Cassandra List Column Names - cassandra

I'm storing photos in a list cql3 column. I can query the list easily from cql3 but I also need to understand how the Cassandra storage model deals with lists to be able to use the JMX bulkLoad service to get my data into Cassandra. If I insert some test data into a list like this:
insert into dat.lgr (id, photos) values (0, [0xaa, 0xbb]);
The resulting data, when queried with the cli looks like this:
=> (column=photos:2fce75c0fe9811e2ab248b7126053a99, value=aa, timestamp=1375794036508000)
=> (column=photos:2fce75c1fe9811e2ab248b7126053a99, value=bb, timestamp=1375794036508000)
So it looks like Cassandra is actually storing a column for each element in the list, identified by a composite column name consisting of the collection name and an unknown hex number. The number is likely a 64 bit hash, or two 32 bit hashes appended together. But what's been hashed? I've looked through the source code but found nothing. Any help appreciated.

I'd suggest that column names for list items are UUIDs. At least both these values represent valid date "Tuesday, August 6, 2013 1:00:36 PM GMT" (try ""2fce75c0-fe98-11e2-ab24-8b7126053a99" in http://www.famkruithof.net/uuid/uuidgen for example).
It's easy to verify - just truncate the table and repeat the same statement. You would get completely different column names for the same data if my guess is correct.

Related

How to understand the 'Flexible schema' in Cassandra?

I am new to Cassandra, and found below in the wikipedia.
A column family (called "table" since CQL 3) resembles a table in an RDBMS (Relational Database Management System). Column families contain rows and columns. Each row is uniquely identified by a row key. Each row has multiple columns, each of which has a name, value, and a timestamp. Unlike a table in an RDBMS, different rows in the same column family do not have to share the same set of columns, and a column may be added to one or multiple rows at any time.[29]
It said that 'different rows in the same column family do not have to share the same set of columns', but how to implement it? I have almost read all the documents in the offical site.
I can create table and insert data like below.
CREATE TABLE Emp_record(E_id int PRIMARY KEY,E_score int,E_name text,E_city text);
INSERT INTO Emp_record(E_id, E_score, E_name, E_city) values (101, 85, 'ashish', 'Noida');
INSERT INTO Emp_record(E_id, E_score, E_name, E_city) values (102, 90, 'ankur', 'meerut');
It's very like I did in the relational database. So how to create multiply rows with different columns?
I also found the offical document mentioned 'Flexible schema', how to understand it here?
Thanks very much in advance.
Column family is from the original design of Cassandra, when the data model looked like the Google BigTable or Apache HBase, and Thrift protocol was used for communication. But this required that schema was defined inside the application, and that makes access to data from many applications more problematic, as you need to update the schema inside all of them...
The CREATE TABLE and INSERT is a part of the Cassandra Query Language (CQL) that was introduced long time ago, and replaced Thrift-based implementation (Cassandra 4.0 completely removed the Thrift support). In CQL you need to have schema defined for a table, where you need to provide column name & type. If you really need to have dynamic columns, there are several approaches to that (I'll link answers that I already wrote over the time, so there won't duplicates):
If you have values of the same type, you can use one column as a name of the attribute/column, and another to store the value, like described here
if you have values of different types, you can also use one column as a name of attribute/column, and define multiple columns for values - one for each of the data types: int, text, ..., and you insert value into the corresponding columns only (described here)
you can use maps (described here) - it's similar to first or second, but mostly designed for very small number of "dynamic columns", plus have other limitations, like, you need to read the full map to fetch one value, etc.)

How to solve 'Secondary indexes cardinality' for cfs.inode?

In OpsCenter 6.0.3, I got the following problem
The above figure appeared after clicking 'Services' -> 'Best Practice Service' -> 'Performance Service - Table Metrics Advisor' -> 'Secondary indexes cardinality' in turn.
The inode table viewed in DevCenter looks as follows:
As far as I know, [inode]link tracks each files metadata and block locations. But, what can I do to fix this problem ?
OpsCenter Version: 6.0.3 Cassandra Version: 2.1.15.1423 DataStax Enterprise Version: 4.8.10
Don't use Secondary index for high cardinality column.
High-cardinality refers to columns with values that are very uncommon or unique. High-cardinality column values are typically identification numbers, email addresses, or user names. An example of a data table column with high-cardinality would be a USERS table with a column named USER_ID.
Problems using a high-cardinality column index datastax doc :
If you create an index on a high-cardinality column, which has many distinct values, a query between the fields will incur many seeks for very few results. In the table with a billion songs, looking up songs by writer (a value that is typically unique for each song) instead of by their artist, is likely to be very inefficient. It would probably be more efficient to manually maintain the table as a form of an index instead of using the Cassandra built-in index. For columns containing unique data, it is sometimes fine performance-wise to use an index for convenience, as long as the query volume to the table having an indexed column is moderate and not under constant load.
Solution :
Create another table with that column in the partition key

Handling the following use case in Cassandra?

