Cassandra: Generate a unique ID? - cassandra

I'm working on a distributed data base. I'm trying to generate a unique ID that will serve as a column family primary key in cassandra.
I read some articles about doing this with Java using UUID but it seems like there is a probability for collision (even if it's very low).
I wonder if there is a way to generate a unique ID based on time maybe?

You can use the TimeUUID type in Cassandra, which backs a Type 1 UUID. This uses the current time and the creator's MAC address and a sequence number. If the TimeUUID number is generated correctly this can be done with zero collisions (you can use the CQL now() method or insert your own, the java SDK's provide some thread-safe implementations). The main advantage of TimeUUIDs is that the IDs can be time ordered. See http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/TimeBaseUUIDNotes for more info.
However, the time ordering is unlikely to be useful for row primary keys, since the ordering is useless when using a hash partitioner, though possible using a clustering key. And also the complexity of generating a unique ID could be a source of bugs if you roll your own. Cassandra also supports Type 4 UUIDs by using the UUID type. These are just random bits. There is a collision probability, but the collision probability (assuming uncorrelated random number sources, which it will be if you generate in Java) is extremely low - if you created 1 billion a second for 100 years the probability of one collision is about 50%. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#Random_UUID_probability_of_duplicates for more details.)

You should investigate using Twitter Snowflake. From the project readme:
As we at Twitter move away from Mysql towards Cassandra, we've needed a new way to generate id numbers. There is no sequential id generation facility in Cassandra, nor should there be.
Snowflake uses an intuitive algorithm that generates longs which are both time-ordered and unique. Since your database is distributed, this service should suit your needs well.

As said by Richard you can use TimeUUID, and generating TimeUUID value is not a big deal. Just follow cassandra FAQ timeuuid.

You need to use cassandra function now() to generate timeuuid and use uuid() function to generate uuid type string.

Related

Is UUID or Integer a good choice as partition key?

Two simple questions:
Is a UUID a good choice as a partition key? Will this distribute data evenly among all nodes in the cluster?
Is a (unique) integer a good choice?
Will any of these options create "hot" partitions?
Thanks!
UUID is a good choice for partition key - it should be good distributed between cluster nodes. "Unique" integer is more tricky - some node need to be an authority for generation of this number, and this is hard to do in the distributed environment.
Regarding hot partition - this will depend on your data model. If you have other primary key components besides the partition key, yes - you may have this problem. For example, you generate a random UUID for sensor & starting to write a lot of data into it.
I usually tell folks not to use a UUID as a partition key for two simple reasons.
UUIDs are designed to be unique, and thus have a high potential cardinality.
While it does depend on your data model, think about how many rows you're going to have under each UUID, and then ask yourself if you really want to have to supply a full UUID on each and every query.
Again, it's all about the data model. From a DBA's perspective, they'll distribute well. But from a developer's perspective, it can really clamp-down your potential query patterns.
Ultimately, you want your primary key components to allow your model to A) distribute well and B) match your query patterns. If partitioning on a UUID gives you that, then great!

Cassandra and IDs concept

Could you please clarify about ids with cassandra.
In the relational databases use id with auto increment generation.
field id is connected to tables mapping, locking.
As i know cassandra uses UUID instead Id
Could you please explain main concept UUIDs. Why does cassandra exclude ids.
Thanks!
The advantage of UUIDs over auto-incrementing integers is that you can generate them distributed. When using incrementing integers there must be a single counter somewhere that always have to be consulted when generating a new ID. With UUIDs you can just generate a new ID anywhere in your cluster and use it right away.
Basically you can think of UUIDs as big random numbers. So it's highly unlikely that two nodes are generating the same ID even if they are not coordinated.
Still it seems you should make yourself familar on the concepts of the keys in Cassandra. Different to relational databases, keys in Cassandra are not just there for generating a unique identification of a record but to prepare your query for data. Therefore keys in cassandra are often not a UUID … or not a UUID alone.

using timeuuid as unique userid or token

I have read some older answers, regarding generating userids. Do you know if it safe to use timeuuid as a unique identifier? I am planning on using it both for userids and for tokens.
Thanks
Regards
The UUID and timeUUID are safe to use as unique keys. Documentation on the UUID types describes them as follows:
The UUID (universally unique id) comparator type is used to avoid
collisions in column names. Alternatively, you can use the timeuuid.
For more information on how UUIDs work the Wikipedia article outlines the way UUIDs are generated and why they work. This question is strange since the odds of a duplicate TYPE 1 UUID is very low. From the wikipedia entry,
...after generating 1 billion UUIDs every second for the next 100 years,
the probability of creating just one duplicate would be about 50%.
This holds true for timeUUIDs.

