Re: 10000+ CF support from Cassandra

2015-06-24 Thread Arun Chaitanya
 any ideas or advises?

On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 10:55 AM, Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com
wrote:

 Hello All,

 Now we settled on the following approach. I want to know if there are any
 problems that you foresee in the production environment.

 Our Approach: Use  Off Heap Memory

 Modifications to default cassandra.yaml and cassandra-env.sh
 
  * memory_allocator: JEMallocAllocator 
 (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-7883)
  * memtable_allocation_type: offheap_objects

  By above two, the slab allocation 
 (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-5935), which requires
  1MB heap memory per table, is disabled. The memory for table metadata, 
 caches and memtable are thus
  allocated natively and does not affect GC performance.

  * tombstone_failure_threshold: 1

Without this, C* throws TombstoneOverwhelmingException while in startup.
This setting looks problematic so I want to know why just creating tables 
 makes so many tombstones ...

  * -XX:+UseG1GC

It is good for reducing GC time.
Without this, full GCs  1s are observed.

 We created 5000 column families with about 1000 entries per column family.
 The read/write performance seems to stable.
 The problem we saw is with startup time.

  Cassandra Start Time (s) 20



 349  Average CPU Usage (%) 40



 49.65  GC Actitivy (%) 2.6



 0.6
 Thanks a lot in advance.

 On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 11:26 AM, graham sanderson gra...@vast.com wrote:

  I strongly advise against this approach.
 Jon, I think so too. But so you actually foresee any problems with this
 approach?
 I can think of a few. [I want to evaluate if we can live with this
 problem]


 Just to be clear, I’m not saying this is a great approach, I AM saying
 that it may be better than having 1+ CFs, which was the original
 question (it really depends on the use case which wasn’t well defined)… map
 size limit may be a problem, and then there is the CQL vs thrift question
 which could start a flame war; ideally CQL maps should give you the same
 flexibility as arbitrary thrift columns

 On Jun 1, 2015, at 9:44 PM, Jonathan Haddad j...@jonhaddad.com wrote:

  Sorry for this naive question but how important is this tuning? Can
 this have a huge impact in production?

 Massive.  Here's a graph of when we did some JVM tuning at my previous
 company:


 http://33.media.tumblr.com/5d0efca7288dc969c1ac4fc3d36e0151/tumblr_inline_mzvj254quj1rd24f4.png

 About an order of magnitude difference in performance.

 Jon

 On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:20 PM Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Thanks Jon and Jack,

  I strongly advise against this approach.
 Jon, I think so too. But so you actually foresee any problems with this
 approach?
 I can think of a few. [I want to evaluate if we can live with this
 problem]

- No more CQL.
- No data types, everything needs to be a blob.
- Limited clustering Keys and default clustering order.

  First off, different workloads need different tuning.
 Sorry for this naive question but how important is this tuning? Can
 this have a huge impact in production?

  You might want to consider a model where you have an application layer
 that maps logical tenant tables into partition keys within a single large
 Casandra table, or at least a relatively small number of  Cassandra tables.
 It will depend on the typical size of your tenant tables - very small ones
 would make sense within a single partition, while larger ones should have
 separate partitions for a tenant's data. The key here is that tables are
 expensive, but partitions are cheap and scale very well with Cassandra.
 We are actually trying similar approach. But we don't want to expose
 this to application layer. We are attempting to hide this and provide an
 API.

  Finally, you said 10 clusters, but did you mean 10 nodes? You might
 want to consider a model where you do indeed have multiple clusters, where
 each handles a fraction of the tenants, since there is no need for separate
 tenants to be on the same cluster.
 I meant 10 clusters. We want to split our tables across multiple
 clusters if above approach is not possible. [But it seems to be very costly]

 Thanks,







 On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 5:49 AM, Jack Krupansky 
 jack.krupan...@gmail.com wrote:

 How big is each of the tables - are they all fairly small or fairly
 large? Small as in no more than thousands of rows or large as in tens of
 millions or hundreds of millions of rows?

 Small tables are are not ideal for a Cassandra cluster since the rows
 would be spread out across the nodes, even though it might make more sense
 for each small table to be on a single node.

 You might want to consider a model where you have an application layer
 that maps logical tenant tables into partition keys within a single large
 Casandra table, or at least a relatively small number of Cassandra tables.
 It will depend on the 

Re: 10000+ CF support from Cassandra

2015-06-24 Thread Jack Krupansky
By entries, do you mean rows or columns? Please clarify how many columns
each of your tables has, and how many rows you are populating for each
table.

In case I didn't make it clear earlier, limit yourself to low hundreds
(like 250) of tables and you should be fine. Thousands of tables is a clear
anti-pattern for Cassandra - not recommended. If it works for you, great,
but if not, don't say you weren't warned.

Disabling of slab allocation is an expert-only feature - its use is
generally an anti-pattern, not recommended.

-- Jack Krupansky

On Sun, Jun 21, 2015 at 10:55 PM, Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com
wrote:

 Hello All,

 Now we settled on the following approach. I want to know if there are any
 problems that you foresee in the production environment.

 Our Approach: Use  Off Heap Memory

 Modifications to default cassandra.yaml and cassandra-env.sh
 
  * memory_allocator: JEMallocAllocator 
 (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-7883)
  * memtable_allocation_type: offheap_objects

  By above two, the slab allocation 
 (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-5935), which requires
  1MB heap memory per table, is disabled. The memory for table metadata, 
 caches and memtable are thus
  allocated natively and does not affect GC performance.

  * tombstone_failure_threshold: 1

Without this, C* throws TombstoneOverwhelmingException while in startup.
This setting looks problematic so I want to know why just creating tables 
 makes so many tombstones ...

  * -XX:+UseG1GC

It is good for reducing GC time.
Without this, full GCs  1s are observed.

 We created 5000 column families with about 1000 entries per column family.
 The read/write performance seems to stable.
 The problem we saw is with startup time.

  Cassandra Start Time (s) 20



 349  Average CPU Usage (%) 40



 49.65  GC Actitivy (%) 2.6



 0.6
 Thanks a lot in advance.

 On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 11:26 AM, graham sanderson gra...@vast.com wrote:

  I strongly advise against this approach.
 Jon, I think so too. But so you actually foresee any problems with this
 approach?
 I can think of a few. [I want to evaluate if we can live with this
 problem]


 Just to be clear, I’m not saying this is a great approach, I AM saying
 that it may be better than having 1+ CFs, which was the original
 question (it really depends on the use case which wasn’t well defined)… map
 size limit may be a problem, and then there is the CQL vs thrift question
 which could start a flame war; ideally CQL maps should give you the same
 flexibility as arbitrary thrift columns

 On Jun 1, 2015, at 9:44 PM, Jonathan Haddad j...@jonhaddad.com wrote:

  Sorry for this naive question but how important is this tuning? Can
 this have a huge impact in production?

 Massive.  Here's a graph of when we did some JVM tuning at my previous
 company:


 http://33.media.tumblr.com/5d0efca7288dc969c1ac4fc3d36e0151/tumblr_inline_mzvj254quj1rd24f4.png

 About an order of magnitude difference in performance.

