1.
The Cassandra Distributed Database
Eric Evans
eevans@rackspace.com
@jericevans
FOSDEM
February 7, 2010

2.
A prophetess in Troy during the Trojan War. Her predictions were
always true, but never believed.

3.
A massively scalable, decentralized, structured data store (aka
database).

4.
Outline
1 Project History
2 Description
3 Case Studies
4 Roadmap

5.
• 7 new committers added
• Dozens of contributors
• 100+ people on IRC
• Hundreds of closed issues (bugs, features, etc)
• 3 major releases, 2 point releases
• Graduation to TLP?

6.
Outline
1 Project History
2 Description
3 Case Studies
4 Roadmap

7.
Cassandra is...
• O(1) DHT
• Eventual consistency
• Tunable trade-offs, consistency vs. latency

8.
But...
• Values are structured, indexed
• Columns / column families
• Slicing w/ predicates (queries)

9.
Column families

10.
Supercolumn families

11.
Querying
• get(): retrieve by column name
• multiget(): by column name for a set of keys
• get slice(): by column name, or a range of names
• returning columns
• returning super columns
• multiget slice(): a subset of columns for a set of keys
• get count: number of columns or sub-columns
• get range slice(): subset of columns for a range of keys

12.
Column comparators
• TimeUUID
• LexicalUUID
• UTF8
• Long
• Bytes
• ...

13.
Updating
• insert(): add/update column (by key)
• batch insert(): add/update multiple columns (by key)
• remove(): remove a column
• batch mutate(): like batch insert() but can also delete
(new for 0.6, deprecates batch insert())
• Remove key range RSN

14.
Consistency
CAP Theorem: choose any two of Consistency, Availability, or
Partition tolerance.
• Zero
• One
• Quorum ((N / 2) + 1)
• All

15.
Client API
• Thrift (12 different languages!)
• Ruby
• http://github.com/fauna/cassandra/tree/master
• http://github.com/NZKoz/cassandra object/tree/master
• Python
• http://github.com/digg/lazyboy/tree/master
• http://github.com/driftx/Telephus/tree/master (Twisted)
• Scala
• http://github.com/viktorklang/Cassidy/tree/master
• http://github.com/nodeta/scalandra/tree/master

16.
Performance vs MySQL w/ 50GB
• MySQL
• 300ms write
• 350ms read
• Cassandra
• 0.12ms write
• 15ms read

17.
Writes

18.
About writes...
• No reads
• No seeks
• Sequential disk access
• Atomic within a column family
• Fast
• Any node
• Always writeable (hinted hand-off)

19.
Reads

20.
About reads...
• Any node
• Read repair
• Usual caching conventions apply

21.
Outline
1 Project History
2 Description
3 Case Studies
4 Roadmap

22.
Case 1: Digg
Digg is a social news site that allows people to discover and share
content from anywhere on the Internet by submitting stories and
links, and voting and commenting on submitted stories and links.
Ranked 98th by Alexa.com.

23.
Digg

24.
Problem
• Terabytes of data; high transaction rate (reads dominated)
• Multiple clusters; heavily sharded
• Management nightmare (high effort, error prone)
• Unsatisfied availability requirements (geographic isolation)

25.
Solution
• Currently production on ”Green Badges”
• Cassandra as primary data store RSN
• Datacenter and rack-aware replication

26.
Case 2: Twitter
Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that
enables its users to send and read tweets, text-based posts of up to
140 characters.
Ranked 12th by Alexa.com.

27.
Twitter

28.
MySQL
• Terabytes of data, ˜1,000,000 ops/s
• Calls for heavy sharding, light replication
• Schema changes are very difficult, (if possible at all)
• Manual sharding is very high effort
• Automated sharding and replication is Hard

29.
Case 3: Facebook
Facebook is a social networking site where users can create a
profile, add friends, and send them messages. Users can also join
groups organized by location or other points of common interest.
Ranked #2 by Alexa.com.

30.
Inbox Search
• 100 TB
• 160 nodes
• 1/2 billion writes per day (2yr old number?)

31.
Case 4: Mahalo
Mahalo.com is a web directory and knowledge exchange. It
differentiates itself by tracking and building hand-crafted result
sets for many of the popular search terms.
(it also means ”thank you” in Hawaiian)

32.
MySQL
• Partial deployment; 16 million video records (and growing)
• Writes (and storage) rapidly exceeding single box limitations
• Managability suffering (clustering is painful)
• Concerns over availability

33.
Outline
1 Project History
2 Description
3 Case Studies
4 Roadmap

34.
0.6
• batch mutate command
• authentication (basic)
• new consistency level, ANY
• fat client
• mmapped i/o reads (default on 64bit jvm)
• improved write concurrency (HH)
• networking optimizations
• row caching
• improved management tools
• per-keyspace replication factor

35.
0.7
• more efficient compactions (row sizes bigger than memory)
• easier (dynamic?) column family changes
• SSTable versioning
• SSTable compression
• support for column family truncation
• improved configuration handling
• remove key range command
• even more improved management tools
• vector clocks w/ server-side conflict resolution

36.
THE END