I have read the post on cages and it is definitely very interesting. But cages seems to be too coarse grained compared to an Atomic Compare and Swap on Cassandra column value. Cages would makes sense when one wants to do multiple atomic row, column updates. Also, I am not so sure about the scalability when it comes to using zookeeper for keeping locks on Cassandra columns... there would also be performance hit with an added RPC for every write. I feel Cages maybe fine for systems when one has few locks but I feel an atomic CAS in Cassandra would help us avoid distributed locking systems and zookeeper in many other simpler scenarios. For more complicated (transaction like) things, using Cages may be fine. Then again doing a read before write for CAS in cassandra will make CAS at least as slow as a read, which I believe will still be better than taking a single column lock from zookeeper.
What do other folks think in this regard? From whatever I have read, I believe CAS is feasible in Cassandra without hurting the normal write path performance. Only for CAS writes would we have to pay for the read before write penalty. I am going to do feasibility study for this and would love any pointers from others about this. Thanks, Rishi ________________________________ From: Rauan Maemirov <ra...@maemirov.com> To: dev@cassandra.apache.org Sent: Mon, June 21, 2010 11:27:02 AM Subject: Re: Atomic Compare and Swap Have you read this post? http://ria101.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/locking-and-transactions-over-cassandra-using-cages/ I guess, you will like it. 2010/6/22 Rishi Bhardwaj <khichri...@yahoo.com> > I am definitely interested in taking this work up. I believe the CAS > functionality would help in a lot of different scenarios and could help > avoid use of other external services (like zookeeper) to provide similar > functionality. I am new at Cassandra development and would really appreciate > pointers from the dev. community about how to approach/start on this > project. Also how feasible is the approach mentioned below to implement the > CAS functionality? It would be great if we could have a discussion on the > pros and cons. > > Thanks, > Rishi > > > > ________________________________ > From: Sriram Srinivasan <sri...@malhar.net> > To: dev@cassandra.apache.org > Sent: Sun, June 20, 2010 9:47:37 PM > Subject: Re: Atomic Compare and Swap > > > I too am interested in a CAS facility. > > I like Rishi's proposal. One could simply use a version number as the > logical timestamp. If we promote CAS to a consistency level, it would rate > higher than a quorum. One pays the price for a more complex write path to > obtain the requisite guarantee. > > > On Jun 21, 2010, at 4:03 AM, Rishi Bhardwaj wrote: > > > > > Heres another thought I had, if say the user always wrote with quorum (or > to all) nodes then can't we implement CAS (compare and swap) assuming that > user employs logical timestamp and Cassandra doesn't allow writes to a > column with same or older timestamp. Here's the scenario I am thinking > about: > > Say we use logical timestamp for a column value and lets assume the > current timestamp is t. Now say two clients read this column and generate > concurrent CAS (compare and swap) operations on timestamp t and for both the > writes the resulting new timestamp would become (t+1). Now if we don't allow > writes to a column with same timestamp then only one of these writes would > succeed. Of course another assumption is that if a third CAS write with > compare on logical timestamp (t - 1) came in, that would be denied as I > believe Cassandra doesn't allow "older" writes to win over "newer" writes. > Do you think such a thing can be accomplished? > > > >
