Cassandra Migrations

Cassandra schema management for a multi-environment development.

A gem to manage Cassandra database schema for Rails. This gem offers migrations and environment specific databases out-of-the-box for Rails users.

This enables you to use Cassandra in an organized way, combined with your ActiveRecord relational database.

Requirements

• Cassandra 1.2 or higher with the native_transport_protocol turned on (Instructions to install cassandra locally)
• Ruby 1.9
• Rails > 3.2

Installation

gem install cassandra_migrations

Quick start

Configure Cassandra

The native transport protocol (sometimes called binary protocol, or CQL protocol) is not on by default on all version of Cassandra. If it is not you can enable by editing the CASSANDRA_DIR/conf/cassandra.yaml file on all nodes in your cluster and set start_native_transport to true. You need to restart the nodes for this to have effect.

Prepare Project

In your rails root directory run:

prepare_for_cassandra .

Which create the config/cassandra.yml

Configuring cassandra access

Open the newly-created config/cassandra.yml and configure the database name for each of the environments, just like you would do for your regular database. The other options defaults should be enough for now.

development:
  hosts: ['127.0.0.1']
  port: 9042
  keyspace: 'my_keyspace_name'
  replication:
    class: 'SimpleStrategy'
    replication_factor: 1

SUPPORTED CONFIGURATION OPTIONS: For a list of supported options see the docs for Cassandra module, connect method in the DataStax Ruby Driver

Create your database

There are a collection of rake tasks to help you manage the cassandra database (rake cassandra:create, rake cassandra:migrate, rake cassandra:drop, etc.). For now this one does the trick:

rake cassandra:reset

Creating a C* Table

rails generate cassandra_migration create_posts

In your migration file, make it create a table and drop it on its way back:

class CreatePosts < CassandraMigrations::Migration
  def up
    create_table :posts do |p|
      p.integer :id, :primary_key => true
      p.timestamp :created_at
      p.string :title
      p.text :text
    end
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :posts
  end
end

And now run:

rake cassandra:migrate

To create a table with compound primary key just specify the primary keys on table creation, i.e.:

class CreatePosts < CassandraMigrations::Migration
  def up
    create_table :posts, :primary_keys => [:id, :created_at] do |p|
      p.integer :id
      p.timestamp :created_at
      p.string :title
      p.text :text
    end
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :posts
  end
end

To create a table with a compound partition key specify the partition keys on table creation, i.e.:

class CreatePosts < CassandraMigrations::Migration
  def up
    create_table :posts, :partition_keys => [:id, :created_month], :primary_keys => [:created_at] do |p|
      p.integer :id
      p.string :created_month
      p.timestamp :created_at
      p.string :title
      p.text :text
    end
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :posts
  end
end

To create a table with a secondary index you add it similar to regular rails indexes, i.e.:

class CreatePosts < CassandraMigrations::Migration
  def up
    create_table :posts, :primary_keys => [:id, :created_at] do |p|
      p.integer :id
      p.timestamp :created_at
      p.string :title
      p.text :text
    end

    create_index :posts, :title, :name => 'by_title'
  end

  def self.down
 	 drop_index 'by_title'

    drop_table :posts
  end
end

Passing options to create_table

The create_table method allow do pass a hash of options for:

• Clustering Order (clustering_order): A string such as 'a_decimal DESC'
• Compact Storage (compact_storage): Boolean, true or false
• Wait before GC (gc_grace_seconds): Default: 864000 [10 days]
• Others: See CQL Table Properties

Cassandra Migration will attempt to pass through the properties to the CREATE TABLE command.

Examples:

class WithClusteringOrderMigration < CassandraMigrations::Migration
  def up
    create_table :collection_lists, options: {
                                      clustering_order: 'a_decimal DESC',
                                      compact_storage: true,
                                      gc_grace_seconds: 43200
                                    } do |t|
      t.uuid :id, :primary_key => true
      t.decimal :a_decimal
    end
  end
end

Using Alternate/Additional Keyspaces

The using_keyspace method in a migration allows to execute that migration in the context of a specific keyspace:

class WithAlternateKeyspaceMigration < CassandraMigrations::Migration
  def up
    using_keyspace('alternative') do
      create_table :collection_lists, options: {compact_storage: true} do |t|
        t.uuid :id, :primary_key => true
        t.decimal :a_decimal
      end
    end
  end
end

The overall workflow for a multiple keyspace env:

• define all of your keyspaces/environment combinations as separate environments in cassandra.yml. You probably want to keep your main or default keyspace as just plain development or 'production`, especially if you're using the queries stuff (so as to confuse Rails as little as possible)
• make sure to run rake cassandra:create for all of them
• if you use using_keyspace in all your migrations for keyspaces defined in environments other than the standard Rails ones, you won't have to run them for each 'special' environment.

Side Note: If you're going to be using multiple keyspaces in one application (specially with cql-rb), you probably want to just fully qualify your table names in your queries rather than having to call USE <keyspace> all over the place. Specially since cql-rb encourages you to only have one client object per application.

There are some other helpers like add_column too.. take a look inside!