 Jon

 On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:20 PM Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Thanks Jon and Jack,

  I strongly advise against this approach.
 Jon, I think so too. But so you actually foresee any problems with this
 approach?
 I can think of a few. [I want to evaluate if we can live with this
 problem]

- No more CQL.
- No data types, everything needs to be a blob.
- Limited clustering Keys and default clustering order.

  First off, different workloads need different tuning.
 Sorry for this naive question but how important is this tuning? Can
 this have a huge impact in production?

  You might want to consider a model where you have an application layer
 that maps logical tenant tables into partition keys within a single large
 Casandra table, or at least a relatively small number of  Cassandra tables.
 It will depend on the typical size of your tenant tables - very small ones
 would make sense within a single partition, while larger ones should have
 separate partitions for a tenant's data. The key here is that tables are
 expensive, but partitions are cheap and scale very well with Cassandra.
 We are actually trying similar approach. But we don't want to expose
 this to application layer. We are attempting to hide this and provide an
 API.

  Finally, you said 10 clusters, but did you mean 10 nodes? You might
 want to consider a model where you do indeed have multiple clusters, where
 each handles a fraction of the tenants, since there is no need for separate
 tenants to be on the same cluster.
 I meant 10 clusters. We want to split our tables across multiple
 clusters if above approach is not possible. [But it seems to be very costly]

 Thanks,







 On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 5:49 AM, Jack Krupansky 
 jack.krupan...@gmail.com wrote:

 How big is each of the tables - are they all fairly small or fairly
 large? Small as in no more than thousands 

Re: 10000+ CF support from Cassandra

2015-06-24 Thread Arun Chaitanya
Hi Jack,

When I mean entries, I meant rows. Each column family has about 200 columns.

 Disabling of slab allocation is an expert-only feature - its use is
generally an anti-pattern, not recommended.
I understand this and have seen this recommendation at several places. I
want to understand the consequences? Is it performance, maintenance or
scalability, that is at stake.

In our use case we have about 3000 column families (ofcourse modelled in
RDBMS). If I were to limit to 250 column families, do you advise us to use
multiple clusters (the problem being cost ineffective)?

If we were to use a single cluster and support 3000 column families, the
only idea is to group few column families and store them in one column
family. In this case, grouping is a difficult task, imo. And if we want an
abstraction of grouping for developer, we need special connector for
Hadoop/Spark systems. So I do not want to enter this territory.

Sorry for such questions, but I am still wondering if I am the only one
facing this problem.

Thanks a lot,
Arun



On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 10:28 PM, Jack Krupansky jack.krupan...@gmail.com
wrote:

 By entries, do you mean rows or columns? Please clarify how many columns
 each of your tables has, and how many rows you are populating for each
 table.

 In case I didn't make it clear earlier, limit yourself to low hundreds
 (like 250) of tables and you should be fine. Thousands of tables is a clear
 anti-pattern for Cassandra - not recommended. If it works for you, great,
 but if not, don't say you weren't warned.

 Disabling of slab allocation is an expert-only feature - its use is
 generally an anti-pattern, not recommended.

 -- Jack Krupansky

 On Sun, Jun 21, 2015 at 10:55 PM, Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Hello All,

 Now we settled on the following approach. I want to know if there are any
 problems that you foresee in the production environment.

 Our Approach: Use  Off Heap Memory

 Modifications to default cassandra.yaml and cassandra-env.sh
 
  * memory_allocator: JEMallocAllocator 
 (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-7883)
  * memtable_allocation_type: offheap_objects

  By above two, the slab allocation 
 (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-5935), which requires
  1MB heap memory per table, is disabled. The memory for table metadata, 
 caches and memtable are thus
  allocated natively and does not affect GC performance.

  * tombstone_failure_threshold: 1

Without this, C* throws TombstoneOverwhelmingException while in startup.
This setting looks problematic so I want to know why just creating tables 
 makes so many tombstones ...

  * -XX:+UseG1GC

It is good for reducing GC time.
Without this, full GCs  1s are observed.

 We created 5000 column families with about 1000 entries per column
 family. The read/write performance seems to stable.
 The problem we saw is with startup time.

  Cassandra Start Time (s) 20



 349  Average CPU Usage (%) 40



 49.65  GC Actitivy (%) 2.6



 0.6
 Thanks a lot in advance.

 On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 11:26 AM, graham sanderson gra...@vast.com
 wrote:

  I strongly advise against this approach.
 Jon, I think so too. But so you actually foresee any problems with this
 approach?
 I can think of a few. [I want to evaluate if we can live with this
 problem]


 Just to be clear, I’m not saying this is a great approach, I AM saying
 that it may be better than having 1+ CFs, which was the original
 question (it really depends on the use case which wasn’t well defined)… map
 size limit may be a problem, and then there is the CQL vs thrift question
 which could start a flame war; ideally CQL maps should give you the same
 flexibility as arbitrary thrift columns

 On Jun 1, 2015, at 9:44 PM, Jonathan Haddad j...@jonhaddad.com wrote:

  Sorry for this naive question but how important is this tuning? Can
 this have a huge impact in production?

 Massive.  Here's a graph of when we did some JVM tuning at my previous
 company:


 http://33.media.tumblr.com/5d0efca7288dc969c1ac4fc3d36e0151/tumblr_inline_mzvj254quj1rd24f4.png

 About an order of magnitude difference in performance.

 Jon

 On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:20 PM Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Thanks Jon and Jack,

  I strongly advise against this approach.
 Jon, I think so too. But so you actually foresee any problems with this
 approach?
 I can think of a few. [I want to evaluate if we can live with this
 problem]

- No more CQL.
- No data types, everything needs to be a blob.
- Limited clustering Keys and default clustering order.

  First off, different workloads need different tuning.
 Sorry for this naive question but how important is this tuning? Can
 this have a huge impact in production?

  You might want to consider a model where you have an application
 layer that maps logical tenant tables into partition keys within a single
 

Re: 10000+ CF support from Cassandra

2015-06-24 Thread Jack Krupansky
I would say that it's mostly a performance issue, tied to memory
management, but the main problem is that a large number of tables invites a
whole host of clluster management difficulties that require... expert
attention, which then means you need an expert to maintain and enhance it.

Cassandra scales in two ways: number of rows and number of nodes, but not
number of tables. Both number of tables and number of columns per row need
to be kept moderate for your cluster to be manageable and perform well.

Adding a tenant ID to your table partition key is the optimal approach to
multi-tenancy at this stage with Cassandra. That, and maybe also assigning
subsets of the tenants to different tables, as well as having separate
clusters if your number of tenants and rows gets too large.

-- Jack Krupansky

On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 11:55 AM, Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com
wrote:

 Hi Jack,

 When I mean entries, I meant rows. Each column family has about 200
 columns.

  Disabling of slab allocation is an expert-only feature - its use is
 generally an anti-pattern, not recommended.
 I understand this and have seen this recommendation at several places. I
 want to understand the consequences? Is it performance, maintenance or
 scalability, that is at stake.

 In our use case we have about 3000 column families (ofcourse modelled in
 RDBMS). If I were to limit to 250 column families, do you advise us to use
 multiple clusters (the problem being cost ineffective)?

