.
So I created a materialized view against this table, and reordered the keys to have ID first so I can search just based on ID.
But how do I delete or update record with just an ID ?
It's not clear if you are using a partition key with 3 columns, or if you are using a composite primary key.
If you are using a partition key with 3 columns:
CREATE TABLE tbl (
id uuid,
name text,
description text,
...
PRIMARY KEY ((id, name, description))
);
notice the double parenthesis you need all 3 components to identify your data. So when you query your data by ID from the materialized view you need to retrieve also both name and description fields, and then issue one delete per tuple <id, name, description>.
Instead, if you use a composite primary key with ID being the only PARTITION KEY:
CREATE TABLE tbl (
id uuid,
name text,
description text,
...
PRIMARY KEY (id, name, description)
);
notice the single parenthesis, then you can simply issue one delete because you already know the partition and don't need anything else.
Check this SO post for a clear explanation on primary key types.
Another thing you should be aware of is that the materialized view will populate a table under the hood for you, and the same rules/ideas about data modeling should also apply for materialized views.

Cassandra table based query and primary key uniqueness

I have read here that for a table like:
CREATE TABLE user (
username text,
password text,
email text,
company text,
PRIMARY KEY (username)
);
We can create a table like:
CREATE TABLE user_by_company (
company text,
username text,
email text,
PRIMARY KEY (company)
);
In order to support query by the company. But what about primary key uniqueness for the second table?
Modify your table's PRIMARY KEY definition and add username as a clustering key:
CREATE TABLE user_by_company (
company text,
username text,
email text,
PRIMARY KEY (company,username)
);
That will enforce uniqueness, as well as return all usernames for a particular company. Additionally, your result set will be sorted in ascending order by username.
data will be partitioned by the company name over nodes. What if there is a lot of users from one company and less from other one. Data will be partition'ed in a non balanced way
That's the balance that you have to figure out on your own. PRIMARY KEY definition in Cassandra is a give-and-take between data distribution and query flexibility. And unless the cardinality of company is very low (like single digits), you shouldn't have to worry about creating hot spots in your cluster.
Also, if one particular company gets too big, you can use a modeling technique known as "bucketing." If I was going to "bucket" your user_by_company table, I would first add a company_bucket column, and it as an additional (composite) partitioning key:
CREATE TABLE user_by_company (
company text,
company_bucket text,
username text,
email text,
PRIMARY KEY ((company,company_bucket),username)
);
As for what to put into that bucket, it's up to you. Maybe that particular company has East and West locations, so something like this might work:
INSERT INTO user_by_company (company,company_bucket,username,email)
VALUES ('Acme','West','Jayne','jcobb#serenity.com');
The drawback here, is that you would then have to provide company_bucket whenever querying that table. But it is a solution that could help you if a company should get too big.
I think there is typo in the blog (the link you mentioned). You are right with the table structure as user_by_company there will be issue with uniqueness.
To support the typo theory:
In this case, creating a secondary index in the company field in the
user table could be a solution because it has much lower cardinality
than the user's email but let’s solve it with performance in mind.
Secondary indexes are always slower than dedicated table approach.
This are the lines mentioned in the blog for querying user by company.
If you were to define company as primary key OR part of primary key there should be no need to create secondary index.

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