Hi Stephen,
this is a great idea but unfortunately doesn't work for us either as we can not store the data in an unencrypted form.

Kind regards
Matthias

On 10/12/2011 07:42 PM, Stephen Connolly wrote:
could you prefix the data with 3-4 bytes of a linear hash of the
unencypted data? it wouldn't be a perfect sort, but you'd have less of a
range to query to get the sorted values?

- Stephen

---
Sent from my Android phone, so random spelling mistakes, random nonsense
words and other nonsense are a direct result of using swype to type on
the screen

On 12 Oct 2011 17:57, "Matthias Pfau" <p...@l3s.de <mailto:p...@l3s.de>>
wrote:

    Unfortunately, that is not an option as we have to store the data in
    an compressed and encrypted and therefore binary and non-sortable form.

    On 10/12/2011 06:39 PM, David McNelis wrote:

        Is it an option to not convert the data to binary prior to inserting
        into Cassandra?  Also, how large are the strings you're sorting?
          If its
        viable to not convert to binary before writing to Cassandra, and
        you use
        one of the string based column ordering techniques (utf8, ascii, for
        example), then the data would be sorted without you  needing to
        specifically worry about that.  Of course, if the strings are
        lengthy
        you could run into  additional issues.

        On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 11:34 AM, Matthias Pfau <p...@l3s.de
        <mailto:p...@l3s.de>
        <mailto:p...@l3s.de <mailto:p...@l3s.de>>> wrote:

            Hi there,
            we are currently building a prototype based on cassandra and
        came
            into problems on implementing sorted lists containing
        millions of items.

            The special thing about the items of our lists is, that
        cassandra is
            not able to sort them as the data is stored in a binary
        format which
            is not sortable. However, we are able to sort the data
        before the
            plain data gets encoded (our application is responsible for
        the order).

            First Approach: Storing Lists in ColumnFamilies
            ***
            We first tried to map the list to a single row of a
        ColumnFamily in
            a way that the index of the list is mapped to the column
        names and
            the items of the list to the column values. The column names are
            increasing numbers which define the sort order.
            This has the major drawback that big parts of the list have
        to be
            rewritten on inserts (because the column names are numbered
        by their
            index), which are quite common.


            Second Approach: Storing the whole List as Binary Data:
            ***
            We tried to store the compressed list in a single column.
        However,
            this is only feasible for smaller lists. Our lists are far
        to big
            leading to multi megabyte reads and writes. As we need to
        read and
            update the lists quite often, this would put our Cassandra
        cluster
            under a lot of pressure.

            Ideal Solution: Native support for storing lists
            ***
            We would be very happy with a way to store a list of sorted
        values
            without making improper use of column names for the list
        index. This
            implies that we would need a possibility to insert values at
        defined
            positions. We know that this could lead to problems with
        concurrent
            inserts in a distributed environment, but this is handled by our
            application logic.


            What are your ideas on that?

            Thanks
            Matthias




        --
        *David McNelis*
        Lead Software Engineer
        Agentis Energy
        www.agentisenergy.com <http://www.agentisenergy.com>
        <http://www.agentisenergy.com>
        c: 219.384.5143 <tel:219.384.5143>

        /A Smart Grid technology company focused on helping consumers of
        energy
        control an often under-managed resource./




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