 If we were to use a single cluster and support 3000 column families, the
 only idea is to group few column families and store them in one column
 family. In this case, grouping is a difficult task, imo. And if we want an
 abstraction of grouping for developer, we need special connector for
 Hadoop/Spark systems. So I do not want to enter this territory.

 Sorry for such questions, but I am still wondering if I am the only one
 facing this problem.

 Thanks a lot,
 Arun



 On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 10:28 PM, Jack Krupansky jack.krupan...@gmail.com
  wrote:

 By entries, do you mean rows or columns? Please clarify how many columns
 each of your tables has, and how many rows you are populating for each
 table.

 In case I didn't make it clear earlier, limit yourself to low hundreds
 (like 250) of tables and you should be fine. Thousands of tables is a clear
 anti-pattern for Cassandra - not recommended. If it works for you, great,
 but if not, don't say you weren't warned.

 Disabling of slab allocation is an expert-only feature - its use is
 generally an anti-pattern, not recommended.

 -- Jack Krupansky

 On Sun, Jun 21, 2015 at 10:55 PM, Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com
  wrote:

 Hello All,

 Now we settled on the following approach. I want to know if there are
 any problems that you foresee in the production environment.

 Our Approach: Use  Off Heap Memory

 Modifications to default cassandra.yaml and cassandra-env.sh
 
  * memory_allocator: JEMallocAllocator 
 (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-7883)
  * memtable_allocation_type: offheap_objects

  By above two, the slab allocation 
 (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-5935), which requires
  1MB heap memory per table, is disabled. The memory for table metadata, 
 caches and memtable are thus
  allocated natively and does not affect GC performance.

  * tombstone_failure_threshold: 1

Without this, C* throws TombstoneOverwhelmingException while in startup.
This setting looks problematic so I want to know why just creating 
 tables makes so many tombstones ...

  * -XX:+UseG1GC

It is good for reducing GC time.
Without this, full GCs  1s are observed.

 We created 5000 column families with about 1000 entries per column
 family. The read/write performance seems to stable.
 The problem we saw is with startup time.

  Cassandra Start Time (s) 20



 349  Average CPU Usage (%) 40



 49.65  GC Actitivy (%) 2.6



 0.6
 Thanks a lot in advance.

 On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 11:26 AM, graham sanderson gra...@vast.com
 wrote:

  I strongly advise against this approach.
 Jon, I think so too. But so you actually foresee any problems with
 this approach?
 I can think of a few. [I want to evaluate if we can live with this
 problem]


 Just to be clear, I’m not saying this is a great approach, I AM saying
 that it may be better than having 1+ CFs, which was the original
 question (it really depends on the use case which wasn’t well defined)… map
 size limit may be a problem, and then there is the CQL vs thrift question
 which could start a flame war; ideally CQL maps should give you the same
 flexibility as arbitrary thrift columns

 On Jun 1, 2015, at 9:44 PM, Jonathan Haddad j...@jonhaddad.com wrote:

  Sorry for this naive question but how important is this tuning? Can
 this have a huge impact in production?

 Massive.  Here's a graph of when we did some JVM tuning at my previous
 company:

Re: 10000+ CF support from Cassandra

2015-06-21 Thread Arun Chaitanya
Hello All,

Now we settled on the following approach. I want to know if there are any
problems that you foresee in the production environment.

Our Approach: Use  Off Heap Memory

Modifications to default cassandra.yaml and cassandra-env.sh

 * memory_allocator: JEMallocAllocator
(https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-7883)
 * memtable_allocation_type: offheap_objects

 By above two, the slab allocation
(https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-5935), which requires
 1MB heap memory per table, is disabled. The memory for table
metadata, caches and memtable are thus
 allocated natively and does not affect GC performance.

 * tombstone_failure_threshold: 1

   Without this, C* throws TombstoneOverwhelmingException while in startup.
   This setting looks problematic so I want to know why just creating
tables makes so many tombstones ...

 * -XX:+UseG1GC

   It is good for reducing GC time.
   Without this, full GCs  1s are observed.

We created 5000 column families with about 1000 entries per column family.
The read/write performance seems to stable.
The problem we saw is with startup time.

 Cassandra Start Time (s) 20



349  Average CPU Usage (%) 40



49.65  GC Actitivy (%) 2.6



0.6
Thanks a lot in advance.

On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 11:26 AM, graham sanderson gra...@vast.com wrote:

  I strongly advise against this approach.
 Jon, I think so too. But so you actually foresee any problems with this
 approach?
 I can think of a few. [I want to evaluate if we can live with this
 problem]


 Just to be clear, I’m not saying this is a great approach, I AM saying
 that it may be better than having 1+ CFs, which was the original
 question (it really depends on the use case which wasn’t well defined)… map
 size limit may be a problem, and then there is the CQL vs thrift question
 which could start a flame war; ideally CQL maps should give you the same
 flexibility as arbitrary thrift columns

 On Jun 1, 2015, at 9:44 PM, Jonathan Haddad j...@jonhaddad.com wrote:

  Sorry for this naive question but how important is this tuning? Can
 this have a huge impact in production?

 Massive.  Here's a graph of when we did some JVM tuning at my previous
 company:


 http://33.media.tumblr.com/5d0efca7288dc969c1ac4fc3d36e0151/tumblr_inline_mzvj254quj1rd24f4.png

 About an order of magnitude difference in performance.

 Jon

 On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:20 PM Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Thanks Jon and Jack,

  I strongly advise against this approach.
 Jon, I think so too. But so you actually foresee any problems with this
 approach?
 I can think of a few. [I want to evaluate if we can live with this
 problem]

- No more CQL.
- No data types, everything needs to be a blob.
- Limited clustering Keys and default clustering order.

  First off, different workloads need different tuning.
 Sorry for this naive question but how important is this tuning? Can this
 have a huge impact in production?

  You might want to consider a model where you have an application layer
 that maps logical tenant tables into partition keys within a single large
 Casandra table, or at least a relatively small number of  Cassandra tables.
 It will depend on the typical size of your tenant tables - very small ones
 would make sense within a single partition, while larger ones should have
 separate partitions for a tenant's data. The key here is that tables are
 expensive, but partitions are cheap and scale very well with Cassandra.
 We are actually trying similar approach. But we don't want to expose this
 to application layer. We are attempting to hide this and provide an API.

  Finally, you said 10 clusters, but did you mean 10 nodes? You might
 want to consider a model where you do indeed have multiple clusters, where
 each handles a fraction of the tenants, since there is no need for separate
 tenants to be on the same cluster.
 I meant 10 clusters. We want to split our tables across multiple clusters
 if above approach is not possible. [But it seems to be very costly]

 Thanks,







 On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 5:49 AM, Jack Krupansky jack.krupan...@gmail.com
  wrote:

 How big is each of the tables - are they all fairly small or fairly
 large? Small as in no more than thousands of rows or large as in tens of
 millions or hundreds of millions of rows?

 Small tables are are not ideal for a Cassandra cluster since the rows
 would be spread out across the nodes, even though it might make more sense
 for each small table to be on a single node.