I've been given the task of modelling a simple in Cassandra. Coming from an almost solely SQL background, though, I'm having a bit of trouble figuring it out.
Basically, we have a list of feeds that we're listening to that update periodically. This can be in RSS, JSON, ATOM, XML, etc (depending on the feed).
What we want to do is periodically check for new items in each feed, convert the data into a few formats (i.e. JSON and RSS) and store that in a Cassandra store.
So, in an RBDMS, the structure would be something akin to:
Feed:
feedId
name
URL
FeedItem:
feedItemId
feedId
title
json
rss
created_time
I'm confused as to how to model that data in Cassandra to facilitate simple things such as getting x amount of items for a specific feed in descending created order (which is probably the most common query).
I've heard of one strategy that mentions having a composite key storing, in this example, the the created_time as a time-based UUID with the feed item ID but I'm still a little confused.
For example, lets say I have a series of rows whose key is basically the feedId. Inside each row, I store a range of columns as mentioned above. The question is, where does the actual data go (i.e. JSON, RSS, title)? Would I have to store all the data for that 'record' as the column value?
I think I'm confusing wide rows and narrow (short?) rows as I like the idea of the composite key but I also want to store other data with each record and I'm not sure how to meld the two together...
You can store everything in one column family. However If the data for each FeedItem is very large, you can split the data for each FeedItem into another column family.
For example, you can have 1 column familyfor Feed, and the columns of that key are FeedItem ids, something like,
Feeds # column family
FeedId1 #key
time-stamp-1-feed-item-id1 #columns have no value, or values are enough info
time-stamp-2-feed-item-id2 #to show summary info in a results list
The Feeds column allows you to quickly get the last N items from a feed, but querying for the last N items of a Feed doesn't require fetching all the data for each FeedItem, either nothing is fetched, or just a summary.
Then you can use another column family to store the actual FeedItem data,
FeedItems # column family
feed-item-id1 # key
rss # 1 column for each field of a FeedItem
title #
...
Using CQL should be easier to understand to you as per your SQL background.
Cassandra (and NoSQL in general) is very fast and you don't have real benefits from using a related table for feeds, and anyway you will not be capable of doing JOINs. Obviously you can still create two tables if that's comfortable for you, but you will have to manage linking data inside your application code.
You can use something like:
CREATE TABLE FeedItem (
feedItemId ascii PRIMARY KEY,
feedId ascii,
feedName ascii,
feedURL ascii,
title ascii,
json ascii,
rss ascii,
created_time ascii );
Here I used ascii fields for everything. You can choose to use different data types for feedItemId or created_time, and available data types can be found here, and depending on which languages and client you are using it can be transparent or require some more work to make them works.
You may want to add some secondary indexes. For example, if you want to search for feeds items from a specific feedId, something like:
SELECT * FROM FeedItem where feedId = '123';
To create the index:
CREATE INDEX FeedItem_feedId ON FeedItem (feedId);
Sorting / Ordering, alas, it's not something easy in Cassandra. Maybe reading here and here can give you some clues where to start looking for, and also that's really depending on the cassandra version you're going to use.

Cassandra super column structure

I'm new to Cassandra, and I'm not familiar with super columns.
Consider this scenario: Suppose we have a some fields of a customer entity like
Name
Contact_no
address
and we can store all these values in a normal column. I want to arrange that when a person moves from one location to another location (the representative field could store the longitude and latitude) that values will be stored consecutively with respect to customer location. I think we can do this with super columns but I'm confused how to design the schema to accomplish this.
Please help me to create this schema and come to understand the concepts behind super columns.
supercolumns are really not recommended anymore...still used but more and more have switched to composite columns. For example playOrm uses this concept for indexing. If I am indexing an integer, and indexing row may look like this
rowkey = 10.pk56 10.pk39 11.pk50
Where the column name type is a composite integer and string in this case. These rows can be up to about 10 million columns though I have only run expirements up to 1 million my self. For example, playOrm's queries use these types of indexes to do a query that took 60 ms on 1,000,000 rows.
With playOrm, you can do scalable relational models in noSQL....you just need to figure out how to partition your data correctly as you can have as many partitions as you want in each table, but a partition should really not be over 10 million rows.
Back to the example though, if you have a table with columns numShares, price, username, age, you may wnat to index numShares and the above row would be that index so you could grab the index by key OR better yet, grab all column names with numShares > 20 and numShares < 50
Once you have those columns, you can then get the second half of the column name which is the primary key. The reason primary key is NOT a value is because as in the example above there is two rows pk56 and pk39 with the same 10 and you can't have two columns named 10, but you can have a 10.pk56 and 10.pk39.
later,
Dean

How to arrange data in Cassandra to get data in last in first out format

As we cannot sort data in Cassandra, I wanted to store data in such format that when I retrieve the data, I need to get data in ' last in first out format ' i.e if user enter comments when I retrieve data, I should first get very latest comment first and then older comments. I think it's something to do with comparator.
I have set following when configuring Cassandra:
assume posts comparator as utf8;
assume posts validator as utf8;
assume posts keys as utf8;
Please help - how should I create the column to arrange data in time format so that latest data is stored first?
Columns in a row are always sorted, and you can iterate over the columns in a row in reverse order. Given these two facs we could model the situation you're describing by storing comments in a column family called "comments" where the row key is the post ID, and the columns represent the comments to the corresponding post. The columns are timestamts (either ISO formatted dates, UNIX timestamps or time UUIDs) and the values are the comment text bodies.
If you would now get the columns for a row and specify that you wanted them in reverse order you would get what you want. How to specify reverse order depends on your driver, but it's usually just an option to the command that retrieves a row, or a column slice.
Another way, which is more hackish, would be to take the UNIX timestamp of a post, and subtract it from a large integer, like 2^31, and use that as column key. That way columns would sort in reverse order by default. It's not pretty and the above method is more elegant.
If you worry about using timestamps because there could be collisions where two comments are posted at exactly the same time, use Cassandra's time UUID type.
You need to organize your data such that the comparator is a timestamp. You store your data in natural order and specify reverse order in your slice query.

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