This document provides an overview of how to enable search capabilities in Cassandra applications using Datastax Enterprise (DSE). It discusses how DSE allows indexing and searching of Cassandra data by integrating the Solr/Lucene search engine. Specifically, it explains that with DSE, data remains stored in Cassandra while indexes are maintained in Solr/Lucene. This provides search capabilities without requiring ETL processes to migrate data out of Cassandra. The document includes code examples of how to define a table and secondary index in Cassandra to support full-text search on tags columns using DSE.

1. Lead Technical Evangelist- Datastax Enterprise
@RachelPedreschi
Rachel Pedreschi
Enabling Search in your Cassandra Application with Datastax Enterprise
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2. What is Search?
Confidential

3. Confidential

4. Confidential
The bright blue butterfly hangs on the breeze.
[the] [bright] [blue] [butterfly] [hangs] [on] [the] [breeze]
Terms

5. Confidential Credit: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/userexperience/conceptual/SearchKitConcepts/searchKit_basics/searchKit_basics.html

6. What is Solr Missing?
Not a
Database
Doesn’t
Cluster
Not
transparently
sharded
Requires ETL
to injest
application data
Doesn’t
Reindex

7. Confidential
Cassandra
✓Highly available
✓Linear scalability
✓Low latency OLTP queries

8. Confidential
+ =

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Its Not ETL,
Its Replication!C* C*
C*/
Solr

10. Data stored in Cassandra
Indexes stored in Solr/Lucene

11. Disk
Memory
Solr Cassandra

12. Disk
Memory
Mem-
Table
Index
Segments
Ram Buffer
Index
Segments
Index
Segments
Mem-
Table
Mem-
table
Index
Segments
SSTables
Commit
Log
Coordinator
Index
Segments
Shard Router
UPDATE videos (videoid, tags)
SET tags = {‘cat tubes’, ‘Al Gore’s Internet’,
‘NoSQL Fairytales’}
WHERE voided = b3a76c6b-7c7f-4af6-964f-803a9283c401

13. OSS Solr
Disk
Memory
Index
Segments
Ram Buffer
Index
Segments
Index
Segments
Index
Segments
Index
Segments
Not Searchable
Searchable

14. DSE Search
Disk
Memory
Index
Segments
Ram Buffer
Index
Segments
Index
Segments
Index
Segments
Index
Segments
Searchable

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Let’s see this in action!

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// Videos by id
CREATE TABLE videos (
videoid uuid,
userid uuid,
name text,
description text,
location text,
location_type int,
preview_image_location text,
tags set<text>,
added_date timestamp,
PRIMARY KEY (videoid)
);
How
can we search on tags?
// Index for tag keywords
CREATE TABLE videos_by_tag (
tag text,
videoid uuid,
added_date timestamp,
userid uuid,
name text,
preview_image_location text,
tagged_date timestamp,
PRIMARY KEY (tag, videoid)
);

17. Confidential
// Videos by id
CREATE TABLE videos (
videoid uuid,
userid uuid,
name text,
description text,
location text,
location_type int,
preview_image_location text,
tags set<text>,
added_date timestamp,
PRIMARY KEY (videoid)
);
Or this?
But what about this?

18. Confidential

19. Behind the scenes…
dse_tool
schema.xml
solrconfig.xml
CQL Query$ dsetool create_core killrvideo.videos generateResources=true
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<schema name="autoSolrSchema" version="1.5">
<types>
…
<fields>
<field indexed="true" multiValued="false" name="added_date" stored="true" type="TrieDateField"/>
<field indexed="true" multiValued="false" name="location" stored="true" type="TextField"/>
<field indexed="true" multiValued="false" name="preview_image_location" stored="true" type="TextField"/>
<field indexed="true" multiValued="false" name="name" termVectors="true" stored="true" type="TextField"/>
<field indexed="true" multiValued="true" name="tags" termVectors="true" stored="true" type="TextField"/>
<field indexed="true" multiValued="false" name="userid" stored="true" type="UUIDField"/>
<field indexed="true" multiValued="false" name="videoid" stored="true" type="UUIDField"/>
<field indexed="true" multiValued="false" name="location_type" stored="true" type="TrieIntField"/>
<field indexed="true" multiValued="false" name="description" termVectors="true" stored="true" type="TextField"/>
</fields>
<uniqueKey>videoid</uniqueKey>
</schema>
<!--
=======
Copyright DataStax, Inc.
Please see the included license file for details.
-->
<!--
For more details about configurations options that may appear in
this file, see http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrConfigXml.
-->
<config>
<!-- In all configuration below, a prefix of "solr." for class names
is an alias that causes solr to search appropriate packages,
including org.apache.solr.(search|update|request|core|analysis)
You may also specify a fully qualified Java classname if you
have your own custom plugins.
-->
…
SELECT * FROM killrvideo.videos
WHERE solr_query=‘name:*’

20. Thank you!
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