Cassandra data modelling less then 1000 records to fit in one row

We have some entity uniquely identified by generated UUID. We need to support find by name query. Also we need to support sorting to be by name.
We know that there will be no more than 1000 of entities of that type which can perfectly fit in one row. Is it viable idea to hardcode primary key, use name as clustering key and id as clustering key there to satisfy uniqueness. Lets say we need school entity. Here is example:
CREATE TABLE school (
constant text,
name text,
id uuid,
description text,
location text,
PRIMARY KEY ((constant), name, id)
);
Initial state would be give me all schools and then filtering by exact name will happen. Our reasoning behind this was to place all schools in single row for fast access, have name as clustering column for filtering and have id as clustering column to guaranty uniqueness. We can use constant = school as known hardcoded value to access this row.
What I like about this solution is that all values are in one row and we get fast reads. Also we can solve sorting easy by clustering column. What I do not like is hardcoded value for constant which seams odd. We could use name as PK but then we would have 1000 records spread across couple of partitions, probably find all without name would be slower and would not be sorted.
Question 1
Is this viable solution and are there any problems with it which we do not see? I did not see any example on Cassandra data modelling with hardcoded primary key probably for the reason so we are doubting this solution.
Question 2
Name is editable field, it will probably be changed rarely (someone can make typo or school can change name) but it can change. What is best way to achieve this? Delete insert inside batch (LTE can be applied to same row with conditional clause)?
Yes this is a good approach for such a small dataset. Just because Cassandra can partition large datasets across multiple nodes does not mean that you need to use that ability for every table. By using a constant for the partition key, you are telling Cassandra that you want the data to be stored on one node where you can access it quickly and in sorted order. Relational databases act on data in a single node all the time, so this is really not such an unusual thing to do.
For safety you will probably want to use a replication factor higher than one so that there are at least two copies of the single partition. In that way you will not lose access to the data if the one node where it is stored went down.
This approach could cause problems if you expect to have a lot of clients (i.e. thousands of clients) frequently reading and writing to this table, since it could become a hot spot. With only 1000 records you can probably keep all the rows cached in memory by setting the table to cache all keys and rows.
You probably won't find a lot of examples where this is done because people move to Cassandra for the support of large datasets where they want the scalability that comes from using multiple partitions. So examples are geared towards that.
Is this viable solution and are there any problems with it which we do not see? I did not see any example on Cassandra data modelling with hardcoded primary key probably for the reason so we are doubting this solution.
I briefly addressed this type of modeling solution earlier this year in my article: We Shall Have Order! This is what is known as a "dummy key," where each row has the same partition key. This is a shortcut that allows you to easily order all of your rows (on an unbound SELECT *) by clustering column(s).
Problems with this solution:
Cassandra allows a maximum of 2 billion column values per partition key. When using a dummy partition key, you will approach this limit with each value that you add.
Your data will all be stored in the same partition, which will create a "hot spot" (large groupings of data) in your cluster. This means that your data model will immediately void one of Cassandra's main benefits...data distribution. This will also complicate load balancing (the same nodes and ranges will keep serving all of your requests).
I can see that your model is designed around a SELECT * query. Cassandra works best when you can give it specific keys to query by. Unbound SELECT * queries (queries without WHERE clauses) are not a good idea to be doing with Cassandra, as they can lead to timeouts (as your data grows).
From reading through your question, I know that you're going to say that you're only using it for 1000 rows. That your dataset won't ever grow much beyond those 1000 rows, so you won't hit any of the roadblocks that I have mentioned.
So then I have to wonder, why are you using Cassandra? As a Cassandra MVP, that's a question I don't ask often. But you don't have an especially large data set (which is what Cassandra is designed to work with). Relying on that fact as a reason to use a product incorrectly is not really the best solution.
Honestly, I am going to recommend that you save yourself some complexity, and use a RDBMS instead. That will fit your use case significantly better than Cassandra will. Then you can update and order by whatever fields you wish.