 You might want to consider a model where you have an application layer
 that maps logical tenant tables into partition keys within a single large
 Casandra table, or at least a relatively small number of Cassandra tables.
 It will depend on the typical size of your tenant tables - very small ones
 would make sense within a single partition, while larger ones should have
 separate partitions 

Re: 10000+ CF support from Cassandra

2015-06-01 Thread Jonathan Haddad
 Sorry for this naive question but how important is this tuning? Can this
have a huge impact in production?

Massive.  Here's a graph of when we did some JVM tuning at my previous
company:

http://33.media.tumblr.com/5d0efca7288dc969c1ac4fc3d36e0151/tumblr_inline_mzvj254quj1rd24f4.png

About an order of magnitude difference in performance.

Jon

On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:20 PM Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com
wrote:

 Thanks Jon and Jack,

  I strongly advise against this approach.
 Jon, I think so too. But so you actually foresee any problems with this
 approach?
 I can think of a few. [I want to evaluate if we can live with this problem]

- No more CQL.
- No data types, everything needs to be a blob.
- Limited clustering Keys and default clustering order.

  First off, different workloads need different tuning.
 Sorry for this naive question but how important is this tuning? Can this
 have a huge impact in production?

  You might want to consider a model where you have an application layer
 that maps logical tenant tables into partition keys within a single large
 Casandra table, or at least a relatively small number of  Cassandra tables.
 It will depend on the typical size of your tenant tables - very small ones
 would make sense within a single partition, while larger ones should have
 separate partitions for a tenant's data. The key here is that tables are
 expensive, but partitions are cheap and scale very well with Cassandra.
 We are actually trying similar approach. But we don't want to expose this
 to application layer. We are attempting to hide this and provide an API.

  Finally, you said 10 clusters, but did you mean 10 nodes? You might
 want to consider a model where you do indeed have multiple clusters, where
 each handles a fraction of the tenants, since there is no need for separate
 tenants to be on the same cluster.
 I meant 10 clusters. We want to split our tables across multiple clusters
 if above approach is not possible. [But it seems to be very costly]

 Thanks,







 On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 5:49 AM, Jack Krupansky jack.krupan...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 How big is each of the tables - are they all fairly small or fairly
 large? Small as in no more than thousands of rows or large as in tens of
 millions or hundreds of millions of rows?

 Small tables are are not ideal for a Cassandra cluster since the rows
 would be spread out across the nodes, even though it might make more sense
 for each small table to be on a single node.

 You might want to consider a model where you have an application layer
 that maps logical tenant tables into partition keys within a single large
 Casandra table, or at least a relatively small number of Cassandra tables.
 It will depend on the typical size of your tenant tables - very small ones
 would make sense within a single partition, while larger ones should have
 separate partitions for a tenant's data. The key here is that tables are
 expensive, but partitions are cheap and scale very well with Cassandra.

 Finally, you said 10 clusters, but did you mean 10 nodes? You might
 want to consider a model where you do indeed have multiple clusters, where
 each handles a fraction of the tenants, since there is no need for separate
 tenants to be on the same cluster.


 -- Jack Krupansky

 On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 11:32 PM, Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com
  wrote:

 Good Day Everyone,

 I am very happy with the (almost) linear scalability offered by C*. We
 had a lot of problems with RDBMS.

 But, I heard that C* has a limit on number of column families that can
 be created in a single cluster.
 The reason being each CF stores 1-2 MB on the JVM heap.

 In our use case, we have about 1+ CF and we want to support
 multi-tenancy.
 (i.e 1 * no of tenants)

 We are new to C* and being from RDBMS background, I would like to
 understand how to tackle this scenario from your advice.

 Our plan is to use Off-Heap memtable approach.
 http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/off-heap-memtables-in-Cassandra-2-1

 Each node in the cluster has following configuration
 16 GB machine (8GB Cassandra JVM + 2GB System + 6GB Off-Heap)
 IMO, this should be able to support 1000 CF with no(very less) impact on
 performance and startup time.

 We tackle multi-tenancy using different keyspaces.(Solution I found on
 the web)

 Using this approach we can have 10 clusters doing the job. (We actually
 are worried about the cost)

 Can you please help us evaluate this strategy? I want to hear
 communities opinion on this.

 My major concerns being,

 1. Is Off-Heap strategy safe and my assumption of 16 GB supporting 1000
 CF right?

 2. Can we use multiple keyspaces to solve multi-tenancy? IMO, the number
 of column families increase even when we use multiple keyspace.

 3. I understand the complexity using multi-cluster for single
 application. The code base will get tightly coupled with infrastructure. Is
 this the right approach?

 Any suggestion is appreciated.

 

Re: 10000+ CF support from Cassandra

2015-06-01 Thread Arun Chaitanya
Thanks Jon and Jack,

 I strongly advise against this approach.
Jon, I think so too. But so you actually foresee any problems with this
approach?
I can think of a few. [I want to evaluate if we can live with this problem]

   - No more CQL.
   - No data types, everything needs to be a blob.
   - Limited clustering Keys and default clustering order.

 First off, different workloads need different tuning.
Sorry for this naive question but how important is this tuning? Can this
have a huge impact in production?

 You might want to consider a model where you have an application layer
that maps logical tenant tables into partition keys within a single large
Casandra table, or at least a relatively small number of  Cassandra tables.
It will depend on the typical size of your tenant tables - very small ones
would make sense within a single partition, while larger ones should have
separate partitions for a tenant's data. The key here is that tables are
expensive, but partitions are cheap and scale very well with Cassandra.
We are actually trying similar approach. But we don't want to expose this
to application layer. We are attempting to hide this and provide an API.

 Finally, you said 10 clusters, but did you mean 10 nodes? You might
want to consider a model where you do indeed have multiple clusters, where
each handles a fraction of the tenants, since there is no need for separate
tenants to be on the same cluster.
I meant 10 clusters. We want to split our tables across multiple clusters
if above approach is not possible. [But it seems to be very costly]

Thanks,







On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 5:49 AM, Jack Krupansky jack.krupan...@gmail.com
wrote:

 How big is each of the tables - are they all fairly small or fairly large?
 Small as in no more than thousands of rows or large as in tens of millions
 or hundreds of millions of rows?

 Small tables are are not ideal for a Cassandra cluster since the rows
 would be spread out across the nodes, even though it might make more sense
 for each small table to be on a single node.

 You might want to consider a model where you have an application layer
 that maps logical tenant tables into partition keys within a single large
 Casandra table, or at least a relatively small number of Cassandra tables.
 It will depend on the typical size of your tenant tables - very small ones
 would make sense within a single partition, while larger ones should have
 separate partitions for a tenant's data. The key here is that tables are
 expensive, but partitions are cheap and scale very well with Cassandra.

 Finally, you said 10 clusters, but did you mean 10 nodes? You might want
 to consider a model where you do indeed have multiple clusters, where each
 handles a fraction of the tenants, since there is no need for separate
 tenants to be on the same cluster.


 -- Jack Krupansky

 On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 11:32 PM, Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Good Day Everyone,

 I am very happy with the (almost) linear scalability offered by C*. We
 had a lot of problems with RDBMS.

 But, I heard that C* has a limit on number of column families that can be
 created in a single cluster.
 The reason being each CF stores 1-2 MB on the JVM heap.

