Develop Reference

Is Cassandra table creation slow?

I've a Jar file that initialises my Cassandra database during which it creates ~13 tables. This file is being run by our tests where we start a Cassandra test container and use the jar to set it up.
But I'm surprised to see that each table takes ~1-2 seconds to initialise, totaling ~15 seconds. If I manually create one of these tables, using cqlsh, it takes ~100-120 ms.
Is there an explanation for this delay? Is there a work around?
I came across Why does it take so long to create a table? but I don't have any tabs in my tables.
Update
The Java Code boils down to
cqlSession.execute( SimpleStatement.newInstance(query).setIdempotent(isIdempotent) );
which uses the java-driver-core version 4.14.1. The query looks like
CREATE TABLE settings (key text, value text, PRIMARY KEY (key))
and took 1.125 seconds.

Because Cassandra is a distributed system, when you create a table you need to make sure that changes are propagated to all nodes so schema will be in agreement. This is especially important when you use something like Java driver that by default uses round-robin policy, so different DDL statements could be sent to different nodes, causing schema mismatch errors. You can find an example of how to do that correctly here.
In cqlsh it's not the issue as it always uses the same connection to send all commands, so you won't get schema mismatch because schema versions are generated on the same node.

Turns out in the java-driver-core there is a feature called debouncing. Here requests are accumulated over 1 second / an upper count before being sent to Cassandra. You can see the code here.
There are driver config settings that can be used to control the debounce behaviour, which I set as
datastax-java-driver.advanced.metadata {
schema.debouncer {
window = 1 milliseconds
max-events = 1
}
}
in order to remove the 1 second delay. This is appropriate for my use case. But the change requires consideration depending on usage.

Is it possible to create Phoenix table backed by existing HBase table?

1) Is it possible to create a Phoenix table backed by existing HBase table?
Based on this info here
http://phoenix.apache.org/language/#create_table
it should be possible but what options exactly one needs to pass in, I am not sure. I see no examples there.
"HBase table and column configuration options may be passed through as key/value pairs to configure the HBase table as desired. Note that when using the IF NOT EXISTS clause, if a table already exists, then no change will be made to it."
2) Also, is it possible that in the process of table creation, I control myself the mapping of phoenix column names to HBase column names?
3) I know that a Phoenix view (backed by an HBase table) has certain problems/limitations to maintain its indexes if the writing process writes directly to the underlying HBase table and not to the Phoenix view.
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PHOENIX-1499
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PHOENIX-1619
So... will that be a problem also if we create a Phoenix table backed by an HBase table (and write to the HBase table behind Phoenix's back)? I mean, if the answer to 1) is positive, will I have the same problem with a Phoenix table as with a Phoenix view (provided that my writes don't go through Phoenix)?

Directly taking a hit at the answer here.
a) Specific properties can be passed to column families or table in general. These are the various options that have been defined using options. Options can be referenced here : http://phoenix.apache.org/language/#options. You can create a view that references an existing hbase table. I prefer views because , i can drop and recreate them without issues unlike tables whose drop will cause the underlying HBase table to vanish as well
b) This is not possible AFAIK. There are no mapping options between existing hbase tables and corresponding phoenix views (i.e fN in phoenix refers to firstName in HBase)
c) That is correct. Atleast in 4.x versions of Phoenix , this is true.
i) If you create a Phoenix table (the HBase table will get created automatically) and write to HBase directly , you will have to take care of using Phoenix types for writing so that they will be properly read from HBase (https://github.com/apache/phoenix/blob/master/phoenix-core/src/main/java/org/apache/phoenix/schema/types). Also note you will have to take care if you have SALT_BUCKETS and the phoenix salt if you have defined tables from phoenix like that

Hbase sort on column qualifiers

I have an Hbase table with a couple of million records. Each record has a couple of properties describing the record, stored each in a column qualifier.(Mostly int or string values)
I have a a requirement that I should be able to see the records paginated and sorted based on a column qualifier (or even more than one, in the future). What would be a best approach to do this? I have looked into secondary indexes using coprocessors (mostly hindex from huawei), but it doesn't seem to match my use case exactly. I've also thought about replicating all the data into multiple tables, one for each sort property, which would be included in the rowkey and then redirect queries to those tables. But this seems very tedious as I have a few so called properties already..
Thanks for any suggestions.