Cassandra UUID vs TimeUUID benefits and disadvantages

Given that TimeUUID handily allows you to use now() in CQL, are there any reasons you wouldn't just go ahead and always use TimeUUID instead of plain old UUID?
UUID and TIMEUUID are stored the same way in Cassandra, and they only really represent two different sorting implementations.
TIMEUUID columns are sorted by their time components first, and then by their raw bytes, whereas UUID columns are sorted by their version first, then if both are version 1 by their time component, and finally by their raw bytes. Curiosly the time component sorting implementations are duplicated between UUIDType and TimeUUIDType in the Cassandra code, except for different formatting.
I think of the UUID vs. TIMEUUID question primarily as documentation: if you choose TIMEUUID you're saying that you're storing things in chronological order, and that these things can occur at the same time, so a simple timestamp isn't enough. Using UUID says that you don't care about order (even if in practice the columns will be ordered by time if you put version 1 UUIDs in them), you just want to make sure that things have unique IDs.
Even if using NOW() to generate UUID values is convenient, it's also very surprising to other people reading your code.
It probably does not matter much in the grand scheme of things, but sorting non-version 1 UUIDs is a bit faster than version 1, so if you have a UUID column and generate the UUIDs yourself, go for another version.
A TimeUUID is a plain old UUID according to the documentation.
A UUID is simply a 128-bit value. Think of it as an unimaginably large number.
The particular bits may be determined by any of several methods. The original method involved taking the MAC address of the computer's networking hardware, combining the current date and time, plus an arbitrary number and a random number. Squish all that together to get a virtually unique number.
Later, for various reasons (security, privacy), other methods were invented to assemble the bits when generating a UUID value. These other methods omit date-time and/or MAC address as an ingredient. The point being: Not all UUID values have an embedded date-time value.
The Cassandra doc incorrectly refers to its TimeUUID being a "Type 1 UUID". The correct term is Version 1 UUID. This version is sometimes called the "time-based version".
A Bit Of Advice
Cassandra seems to identify this specific version of UUID for the purpose of extracting the date and time portion of the 128-bits. Extracting the date-time from a UUID is a bad idea.
For one thing, UUID was never intended to be used for such history tracking. Indeed, the spec for UUID specifically recognizes that (a) computer clocks can be reset and therefor (b) UUIDs generated later may actually record an earlier date-time than previous UUIDs. Another reason to not extract date-time from a UUID is because you may well have UUIDs that were not generated by the time method, therefore you will be building a data-time value based on bits that do not in fact represent the date-time of creation. A third reason is that when programming code is later refactored, the UUID may be generated at a different time than the database record so using the UUID's date-time would be misleading.
If you need to track date-time history, do so explicitly. Create a date-time field in your data. By the way, track that date-time in UTC, but that’s another topic.
All said, you need to generate some to believe them. Timeuuids are Version/Level 1 UUID only seem to randomize the first 8 characters as you can see below, so, there is some chance of conflict, but still timeuuid is better than using timestamp itself. If uuid randomness is important, using Version/Level 4 UUID is a better choice with an almost improbable collision.
So, it feels like if you don't care about uniqueness across partitions and your partitions are wide row time series data with high writes and need some unique identifier for each event (time), its a good choice that also has the benefit of clustering, pagination, etc.,.
insert into test_tuuid(1, now())
insert into test_tuuid(1, now())
insert into test_tuuid(1, now())
insert into test_tuuid(1, now())
49cbda60-961b-11e8-9854-134d5b3f9cf8
49d1a6c1-961b-11e8-9854-134d5b3f9cf8
49d59e61-961b-11e8-9854-134d5b3f9cf8
49d8d2b1-961b-11e8-9854-134d5b3f9cf8

Resources