 In our use case, we have about 1+ CF and we want to support
 multi-tenancy.
 (i.e 1 * no of tenants)

 We are new to C* and being from RDBMS background, I would like to
 understand how to tackle this scenario from your advice.

 Our plan is to use Off-Heap memtable approach.
 http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/off-heap-memtables-in-Cassandra-2-1

 Each node in the cluster has following configuration
 16 GB machine (8GB Cassandra JVM + 2GB System + 6GB Off-Heap)
 IMO, this should be able to support 1000 CF with no(very less) impact on
 performance and startup time.

 We tackle multi-tenancy using different keyspaces.(Solution I found on
 the web)

 Using this approach we can have 10 clusters doing the job. (We actually
 are worried about the cost)

 Can you please help us evaluate this strategy? I want to hear communities
 opinion on this.

 My major concerns being,

 1. Is Off-Heap strategy safe and my assumption of 16 GB supporting 1000
 CF right?

 2. Can we use multiple keyspaces to solve multi-tenancy? IMO, the number
 of column families increase even when we use multiple keyspace.

 3. I understand the complexity using multi-cluster for single
 application. The code base will get tightly coupled with infrastructure. Is
 this the right approach?

 Any suggestion is appreciated.

 Thanks,
 Arun





Re: 10000+ CF support from Cassandra

2015-06-01 Thread graham sanderson
  I strongly advise against this approach.
 Jon, I think so too. But so you actually foresee any problems with this 
 approach?
 I can think of a few. [I want to evaluate if we can live with this problem]
Just to be clear, I’m not saying this is a great approach, I AM saying that it 
may be better than having 1+ CFs, which was the original question (it 
really depends on the use case which wasn’t well defined)… map size limit may 
be a problem, and then there is the CQL vs thrift question which could start a 
flame war; ideally CQL maps should give you the same flexibility as arbitrary 
thrift columns

 On Jun 1, 2015, at 9:44 PM, Jonathan Haddad j...@jonhaddad.com wrote:
 
  Sorry for this naive question but how important is this tuning? Can this 
  have a huge impact in production?
 
 Massive.  Here's a graph of when we did some JVM tuning at my previous 
 company: 
 
 http://33.media.tumblr.com/5d0efca7288dc969c1ac4fc3d36e0151/tumblr_inline_mzvj254quj1rd24f4.png
  
 http://33.media.tumblr.com/5d0efca7288dc969c1ac4fc3d36e0151/tumblr_inline_mzvj254quj1rd24f4.png
 
 About an order of magnitude difference in performance.
 
 Jon
 
 On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:20 PM Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com 
 mailto:chaitan64a...@gmail.com wrote:
 Thanks Jon and Jack,
 
  I strongly advise against this approach.
 Jon, I think so too. But so you actually foresee any problems with this 
 approach?
 I can think of a few. [I want to evaluate if we can live with this problem]
 No more CQL. 
 No data types, everything needs to be a blob.
 Limited clustering Keys and default clustering order.
  First off, different workloads need different tuning.
 Sorry for this naive question but how important is this tuning? Can this have 
 a huge impact in production?
 
  You might want to consider a model where you have an application layer that 
  maps logical tenant tables into partition keys within a single large 
  Casandra table, or at least a relatively small number of  Cassandra tables. 
  It will depend on the typical size of your tenant tables - very small ones 
  would make sense within a single partition, while larger ones should have 
  separate partitions for a tenant's data. The key here is that tables are 
  expensive, but partitions are cheap and scale very well with Cassandra.
 We are actually trying similar approach. But we don't want to expose this to 
 application layer. We are attempting to hide this and provide an API.
 
  Finally, you said 10 clusters, but did you mean 10 nodes? You might want 
  to consider a model where you do indeed have multiple clusters, where each 
  handles a fraction of the tenants, since there is no need for separate 
  tenants to be on the same cluster.
 I meant 10 clusters. We want to split our tables across multiple clusters if 
 above approach is not possible. [But it seems to be very costly]
 
 Thanks,
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 5:49 AM, Jack Krupansky jack.krupan...@gmail.com 
 mailto:jack.krupan...@gmail.com wrote:
 How big is each of the tables - are they all fairly small or fairly large? 
 Small as in no more than thousands of rows or large as in tens of millions or 
 hundreds of millions of rows?
 
 Small tables are are not ideal for a Cassandra cluster since the rows would 
 be spread out across the nodes, even though it might make more sense for each 
 small table to be on a single node.
 
 You might want to consider a model where you have an application layer that 
 maps logical tenant tables into partition keys within a single large Casandra 
 table, or at least a relatively small number of Cassandra tables. It will 
 depend on the typical size of your tenant tables - very small ones would make 
 sense within a single partition, while larger ones should have separate 
 partitions for a tenant's data. The key here is that tables are expensive, 
 but partitions are cheap and scale very well with Cassandra.
 
 Finally, you said 10 clusters, but did you mean 10 nodes? You might want to 
 consider a model where you do indeed have multiple clusters, where each 
 handles a fraction of the tenants, since there is no need for separate 
 tenants to be on the same cluster.
 
 
 -- Jack Krupansky
 
 On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 11:32 PM, Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com 
 mailto:chaitan64a...@gmail.com wrote:
 Good Day Everyone,
 
 I am very happy with the (almost) linear scalability offered by C*. We had a 
 lot of problems with RDBMS.
 
 But, I heard that C* has a limit on number of column families that can be 
 created in a single cluster.
 The reason being each CF stores 1-2 MB on the JVM heap.
 
 In our use case, we have about 1+ CF and we want to support multi-tenancy.
 (i.e 1 * no of tenants)
 
 We are new to C* and being from RDBMS background, I would like to understand 
 how to tackle this scenario from your advice.
 
 Our plan is to use Off-Heap memtable approach.
 http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/off-heap-memtables-in-Cassandra-2-1 
 

Re: 10000+ CF support from Cassandra

2015-05-28 Thread Jack Krupansky
How big is each of the tables - are they all fairly small or fairly large?
Small as in no more than thousands of rows or large as in tens of millions
or hundreds of millions of rows?

Small tables are are not ideal for a Cassandra cluster since the rows would
be spread out across the nodes, even though it might make more sense for
each small table to be on a single node.

You might want to consider a model where you have an application layer that
maps logical tenant tables into partition keys within a single large
Casandra table, or at least a relatively small number of Cassandra tables.
It will depend on the typical size of your tenant tables - very small ones
would make sense within a single partition, while larger ones should have
separate partitions for a tenant's data. The key here is that tables are
expensive, but partitions are cheap and scale very well with Cassandra.

Finally, you said 10 clusters, but did you mean 10 nodes? You might want
to consider a model where you do indeed have multiple clusters, where each
handles a fraction of the tenants, since there is no need for separate
tenants to be on the same cluster.


-- Jack Krupansky

On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 11:32 PM, Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com
wrote:

 Good Day Everyone,

 I am very happy with the (almost) linear scalability offered by C*. We had
 a lot of problems with RDBMS.

 But, I heard that C* has a limit on number of column families that can be
 created in a single cluster.
 The reason being each CF stores 1-2 MB on the JVM heap.

