SASI and Secondary Indexes

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Let's talk about indexes

Regular index

You can search a user by ID and get his/her email.

What happens if given an email you want to retrieve the  user ID? 

Let's have some Math:

In terms of matrices:

In terms of matrices:

 Regular Index

Form Input

We would have to iterate over users, then compare the emails, then get the ID

But we can find the ID in analogical terms very easily! 

What if we could have an extra index on a column to help on that?

Secondary Indexes - The good parts

• Practical
• Easy to make
• Easy to understand
• good performance for small sets of data

Secondary Indexes - The bad parts

• Slow for large sets of data
• They are applied locally, instead of globally
• In a ring with 5 instances, 1 query => 5 reads.

Several Strategies for the Secondary Index

References

• https://dzone.com/articles/cassandra-indexing-good-bad
• http://www.slideshare.net/edanuff/indexing-in-cassandra
• http://blog.websudos.com/2014/08/23/a-series-on-cassandra-part-2-indexes-and-keys/
• http://brianoneill.blogspot.com.br/2012/03/cassandra-indexing-good-bad-and-ugly.html
• https://pantheon.io/blog/cassandra-scale-problem-secondary-indexes

Things are not lost

Apple opened their second index startegy

SSTableAttachedSecondaryIndex (SASI)

https://github.com/xedin/sasi

SASI through an exmaple

cqlsh> CREATE KEYSPACE foo 
  WITH replication = {
    'class': 'SimpleStrategy',
    'replication_factor': '1'
   };
cqlsh> USE foo;

CREATE TABLE bar (
id uuid, fname text, 
lname text,
age int, 
created_at bigint, 
primary key (id))
WITH COMPACT STORAGE;

Creating the indexes

case_sensitive

CREATE CUSTOM INDEX ON bar (fname) 
USING 'org.apache.cassandra.db.index.SSTableAttachedSecondaryIndex'
WITH OPTIONS = {
'analyzer_class':
'org.apache.cassandra.db.index.sasi.analyzer.NonTokenizingAnalyzer',
'case_sensitive': 'false'
};

https://github.com/xedin/sasi/blob/master/src/java/org/apache/cassandra/db/index/sasi/analyzer/StandardAnalyzer.java

'mode': 'SUFFIX'

CREATE CUSTOM INDEX ON bar (lname) 
USING 'org.apache.cassandra.db.index.SSTableAttachedSecondaryIndex'
WITH OPTIONS = {'mode': 'SUFFIX'};

Analyses by suffix. 

'mode': 'SPARSE'

CREATE CUSTOM INDEX ON bar (created_at) 
USING 'org.apache.cassandra.db.index.SSTableAttachedSecondaryIndex'
WITH OPTIONS = {'mode': 'SPARSE'};

Analyses ranges of time by timestamp

Understanding the basics of SASI architecture

SASI

Cassandra's key features to SASI

• Write-only
• Immutability
• Ordered data sets

memory => disk

SASI

Indexing

Indexing

Indexed columns

Index files by SASI

MEMORY

OnDiskIndexBuilder

SASI

Querying

Index files by SASI

Limitations

• Cluster must be configured to use a partitioner that produces LongTokens (Murmur3Partitioner). Does not work with ByteOrderedPartitioner.
• CQL3 requires COMPACT STORAGE
• Only Cassandra 2.0.x is supported. If you don't have plans to upgrade, you cannot use SASI properly

Conclusion

Powerful tool for Secondary Indexes

Let's study data structures and more Mathematics :)

References

• Our meetup group in Sao Paulo - http://www.meetup.com/Sao-Paulo-Cassandra-Users/
• SASI repo https://github.com/xedin/sasi
• Cassandra initial docs for secondary indexes http://docs.datastax.com/en/archived/cassandra/1.1/docs/ and http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/whats-new-cassandra-07-secondary-indexes
• SecondaryIndexes Q/A https://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/SecondaryIndexes
• SASI on Cassandra https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-10661

Special Thanks

• @PatrickMcFadin
• @wheresLINA
• @planetcassandra
• @lafp, @romulostores and @pedrofelipee (GIFs)

Thank you :)

Questions?

hannelita@gmail.com

@hannelita

@planetcassandra

@datastax