Validating Hector connection for Cassandra - cassandra

Supposing I've connected to a cluster with
HFactory.getOrCreateCluster(cluster, address)
Is there a way to check later on whether or not I'm still connected? There doesn't seem to be an obvious way of doing that from looking through their javadocs.

One option might be to just fire a simple query to the cluster within a try-catch statement and see whether it returns properly, or it throws an exception.

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Hazelcast readiness probe

I am aware that there is a probe available at /hazelcast/health/ready at port 5701.
However I need to do this progamatically through code as I am using embedded hazelcast deployed on a kubernetes cluster and all communication should pass through the main application (that means hazelcast cannot expose that endpoint, using http requests through localhost would not suffice). I tried looking into the documentation but I found no help in this.
Only thing that I found is to use instance.getServer().getPartitionService().isLocalMemberSafe() but I got no evidence that this is effectively the same as checking the readiness probe.
Any help would be appreciated, thanks!
The exact logic for /ready endpoint is:
node.isRunning() && node.getNodeExtension().isStartCompleted()
I guess you can't use exactly the same from the code, but fairly good approximations are:
instance.getLifecycleService().isRunning() (the only difference is that it won't wait with being ready for joining other members)
instance.getPartitionService().isClusterSafe() (the difference is that it will wait for all the Hazelcast migration to finish)
You can use any of them. If you want to be really sure that Hazelcast member can receive the traffic when its ready, then the second option is totally safe.

Cassandra trigger explanation

I could not find any proper documentation on Cassandra triggers. Can anyone please explain how they actually work, I mean right from the client making a write request to when the trigger is fired by the coordinator node?
If some documentation is present then a link to that would also work.
Whenever the client makes a write query request to the Cassandra cluster, it goes to a coordinator node which first runs the trigger, and then the query is executed in batch logged form.
References:
https://www.datastax.com/blog/2013/08/whats-new-cassandra-20-prototype-triggers-support
https://docs.datastax.com/en/dse/6.0/cql/cql/cql_using/useBatch.html

knex migration error in node js app

I am using knew to connect with postgres in my application. I am getting following error when I run
knex migrate:latest
TimeoutError: Knex: Timeout acquiring a connection. The pool is probably full. Are you missing a .transacting(trx) call?
at Timeout._onTimeout
Referring some thread , I understand that I have to add transacting call but Do I need to add in all the sql calls of my app ?
In documentation , It do not give me details about when to add this ? why is must ? My queries are mostly of type "GET", hence not sure if those queries needs to apply transacting?
It seems a library bug, probably.
Generally speaking, any behaviors including SELECT also need a transaction with read locking. DB will organize the resource locking sequence according to the transaction isolation level setting and mostly READ COMMITTED is default. Rows in a table cannot be deleted while a user is reading it until finished the action. Delete (exclusive locking) waits until the Select (read shared lock) release it, even if we didn't mention a begin transaction.
In this reason, most of the database connection libraries are supporting "auto commit" option like this, this and this to automatically wrap with a transaction by default if there is no explicit transaction made (or supported by the DBMS session option natively), so all the request run on a transaction block.
Knex seems not have this option explicitly. I can find
it may differ to the DBMS types. Oracle dialect. While reading the code, I found Oracle implementation have it here but Postgresql implementation here does not have auto commit. It looks incomplete to me.
The document also says it could select query without transacting call. If it leaks many open session, then it's obviously a bug. Please file a bug report with a sample code to reproduce this issue.
Or you could inspect what queries in the pending list from the database side. All the modern database system could list up the sessions and locking status. I suppose you have mixed with the naive select call and the transacting() call and then the naive select calls may appended to an uncommitted open transaction. You can watch what is happening from the DB admin feature like this.

Handling failures in Thrift in general

I read through the official documentation and the official whitepaper, but I couldn't find a satisfying answer to how Thrift handles failures in the following scenario:
Say you have a client sending a method call to a server to insert an entry in some data structure residing in that server (it doesn't really matter what it is). Suppose the server has processed the call and inserted the entry but the client couldn't receive a response due to a network failure. In such a case, how should the client handle this? A simple retry of sending the call would possibly result in a duplicate entry being inserted. Does the Thrift library persist the response somewhere so that it can resend to the client when it is back online? Or is it the application's responsibility to do so?
Would appreciate it if someone could point out the details of how it works, besides directing to its source code.
The question is an interesting one, but it is by no means limited to Thrift. A better name would be
Handling failures in asynchronous or remote calls in general
because that's in essence, what it is. Altough in the specific case of an RPC-style API like, for example, a Thrift service, the client blocks and it seems to be an synchronous call, it really isn't that way.
The whole problem can be rephrased to the more general question about
Designing robust distributed systems
So what is the main problem, that we have to deal with? We have to assume that every call we do may fail. In particular, it can fail in three ways:
request died
request sent, server processing successful, response died
request sent, server processing failed, response died
In some cases, this is not a big deal, regardless of the exact case we have. If the client just wants to retrieve some values, he can simply re-query and will get some results eventually if he tries often enough.
In other cases, especially when the client modifies data on the server, it may become more problematic. The general recommendation in such cases is to make the service calls idempotent, meaning: regardless, how often I do the same call, the end result is always the same. This could be achieved by various means and more or less depends on the use case.
For example, one method is it to send some logical "ticket" values along with each request to filter out doubled or outdated requests on the server. The server keeps track and/or checks these tickets, before the processing starts eventually. But again, if that method suits your needs depends on your use case.
The Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) pattern is another approach to deal with the complexity. It basically breaks the API into setters and getters. I'd recommend to look into that topic, but it is not useful for every scenario. I'd also recommend to look at the Data Consistency Primer article. Last not least the CAP theorem is always a good read.
Good Service/API design is not simple, and the fact, that we have to deal with a distributed parallel system does not make it easier, quite the opposite.
Let me try to give a straight answer.
... is it the application's responsibility to do so?
Yes.
There're 4 types of Exceptions involved in Thrift RPC, including TTransportException, TProtocolException, TApplicationException, and User-defined exceptions.
Based on the book Programmer's Guide to Apache Thrift, the former 2 are local exceptions, while the latter 2 are not.
As the names imply, TTransportException includes exceptions like NOT_OPEN, TIMED_OUT, and TProtocolException includes INVALID_DATA, BAD_VERSION, etc. These exceptions are not propagated from the server the the client and act much like normal language exceptions.
TApplicationExceptions involve problems such as calling a method that isn’t implemented or failing to provide the necessary arguments to a method.
User-defined Exceptions are defined in IDL files and raised by the user code.
For all of these exceptions, no retry operations are done by Thrift RPC framework itself. Instead, they should be handled properly by the application code.

How Datastax PreparedStatements work

When we create a PreparedStatement object is it cached on the server side? How it is different comparing to PreparedStatement in Oracle driver? If prepared statement is reused, what data is sent to Cassandra server, param values only?
From what I understand, one Session object in java driver holds multiple connections to multiple nodes in cluster. If we reuse the same prepared statement in our application in multiple threads, will make us using only one connection to one Cassandra? I guess preparing statement is done on one connection only... What happens when routing key is updated by each execute call?
What are benefits of using prepared statements?
Thank you
Yes, only the statement ID and parameters need to be sent after preparing the statement.
The driver tracks statement IDs for each server in its connection pool; it's transparent to your application.
The benefit is improved performance from not having to re-compile the statement for each query.

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