 In our use case, we have about 1+ CF and we want to support
 multi-tenancy.
 (i.e 1 * no of tenants)

 We are new to C* and being from RDBMS background, I would like to
 understand how to tackle this scenario from your advice.

 Our plan is to use Off-Heap memtable approach.
 http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/off-heap-memtables-in-Cassandra-2-1

 Each node in the cluster has following configuration
 16 GB machine (8GB Cassandra JVM + 2GB System + 6GB Off-Heap)
 IMO, this should be able to support 1000 CF with no(very less) impact on
 performance and startup time.

 We tackle multi-tenancy using different keyspaces.(Solution I found on the
 web)

 Using this approach we can have 10 clusters doing the job. (We actually
 are worried about the cost)

 Can you please help us evaluate this strategy? I want to hear communities
 opinion on this.

 My major concerns being,

 1. Is Off-Heap strategy safe and my assumption of 16 GB supporting 1000 CF
 right?

 2. Can we use multiple keyspaces to solve multi-tenancy? IMO, the number
 of column families increase even when we use multiple keyspace.

 3. I understand the complexity using multi-cluster for single application.
 The code base will get tightly coupled with infrastructure. Is this the
 right approach?

 Any suggestion is appreciated.

 Thanks,
 Arun



Re: 10000+ CF support from Cassandra

2015-05-28 Thread Arun Chaitanya
Hello Jack,

 Column families? As opposed to tables? Are you using Thrift instead of
CQL3? You should be focusing on the latter, not the former.
We have an ORM developed in our company, which maps each DTO to a column
family. So, we have many column families. We are using CQL3.

 But either way, the general guidance is that there is no absolute limit
of tables per se, but low hundreds is the recommended limit, regardless
of whether how many key spaces they may be divided
 between. More than that is an anti-pattern for Cassandra - maybe you can
make it work for your application, but it isn't recommended.
You want to say that most cassandra users don't have more than 2-300 column
families? Is this achieved through careful data modelling?

 A successful Cassandra deployment is critically dependent on careful data
modeling - who is responsible for modeling each of these tables, you and a
single, tightly-knit team with very common interests  and very specific
goals and SLAs or many different developers with different managers with
different goals such as SLAs?
The latter.

 When you say multi-tenant, are you simply saying that each of your
organization's customers has their data segregated, or does each customer
have direct access to the cluster?
Each organization's data is in the same cluster. No customer doesn't have
access to the cluster.

Thanks,
Arun

On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 7:17 PM, Jack Krupansky jack.krupan...@gmail.com
wrote:

 Scalability of Cassandra refers primarily to number of rows and number of
 nodes - to add more data, add more nodes.

 Column families? As opposed to tables? Are you using Thrift instead of
 CQL3? You should be focusing on the latter, not the former.

 But either way, the general guidance is that there is no absolute limit of
 tables per se, but low hundreds is the recommended limit, regardless of
 whether how many key spaces they may be divided between. More than that is
 an anti-pattern for Cassandra - maybe you can make it work for your
 application, but it isn't recommended.

 A successful Cassandra deployment is critically dependent on careful data
 modeling - who is responsible for modeling each of these tables, you and a
 single, tightly-knit team with very common interests and very specific
 goals and SLAs or many different developers with different managers with
 different goals such as SLAs?

 When you say multi-tenant, are you simply saying that each of your
 organization's customers has their data segregated, or does each customer
 have direct access to the cluster?





 -- Jack Krupansky

 On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 11:32 PM, Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Good Day Everyone,

 I am very happy with the (almost) linear scalability offered by C*. We
 had a lot of problems with RDBMS.

 But, I heard that C* has a limit on number of column families that can be
 created in a single cluster.
 The reason being each CF stores 1-2 MB on the JVM heap.

 In our use case, we have about 1+ CF and we want to support
 multi-tenancy.
 (i.e 1 * no of tenants)

 We are new to C* and being from RDBMS background, I would like to
 understand how to tackle this scenario from your advice.

 Our plan is to use Off-Heap memtable approach.
 http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/off-heap-memtables-in-Cassandra-2-1

 Each node in the cluster has following configuration
 16 GB machine (8GB Cassandra JVM + 2GB System + 6GB Off-Heap)
 IMO, this should be able to support 1000 CF with no(very less) impact on
 performance and startup time.

 We tackle multi-tenancy using different keyspaces.(Solution I found on
 the web)

 Using this approach we can have 10 clusters doing the job. (We actually
 are worried about the cost)

 Can you please help us evaluate this strategy? I want to hear communities
 opinion on this.

 My major concerns being,

 1. Is Off-Heap strategy safe and my assumption of 16 GB supporting 1000
 CF right?

 2. Can we use multiple keyspaces to solve multi-tenancy? IMO, the number
 of column families increase even when we use multiple keyspace.

 3. I understand the complexity using multi-cluster for single
 application. The code base will get tightly coupled with infrastructure. Is
 this the right approach?

 Any suggestion is appreciated.

 Thanks,
 Arun





Re: 10000+ CF support from Cassandra

2015-05-28 Thread Graham Sanderson
Depending on your use case and data types (for example if you can have a 
minimally
Nested Json representation of the objects;
Than you could go with a common mapstring,string representation where keys 
are top love object fields and values are valid Json literals as strings; eg 
unquoted primitives, quoted strings, unquoted arrays or other objects

Each top level field is then independently updatable - which may be beneficial 
(and allows you to trivially keep historical versions of objects of that is a 
requirement)

If you are updating the object in its entirety on save then simply store the 
entire object in a single cql field, and denormalize any search fields you may 
need (which you kinda want to do anyway)

Sent from my iPhone

 On May 28, 2015, at 1:49 AM, Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 Hello Jack,
 
  Column families? As opposed to tables? Are you using Thrift instead of 
  CQL3? You should be focusing on the latter, not the former.
 We have an ORM developed in our company, which maps each DTO to a column 
 family. So, we have many column families. We are using CQL3.
 
  But either way, the general guidance is that there is no absolute limit of 
  tables per se, but low hundreds is the recommended limit, regardless of 
  whether how many key spaces they may be divided 
  between. More than that is an anti-pattern for Cassandra - maybe you can 
  make it work for your application, but it isn't recommended.
 You want to say that most cassandra users don't have more than 2-300 column 
 families? Is this achieved through careful data modelling?
 
  A successful Cassandra deployment is critically dependent on careful data 
  modeling - who is responsible for modeling each of these tables, you and a 
  single, tightly-knit team with very common interests  and very specific 
  goals and SLAs or many different developers with different managers with 
  different goals such as SLAs?
 The latter.
 
  When you say multi-tenant, are you simply saying that each of your 
  organization's customers has their data segregated, or does each customer 
  have direct access to the cluster?
 Each organization's data is in the same cluster. No customer doesn't have 
 access to the cluster.
 
 Thanks,
 Arun
 
 On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 7:17 PM, Jack Krupansky jack.krupan...@gmail.com 
 wrote:
 Scalability of Cassandra refers primarily to number of rows and number of 
 nodes - to add more data, add more nodes.
 
 Column families? As opposed to tables? Are you using Thrift instead of CQL3? 
 You should be focusing on the latter, not the former.
 
