Apache Cassandra

Apache Cassandra
Original author(s) Avinash Lakshman, Prashant Malik
Developer(s) Apache Software Foundation
Initial release 2008
Stable release 1.0.6 / December 14, 2011; 2 months ago (2011-12-14)
Development status Active
Written in Java
Operating system Cross-platform
Available in English
Type key-value store
License Apache License 2
Website cassandra.apache.org

Apache Cassandra is an open source distributed database management system. It is an Apache Software Foundation top-level project[1] designed to handle very large amounts of data spread out across many commodity servers while providing a highly available service with no single point of failure. It is a NoSQL solution that was initially developed by Facebook and powered their Inbox Search feature until late 2010.[2][3] Jeff Hammerbacher, who led the Facebook Data team at the time, has described Cassandra as a BigTable data model running on an Amazon Dynamo-like infrastructure.[4]

Cassandra provides a structured key-value store with tunable consistency.[5] Keys map to multiple values, which are grouped into column families. The column families are fixed when a Cassandra database is created, but columns can be added to a family at any time. Furthermore, columns are added only to specified keys, so different keys can have different numbers of columns in any given family.

The values from a column family for each key are stored together. This makes Cassandra a hybrid data management system between a column-oriented DBMS and a row-oriented store.[6] Also, besides using the way of modeling of BigTable, it has properties like eventual consistency, the Gossip protocol, a master-master way of serving the read and write requests that are inspired by Amazon's Dynamo.[7]

Contents

History

Apache Cassandra was developed at Facebook to power their Inbox Search feature by Avinash Lakshman (one of the authors of Amazon's Dynamo) and Prashant Malik. It was released as an open source project on Google code in July 2008.[4] In March 2009, it became an Apache Incubator project.[8] On February 17, 2010 it graduated to a top-level project.[1]
Facebook abandoned Cassandra in late 2010 when they built Facebook Messaging platform on HBase.[3]

Data model

A table in Cassandra is a distributed multidimensional map indexed by a key. The value is an object that is highly structured. The row key in a table is a string with no size restrictions, although typically 16 to 36 bytes long. Every operation under a single row key is atomic per replica no matter how many columns are being read or written into. Columns are grouped together into sets called column families very much similar to what happens in the BigTable system. Cassandra exposes two kinds of column families: Simple and Super. Super column families can be visualized as a column family within a column family. The top dimension in Cassandra is called Keyspace.

Therefore, Cassandra can handle maps with four or five dimensions:

Map with four dimensions:

  1. Keyspace → Column Family
  2. Column Family → Column Family Row
  3. Column Family Row → Columns
  4. Column → Data value

Map with five dimensions:

  1. Keyspace → Super Column Family
  2. Super Column Family → Super Column Family Row
  3. Super Column Family Row → Super Columns
  4. Super Column → Columns
  5. Column → Data value

The first dimension - Keyspace → (Super) Column Family - is limited to a (small) set of schema-predefined keys. Cassandra documentation mentions similarities of this dimension with the table definition inside a relational database.

Furthermore, applications can specify the sort order of columns within a Super Column or Simple Column family. The system allows columns to be sorted either by time or by name. Time sorting of columns is exploited by applications like Facebook Inbox Search, where the results are always displayed in time-sorted order. Any column within a column family is accessed using the convention column_family : column, and any column within a column family that is of type super is accessed using the convention column_family : super_column : column.

Clustering

When the cluster for Apache Cassandra is designed, an important point is to select the right partitioner. Two partitioners exist:[9]

  1. RandomPartitioner (RP): This partitioner randomly distributes the key-value pairs over the network, resulting in a good load balancing. Compared to OPP, more nodes have to be accessed to get a number of keys.
  2. OrderPreservingPartitioner (OPP): This partitioner distributes the key-value pairs in a natural way so that similar keys are not far away. The advantage is that fewer nodes have to be accessed. The drawback is the uneven distribution of the key-value pairs.

Features

Decentralized

Every node in the cluster has the same role. There is no single point of failure. Data is distributed across the cluster (so each node contains different data), but there is no master as every node can service any request.

Elasticity

Read and write throughput both increase linearly as new machines are added, with no downtime or interruption to applications.

Fault-tolerant

Data is automatically replicated to multiple nodes for fault-tolerance. Replication across multiple data centers is supported. Failed nodes can be replaced with no downtime.

Tunable consistency

Writes and reads offer a tunable level of consistency, all the way from "writes never fail" to "block for all replicas to be readable", with the quorum level in the middle.

Query Language

New for 0.8 is CQL (Cassandra Query Language), an SQL-alike alternative to the traditional RPC interface. Language drivers are available for Java (JDBC) and Python (DBAPI2).

Prominent users

See also

References

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  7. ^ Olivier Mallassi (2010-06-09). "Let’s play with Cassandra… (Part 1/3)". http://blog.octo.com/: OCTO Talks. http://blog.octo.com/en/nosql-lets-play-with-cassandra-part-13/. Retrieved 2010-03-22. "Hybrid firstly because Cassandra uses a column-oriented way of modeling data (inspired by the BigTable) and permit to use Hadoop Map/Reduce jobs and secondly because it uses patterns inspired by Dynamo like Eventually Consistent, Gossip protocols, a master-master way of serving both read and write requests…" 
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Bibliography

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