You need your NoSQL database to work just like a RDBMS, and given the size of your data your life would be a lot simpler if you stick to it, unless you expect exponential growth :) Also, you don't mention if your data gets updated, this is very important to make a good decision.
Having said that, you have a lot of options, here are some:
If you can wait for the results: Write a MapReduce task to do the scan, sort it and retrieve the top X rows, do you really need more than 1000 pages (20-50k rows) for each sort type?. Another option would be using something like Hive.
If you can aggregate the data and "reduce" the dataset: Write a MapReduce task to periodically export the newest aggregated data to a SQL table (which will handle the queries). I've done this a few times to and it works like a charm, but it depends on your requirements.
If you have plenty of storage: Write a MapReduce task to periodically regenerate (or append the data) a new table for each property (sorting by it in the row-key). You don't need multiple tables, just use a prefix in your rowkeys for each case, or, if you do not want tables and you won't have a lot queries, simply write the sorted data to csv files and store them in the HDFS, they could be easily read by your frontend app.
Manually maintain a secondary index: Which would not very tolerant to schema updates and new properties but would work great for near real-time results. To do it, you have to update your code to also to write to the secondary table with a good buffer to help with performance while avoiding hot regions. Think about this type of rowkeys: [4B SORT FIELD ID (4 chars)] [8B SORT FIELD VALUE] [8B timestamp], with just one column storing the rowkey of the main table. To retrieve the data sorted by any of the fields just perform a SCAN using the SORT FIELD ID as start row + the starting sort field value as pivot for pagination (ignore it to get the first page, then set the last one retrieved), that way you'll have the rowkeys of the main table, and you can just perform a multiget to it to retrieve the full data. Keep in mind that you'll need a small script to scan the main table and write the data to the index table for the existing rows.
Rely on any of the automatic secondary indexing through coprocessors like you mentioned, although I do not like this option at all.

You have mostly enumerated the options. HBase natively does not support secondary indexes as you are aware. In addition to hindex you may consider phoenix
https://github.com/forcedotcom/phoenix
( from SalesForce) which in addition to secondary indexes has jdbc driver and sql support.

speed up operation on mysql

I'm currently writing java project against mysql in a cluster with ten nodes. The program simply pull some information from the database and do some calculation, then push some data back to the database. However, there are millions of rows in the table. Is there any way to split up the job and utilize the cluster architecture? How to do multi-threading on different node?

I watched an interesting presentation on using Gearman to do Map/Reduce style things on a mysql database. It might be what you are looking for: see here. There is a recording on the mysql webpage here (have to register for mysql.com though).

I'd think about doing that calculation in a stored procedure on the database server and pass on bringing millions of rows to the middle tier. You'll save yourself a lot of bytes on the wire. Depending on the nature of the calculation, your schema, indexing, etc. you might find that the database server is well equipped to do that calculation without having to resort to multi-threading.
I could be wrong, but it's worth a prototype to see.

Assume the table (A) you want to process has 10 million rows. Create a table B in the database to store the set of rows processed by a node. So you can write the Java program in such a way like it will first fetch the last row processed by other nodes and then it add an entry in the same table informing other nodes what range of rows it is going to process (you can decide this number). In our case, lets assume each node can process 1000 rows at a time. Node 1 fetches table B and finds it it empty. Then Node 1 inserts a row ('Node1', 1000) informing that it is processing till primary key of A is <=1000 ( Assuming primary key of table A is numeric and it is in ascending order). Node 2 comes and finds 1000 primary keys are processed by some other node. Hence it inserts a row ('Node2', 2000) informing others that it is processing rows between 1001 and 2000. Please note that access to table B should be synchronized, i.e. only one can work on it at a time.

Since you only have one mysql server, make sure you're using the innodb engine to reduce table locking on updates.
Also I'd try to keep your queries as simple as possible, even if you have to run more of them. This can increase chances of query cache hits, as well as reduce the over all workload on the backend, offloading some of the querying matching and work to the frontends (where you have more resources). It will also reduce the time a row lock is held therefore decreasing contention.
The proposed Gearman solution is probably the right tool for this job. As it will allow you to offload batch processing from mysql back to the cluster transparently.
You could set up sharding with a mysql on each machine but the set up time, maintenance and the changes to database access layer might be a lot of work compared to a gearman solution. You might also want to look at the experimental spider engine that could allow you to use multiple mysqls in unison.