 But either way, the general guidance is that there is no absolute limit of 
 tables per se, but low hundreds is the recommended limit, regardless of 
 whether how many key spaces they may be divided between. More than that is 
 an anti-pattern for Cassandra - maybe you can make it work for your 
 application, but it isn't recommended.
 
 A successful Cassandra deployment is critically dependent on careful data 
 modeling - who is responsible for modeling each of these tables, you and a 
 single, tightly-knit team with very common interests and very specific goals 
 and SLAs or many different developers with different managers with different 
 goals such as SLAs?
 
 When you say multi-tenant, are you simply saying that each of your 
 organization's customers has their data segregated, or does each customer 
 have direct access to the cluster?
 
 
 
 
 
 -- Jack Krupansky
 
 On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 11:32 PM, Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com 
 wrote:
 Good Day Everyone,
 
 I am very happy with the (almost) linear scalability offered by C*. We had 
 a lot of problems with RDBMS.
 
 But, I heard that C* has a limit on number of column families that can be 
 created in a single cluster.
 The reason being each CF stores 1-2 MB on the JVM heap.
 
 In our use case, we have about 1+ CF and we want to support 
 multi-tenancy.
 (i.e 1 * no of tenants)
 
 We are new to C* and being from RDBMS background, I would like to 
 understand how to tackle this scenario from your advice.
 
 Our plan is to use Off-Heap memtable approach.
 http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/off-heap-memtables-in-Cassandra-2-1
 
 Each node in the cluster has following configuration
 16 GB machine (8GB Cassandra JVM + 2GB System + 6GB Off-Heap)
 IMO, this should be able to support 1000 CF with no(very less) impact on 
 performance and startup time.
 
 We tackle multi-tenancy using different keyspaces.(Solution I found on the 
 web)
 
 Using this approach we can have 10 clusters doing the job. (We actually are 
 worried about the cost)
 
 Can you please help us evaluate this strategy? I want to hear communities 
 opinion on this.
 
 My major concerns being, 
 
 1. Is Off-Heap strategy safe and my assumption of 16 GB supporting 1000 CF 
 right?
 
 2. Can we use multiple keyspaces to solve multi-tenancy? IMO, the number of 
 column families increase even when we use multiple keyspace.
 
 3. I 

Re: 10000+ CF support from Cassandra

2015-05-28 Thread Jonathan Haddad
While Graham's suggestion will let you collapse a bunch of tables into a
single one, it'll likely result in so many other problems it won't be worth
the effort.  I strongly advise against this approach.

First off, different workloads need different tuning.  Compaction
strategies, gc_grace_seconds, garbage collection, etc.  This is very
workload specific and you'll quickly find that fixing one person's problem
will negatively impact someone else.

Nested JSON using maps will not lead to a good data model, from a
performance perspective and will limited your flexibility.  As CQL becomes
more expressive you'll miss out on its querying potential as well as the
ability to *easily* query those tables from tools like Spark.  You'll also
hit the limit of the number of elements in a map, which to my knowledge
still exists in current C* versions.

If you're truly dealing with a lot of data, you'll be managing one cluster
that is thousands of nodes.  Managing clusters  1k is territory that only
a handful of people in the world are familiar with.  Even the guys at
Netflix stick to a couple hundred.

Managing multi tenancy for a hundred clients each with different version
requirements will be a nightmare from a people perspective.  You'll need
everyone to be in sync when you upgrade your cluster.  This is just a mess,
people are in general, pretty bad at this type of thing.  Coordinating a
hundred application upgrades (say, to use a newer driver version) is pretty
much impossible.

off heap in 2.1 isn't fully off heap.  Read
http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/off-heap-memtables-in-Cassandra-2-1 for
details.

If you hit any performance issues, GC, etc, you will take down your entire
business instead of just a small portion.  Everyone will be impacting
everyone else.  1 app's tombstones will cause compaction problems for
everyone using that table and be a disaster to try to fix.

A side note: you can get away with more than 8GB of memory if you use
G1GC.  In fact, it only really works if you use  8GB.  Using ParNew  CMS,
tuning the JVM is a different story.  The following 2 pages are a good read
if you're interested in such details.

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-8150
http://blakeeggleston.com/cassandra-tuning-the-jvm-for-read-heavy-workloads.html

My recommendation: Separate your concerns, put each (or a handful) of
applications on each cluster and maintain multiple clusters.  Put each
application in a different keyspace, model normally.  If you need to move
an app off onto it's own cluster, do so via setting up a second DC for that
keyspace, replicate, then shift over.

Jon


On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 3:06 AM Graham Sanderson gra...@vast.com wrote:

 Depending on your use case and data types (for example if you can have a
 minimally
 Nested Json representation of the objects;
 Than you could go with a common mapstring,string representation where
 keys are top love object fields and values are valid Json literals as
 strings; eg unquoted primitives, quoted strings, unquoted arrays or other
 objects

 Each top level field is then independently updatable - which may be
 beneficial (and allows you to trivially keep historical versions of objects
 of that is a requirement)

 If you are updating the object in its entirety on save then simply store
 the entire object in a single cql field, and denormalize any search fields
 you may need (which you kinda want to do anyway)

 Sent from my iPhone

 On May 28, 2015, at 1:49 AM, Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Hello Jack,

  Column families? As opposed to tables? Are you using Thrift instead of
 CQL3? You should be focusing on the latter, not the former.
 We have an ORM developed in our company, which maps each DTO to a column
 family. So, we have many column families. We are using CQL3.

  But either way, the general guidance is that there is no absolute limit
 of tables per se, but low hundreds is the recommended limit, regardless
 of whether how many key spaces they may be divided
  between. More than that is an anti-pattern for Cassandra - maybe you can
 make it work for your application, but it isn't recommended.
 You want to say that most cassandra users don't have more than 2-300
 column families? Is this achieved through careful data modelling?

  A successful Cassandra deployment is critically dependent on careful
 data modeling - who is responsible for modeling each of these tables, you
 and a single, tightly-knit team with very common interests  and very
 specific goals and SLAs or many different developers with different
 managers with different goals such as SLAs?
 The latter.

  When you say multi-tenant, are you simply saying that each of your
 organization's customers has their data segregated, or does each customer
 have direct access to the cluster?
 Each organization's data is in the same cluster. No customer doesn't have
 access to the cluster.

 Thanks,
 Arun

 On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 7:17 PM, Jack Krupansky 

Re: 10000+ CF support from Cassandra

2015-05-27 Thread Jack Krupansky
Scalability of Cassandra refers primarily to number of rows and number of
nodes - to add more data, add more nodes.

Column families? As opposed to tables? Are you using Thrift instead of
CQL3? You should be focusing on the latter, not the former.

But either way, the general guidance is that there is no absolute limit of
tables per se, but low hundreds is the recommended limit, regardless of
whether how many key spaces they may be divided between. More than that is
an anti-pattern for Cassandra - maybe you can make it work for your
application, but it isn't recommended.

A successful Cassandra deployment is critically dependent on careful data
modeling - who is responsible for modeling each of these tables, you and a
single, tightly-knit team with very common interests and very specific
goals and SLAs or many different developers with different managers with
different goals such as SLAs?

When you say multi-tenant, are you simply saying that each of your
organization's customers has their data segregated, or does each customer
have direct access to the cluster?





