I think that Les's question was reasonable. Why *not* ask the community for the 'gotchas'?
Whether the info is already documented or not, it could be an opportunity to improve the documentation based on users' perception. The "you just have to learn" responses are fair also, but that reminds me of the days when running Oracle was a black art, and accumulated wisdom made DBAs irreplaceable. Some recommendations *are* documented, but they are dispersed / stale / contradictory / or counter-intuitive. Others have not been documented in the wiki nor in DataStax's doco, and are instead learned anecdotally or The Hard Way. For example, whether documented or not, some of the 'gotchas' that I encountered when I first started working with Cassandra were: * Don't use OpenJDK. Prefer the Sun JDK. (Wiki says this, Jira says that). * Its not viable to run without JNA installed. * Disable swap memory. * Need to run nodetool repair on a regular basis. I'm looking forward to Edward Capriolo's Cassandra book which Les will probably find helpful. On Jun 22, 2011, at 7:12 PM, Les Hazlewood wrote: > > > > [1] http://www.datastax.com/docs/0.8/operations/index > > [2] http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/Operations > > > > Well if they new some secret gotcha the dutiful cassandra operators of > the world would update the wiki. > > As I am new to the Cassandra community, I don't know how 'dutifully' this is > maintained. My questions were not unreasonable question given the nature of > open-source documentation. All I was looking for was what people thought > were best practices based on their own production experience. > > Telling me to read the mailing lists and follow the issue tracker and use > monitoring software is all great and fine - and I do all of these things > today already - but this is a philosophical recommendation that does not > actually address my question. So I chalk this up as an error on my side in > not being clear in my question - my apologies. Let me reformulate it :) > > Does anyone out there have any concrete recommended techniques or insights in > maintaining a HA Cassandra cluster that you've gained based on production > experience beyond what is described in the 2 links above? > > Thanks, > > Les