Unless your calculation is very complex, most of the time will be spent retrieving data from MySql and sending the results back to MySQl.
As you have a single database no amount of parallelism or clustering on the application side will make much difference.
So your best options would be to do the update in pure SQL if that is at all possible, or, use a stored procedure so that all processing can take place within the MySql server and no data movement is required.
If this is not fast enough then you will need to split your database among several instances of MySql and come up with some schema to partition the data based on some application key.

Duplicate set of columns from one table to another table

My requirement is to read some set of columns from a table.
The source table has many - around 20-30 numeric columns and I would like to read only a set of those columns from the source table and keep appending the values of those columns to the destination table. My DB is on Oracle and the programming language is JDBC/Java.
The source table is very dynamic - there are frequent inserts and deletes happen on
it. Whereas at the destination table, I would like to keep the data for at least 30
days.
My Setup is described as below -
Database is Oracle.
Number of rows in the source table = 20 Million rows with 30 columns
Number of rows in destinationt table = 300 Million rows with 2-3 columns
The columns are all Numeric.
I am thinking of not doing a vanilla JDBC connection open and transfer the data,
which might be pretty slow looking at the size of the tables.
I am trying to take the dump of the selected columns of the source table using some
sql like -
SQL> spool on
SQL> select c1,c5,c6 from SRC_Table;
SQL> spool off
And later use SQLLoader to load the data into the destination database.
The source table is storing time series data and the data gets purged/deleted from source table within 2 days. Its part of OLTP environment. The destination table has larger retention period - 30days of data can be stored here and it is a part of OLAP environment. So, the view on source table where view selects only set of columns from the source table, does not work in this environment.
Any suggestion or review comments on this approach is welcome.
EDIT
My tables are partitioned. The easiest way to copy data is to exchange partition netween tables
*ALTER TABLE <table_name>
EXCHANGE PARTITION <partition_name>
WITH TABLE <new_table_name>
<including | excluding> INDEXES
<with | without> VALIDATION
EXCEPTIONS INTO <schema.table_name>;*
but since my source and destination tables have different columns so I think exchange partition will not work.

Shamik, okay, you're loading an OLAP database with OLTP data.
What's the acceptable latency? Does your OLAP need today's data before people come in to the office tomorrow morning, or is it closer to real time.
Saying the Inserts are "frequent" doesn't mean anything. Some of us are used to thousands of txns/sec - to others 1/sec is a lot.
And you say there's a lot of data. Same idea. I've read people's post where they have HUGE tables with a couple million records. i have table with hundreds of billions of records. SO again. A real number is very helpful.
Do not go with the trigger suggested by Schwern. If you believe your insert volume is large, it means you've probably have had issues in that area. A trigger will just make it worse.
Oracle provide lots of different choices for getting data from OLTP to OLAP. Instead of reinventing the wheel, use something already written. Oracle Streams was BORN to do this exact job. You can roll your own streams with using Oracle AQ. You can capture inserted rows without a trigger by using either Database Change Notification or Change Data Capture.
This is an extremely common problem, which is why I've listed 4 technologies designed to solve it.
Advanced Queuing
Streams
Change Data Capture
Database Change Notification
Start googling these terms and come back with questions on those. you'll be better off than building your own from the ground up or using triggers.

The problem seems a little vague, and frankly a little odd. The fact that there's hundreds of columns in a single table, and that you're duplicating data within the database, suggests a hosed database design.
Rather than do it manually, it sounds like a job for a trigger. Create an insert trigger on the source table to copy columns to the destination table just after they're inserted.
Another possibility is that since it seems all you want is a slice of the data in your original table, rather than duplicating it, a cardinal sin of database design, create a view which only includes the columns and ranges you want. Then just access that view like any other table.
I'm willing the guess that the root of the problem is accessing just the information you want in your source table is too slow. This suggests you might be able to fix that with better indexing. Also, your source table is probably just too damn wide.
Since I'm not an Oracle person, I leave the syntax of this as an exercise for the reader, but the concept should be sound.

On a tangential note, you might want to look at Oracle's partitioning here and here.
Partitioning enables tables and indexes to be split into smaller, more manageable components and is a key requirement for any large database with high performance and high availability requirements. Oracle Database 11g offers the widest choice of partitioning methods including interval, reference, list, and range in addition to composite partitions of two methods such as order date (range) and region (list) or region (list) and customer type (list).
Faster Performance—Lowers query times from minutes to seconds
Increases Availability—24 by 7 access to critical information
Improves Manageability—Manage smaller 'chunks' of data
Enables Information Lifecycle Management—Cost-efficient use of storage
Partitioning the table into daily partitions would make archiving easier as described here