-- Jack Krupansky

On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 11:32 PM, Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com
wrote:

 Good Day Everyone,

 I am very happy with the (almost) linear scalability offered by C*. We had
 a lot of problems with RDBMS.

 But, I heard that C* has a limit on number of column families that can be
 created in a single cluster.
 The reason being each CF stores 1-2 MB on the JVM heap.

 In our use case, we have about 1+ CF and we want to support
 multi-tenancy.
 (i.e 1 * no of tenants)

 We are new to C* and being from RDBMS background, I would like to
 understand how to tackle this scenario from your advice.

 Our plan is to use Off-Heap memtable approach.
 http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/off-heap-memtables-in-Cassandra-2-1

 Each node in the cluster has following configuration
 16 GB machine (8GB Cassandra JVM + 2GB System + 6GB Off-Heap)
 IMO, this should be able to support 1000 CF with no(very less) impact on
 performance and startup time.

 We tackle multi-tenancy using different keyspaces.(Solution I found on the
 web)

 Using this approach we can have 10 clusters doing the job. (We actually
 are worried about the cost)

 Can you please help us evaluate this strategy? I want to hear communities
 opinion on this.

 My major concerns being,

 1. Is Off-Heap strategy safe and my assumption of 16 GB supporting 1000 CF
 right?

 2. Can we use multiple keyspaces to solve multi-tenancy? IMO, the number
 of column families increase even when we use multiple keyspace.

 3. I understand the complexity using multi-cluster for single application.
 The code base will get tightly coupled with infrastructure. Is this the
 right approach?

 Any suggestion is appreciated.

 Thanks,
 Arun



Re: 10000+ CF support from Cassandra

2015-05-26 Thread graham sanderson
Are the CFs different, or all the same schema? Are you contractually obligated 
to actually separate data into separate CFs? It seems like you’d have a lot 
simpler time if you could use the part of the partition key to separate data.

Note also, I don’t know what disks you are using, but disk cache can be pretty 
helpful, and you haven’t allowed for any in your machine sizing. Of course that 
depends on your stored data volume also.

Also hard to answer your questions without an idea of read/write load system 
wide, and indeed distribution across tenants.

 On May 26, 2015, at 10:32 PM, Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 Good Day Everyone,
 
 I am very happy with the (almost) linear scalability offered by C*. We had a 
 lot of problems with RDBMS.
 
 But, I heard that C* has a limit on number of column families that can be 
 created in a single cluster.
 The reason being each CF stores 1-2 MB on the JVM heap.
 
 In our use case, we have about 1+ CF and we want to support multi-tenancy.
 (i.e 1 * no of tenants)
 
 We are new to C* and being from RDBMS background, I would like to understand 
 how to tackle this scenario from your advice.
 
 Our plan is to use Off-Heap memtable approach.
 http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/off-heap-memtables-in-Cassandra-2-1 
 http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/off-heap-memtables-in-Cassandra-2-1
 
 Each node in the cluster has following configuration
 16 GB machine (8GB Cassandra JVM + 2GB System + 6GB Off-Heap)
 IMO, this should be able to support 1000 CF with no(very less) impact on 
 performance and startup time.
 
 We tackle multi-tenancy using different keyspaces.(Solution I found on the 
 web)
 
 Using this approach we can have 10 clusters doing the job. (We actually are 
 worried about the cost)
 
 Can you please help us evaluate this strategy? I want to hear communities 
 opinion on this.
 
 My major concerns being, 
 
 1. Is Off-Heap strategy safe and my assumption of 16 GB supporting 1000 CF 
 right?
 
 2. Can we use multiple keyspaces to solve multi-tenancy? IMO, the number of 
 column families increase even when we use multiple keyspace.
 
 3. I understand the complexity using multi-cluster for single application. 
 The code base will get tightly coupled with infrastructure. Is this the right 
 approach?
 
 Any suggestion is appreciated.
 
 Thanks,
 Arun



smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature


Re: 10000+ CF support from Cassandra

2015-05-26 Thread Arun Chaitanya
Hello Graham,

 Are the CFs different, or all the same schema?
The column families are different. May be with better data modelling, we
can combine a few of them.

 Are you contractually obligated to actually separate data into separate
CFs?
No. Its just that we have several sub systems(around 100) and the data is
different.

 It seems like you’d have a lot simpler time if you could use the part of
the partition key to separate data.
I didn't understand this approach. You mean, we combine some of them using
an extra partition key?
But the columns are of different schema, isn't it? Sorry I might be
understanding it wrong.

 Note also, I don’t know what disks you are using, but disk cache can be
pretty helpful, and you haven’t allowed for any in your machine sizing. Of
course that depends on your stored data volume also.
OK. This is new information, I will consider this.

 Also hard to answer your questions without an idea of read/write load
system wide, and indeed distribution across tenants.
The read write actually depends actually on column family and tenant. Some
analytic jobs read data on some CF, some online event jobs write a lot of
data.

Thanks a lot for your insight. Anyways my previous questions still remain
unclear for me.

Arun

On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 11:40 AM, graham sanderson gra...@vast.com wrote:

 Are the CFs different, or all the same schema? Are you contractually
 obligated to actually separate data into separate CFs? It seems like you’d
 have a lot simpler time if you could use the part of the partition key to
 separate data.

 Note also, I don’t know what disks you are using, but disk cache can be
 pretty helpful, and you haven’t allowed for any in your machine sizing. Of
 course that depends on your stored data volume also.

 Also hard to answer your questions without an idea of read/write load
 system wide, and indeed distribution across tenants.


 On May 26, 2015, at 10:32 PM, Arun Chaitanya chaitan64a...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Good Day Everyone,

 I am very happy with the (almost) linear scalability offered by C*. We had
 a lot of problems with RDBMS.

 But, I heard that C* has a limit on number of column families that can be
 created in a single cluster.
 The reason being each CF stores 1-2 MB on the JVM heap.

 In our use case, we have about 1+ CF and we want to support
 multi-tenancy.
 (i.e 1 * no of tenants)

 We are new to C* and being from RDBMS background, I would like to
 understand how to tackle this scenario from your advice.

 Our plan is to use Off-Heap memtable approach.
 http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/off-heap-memtables-in-Cassandra-2-1

 Each node in the cluster has following configuration
 16 GB machine (8GB Cassandra JVM + 2GB System + 6GB Off-Heap)
 IMO, this should be able to support 1000 CF with no(very less) impact on
 performance and startup time.

 We tackle multi-tenancy using different keyspaces.(Solution I found on the
 web)

 Using this approach we can have 10 clusters doing the job. (We actually
 are worried about the cost)

 Can you please help us evaluate this strategy? I want to hear communities
 opinion on this.

 My major concerns being,

 1. Is Off-Heap strategy safe and my assumption of 16 GB supporting 1000 CF
 right?

 2. Can we use multiple keyspaces to solve multi-tenancy? IMO, the number
 of column families increase even when we use multiple keyspace.

 3. I understand the complexity using multi-cluster for single application.
 The code base will get tightly coupled with infrastructure. Is this the
 right approach?

 Any suggestion is appreciated.

 Thanks,
 Arun