Unit - 3
Column-Oriented Databases
What Is a Column-Family Data Store
● A column store database is a type of
database that stores data using a column
oriented model.
● Columns store databases use a concept
called a keyspace. A keyspace is kind of
like a schema in the relational model. The
keyspace contains all the column families
(kind of like tables in the relational
model), which contain rows, which
contain columns.
Ex:
Here’s a breakdown of each element in the row:
● Row Key. Each row has a unique key, which is a unique identifier for that row.
● Column. Each column contains a name, a value, and timestamp.
● Name. This is the name of the name/value pair.
● Value. This is the value of the name/value pair.
● Timestamp. This provides the date and time that the data was inserted. This can
be used to determine the most recent version of data.
Benefits
● Compression. Column stores are very efficient at data compression and/or
partitioning.
● Aggregation queries. Due to their structure, columnar databases perform particularly
well with aggregation queries (such as SUM, COUNT, AVG, etc).
● Scalability. Columnar databases are very scalable. They are well suited to massively
parallel processing (MPP), which involves having data spread across a large cluster
of machines – often thousands of machines.
● Fast to load and query. Columnar stores can be loaded extremely fast. A billion row
table could be loaded within a few seconds. You can start querying and analysing
almost immediately.
Examples of Column Store DBMSs
● Bigtable
● Cassandra
● HBase
● Vertica
● Druid
● Accumulo
● Hypertable
● Apache Cassandra is an open source, distributed and decentralized/distributed storage system
(database), for managing very large amounts of structured data spread out across the world. It
provides highly available service with no single point of failure.
● Notable points
○ Apache Cassandra was initially designed at Facebook to implement a combination of
Amazon’s Dynamo distributed storage and replication techniques and Google’s Bigtable data
and storage engine model.
○ It was open-sourced by Facebook in July 2008.
○ Cassandra was accepted into Apache Incubator in March 2009.
○ It is a column-oriented NoSQL database
○ Scalable, fault-tolerant and consistent
○ Cassandra implements a Dynamo-style replication model with no single point of failure, but
adds a more powerful “column family” data model.
○ Cassandra is being used by some of the biggest companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Cisco,
Rackspace, ebay, Twitter, Netflix, and more.
Cassandra Architecture
● Basic Terminology:
○ Node
○ Data center
○ Cluster
● Operations:
○ Read Operation
○ Write Operation
● Storage Engine:
○ CommitLog
○ Memtables
○ SSTables
● Data Replication Strategies
Node
Node:
Node is the basic
component in Apache
Cassandra. It is the place
where actually data is
stored. For Example:As
shown in diagram node
which has IP address
10.0.0.7 contain data
(keyspace which contain
one or more tables).
DataCenter
Data Center is a collection of nodes.
For example:
DC – N1 + N2 + N3 ….
DC: Data Center
N1: Node 1
N2: Node 2
N3: Node 3
Cluster
It is the collection of many data centers.
For example:
C = DC1 + DC2 + DC3….
C: Cluster
DC1: Data Center 1
DC2: Data Center 2
DC3: Data Center 3
Read Operation
● Direct Request
○ Send request to one of the
nodes
● Digest Request
○ Send request to N nodes as
specified in the
CONSISTENCY parameter
● Read - Repair Request
○ Will be triggered in case of
INCONSISTENT nodes to
make them consistent
Write Operation
● Step 1 : Write Operation as soon as we receives request then it is first
dumped into commit log to make sure that data is saved.
● Step-2: Insertion of data into table that is also written in MemTable that holds
the data till it’s get full.
● Step-3: If MemTable reaches its threshold then data is flushed to SS Table.
Replication Strategies
● It is used to ensure that there are no point of failures,
Each data item is replicated at N hosts, where N is the
replication factor configured \per-instance
● There are 2 types of replication strategies
○ Simple Strategy
○ Network Topology STrategy
Simple Strategy
In this Strategy it allows a single
integer RF (replication_factor) to
be defined. It determines the
number of nodes that should
contain a copy of each row. For
example, if replication_factor is
2, then two different nodes
should store a copy of each row.
○ Network Topology STrategy
In this strategy it allows a replication
factor to be specified for each
datacenter in the cluster. Even if your
cluster only uses a single datacenter.
This Strategy should be preferred
over SimpleStrategy to make it easier
to add new physical or virtual
datacenters to the cluster later.
Cassandra Data types
Create KeySpace
CREATE KEYSPACE Demo
WITH replication = {'class':'SimpleStrategy',
'replication_factor' : 2};
Alter KeySpace
ALTER KEYSPACE Demo
WITH replication = {'class':'SimpleStrategy',
'replication_factor' : 3};
Drop KeySpace
DROP KEYSPACE Demo;
CRUD operations on tables
Create:
Create table personal details(sid int, sname
text, spg boolean, emails set<text>);
CRUD operations on tables
Read
Select * from personal;
CRUD operations on tables
Update
Update personal set spg=false where
sid=123
CRUD operations on tables
Delete
Delete from personal where sid=143;
Suitable use cases
● Event Logging
● Content Management Systems, Blogging Platforms
● Counters
● Expiring usage
When not to use
● Databases which requires ACID properties for reads and
writes
● Early prototypes which requires query change, as the cost
of query change is more when compared to schema
change.