Migrations for Cassandra Collections

Support for C* collections is provided via the list, set and map column types.

class CollectionsListMigration < CassandraMigrations::Migration
  def up
    create_table :collection_lists do |t|
      t.uuid :id, :primary_key => true
      t.list :my_list, :type => :string
      t.set :my_set, :type => :float
      t.map :my_map, :key_type => :uuid, :value_type => :float
    end
  end
end

Querying cassandra

There are two ways to use the cassandra interface provided by this gem

1. Accessing through query helpers

# selects all posts
CassandraMigrations::Cassandra.select(:posts)

# more complex select query
CassandraMigrations::Cassandra.select(:posts,
  :projection => 'title, created_at',
  :selection => 'id > 1234',
  :order_by => 'created_at DESC',
  :limit => 10
)

# selects single row by uuid
CassandraMigrations::Cassandra.select(:posts,
  :projection => 'title, created_at',
  :selection => 'id = 6bc939c2-838e-11e3-9706-4f2824f98172',
  :allow_filtering => true  # needed for potentially expensive queries
)

# secondary options
If using gem version 0.2.3+, you can also select based on secondary options listed [here](http://datastax.github.io/ruby-driver/api/session/#execute_async-instance_method).

For instance, for the above query you might want your results to be paginated with 50 results on each page with a timeout of 200 seconds:
CassandraMigrations::Cassandra.select(:posts,
  :projection => 'title, created_at',
  :selection => 'id > 1234',
  :order_by => 'created_at DESC',
  :limit => 10,
  :page_size => 50,
  :timeout => 200
)

All listed options in the linked page above are supported though you can also pass in any secondary options using a "secondary_options" hash as shown below:
CassandraMigrations::Cassandra.select(:posts,
  :projection => 'title, created_at',
  :selection => 'id > 1234',
  :order_by => 'created_at DESC',
  :limit => 10,
  {:secondary_options =>
    {:page_size => 50,
    {:timeout => 200}}
)



# adding a new post
CassandraMigrations::Cassandra.write!(:posts, {
  :id => 9999,
  :created_at => Time.current,
  :title => 'My new post',
  :text => 'lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.'
})

# adding a new post with TTL
CassandraMigrations::Cassandra.write!(:posts,
  {
    :id => 9999,
    :created_at => Time.current,
    :title => 'My new post',
    :text => 'lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.'
  },
  :ttl => 3600
)

# updating a post
CassandraMigrations::Cassandra.update!(:posts, 'id = 9999',
  :title => 'Updated title'
)

# updating a post with TTL
CassandraMigrations::Cassandra.update!(:posts, 'id = 9999',
  { :title => 'Updated title' },
  :ttl => 3600
)

# deleting a post
CassandraMigrations::Cassandra.delete!(:posts, 'id = 1234')

# deleting a post title
CassandraMigrations::Cassandra.delete!(:posts, 'id = 1234',
  :projection => 'title'
)

# deleting all posts
CassandraMigrations::Cassandra.truncate!(:posts)

4. Manipulating Collections

Given a migration that generates a set type column as shown next:

class CreatePeople < CassandraMigrations::Migration
  def up
    create_table :people, :primary_keys => :id do |t|
      t.uuid :id
      t.string :ssn
      ...
      t.set :emails, :type => :string
    end
  end

  ...
end

You can add new emails to the existing collection:

CassandraMigrations::Cassandra.update!(:people, "ssn = '867530900'",
                                       {emails: ['[email protected]', '[email protected]']},
                                       {operations: {emails: :+}})

You can remove emails from the collection:

CassandraMigrations::Cassandra.update!(:people, "ssn = '867530900'",
                                       {emails: ['[email protected]']},
                                       {operations: {emails: :-}})

Or, completely replace the existing values in the collection:

CassandraMigrations::Cassandra.update!(:people, "ssn = '867530900'",
                                       {emails: ['[email protected]', '[email protected]']})

The same operations (addition :+ and subtraction :-) are supported by all collection types.

Read more about C* collections at http://cassandra.apache.org/doc/cql3/CQL.html#collections

3. Using raw CQL3

CassandraMigrations::Cassandra.execute('SELECT * FROM posts')

Reading query results

Select queries will return an enumerable object over which you can iterate. All other query types return nil.

CassandraMigrations::Cassandra.select(:posts).each |post_attributes|
  puts post_attributes
end

# => {'id' => 9999, 'created_at' => 2013-05-20 18:43:23 -0300, 'title' => 'My new post', 'text' => 'lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.'}

If your want some info about the table metadata just call it on a query result:

CassandraMigrations::Cassandra.select(:posts).metadata

# => {'id' => :integer, 'created_at' => :timestamp, 'title' => :varchar, 'text' => :varchar}

Using uuid data type

Please refer to the wiki: Using uuid data type

Deploy integration with Capistrano

This gem comes with built-in compatibility with Passenger and its smart spawning functionality, so if you're using Passenger all you have to do is deploy and be happy!

To add cassandra database creation and migrations steps to your Capistrano recipe, just add the following line to you deploy.rb:
require 'cassandra_migrations/capistrano'

Acknowledgements

This gem is built upon the official Ruby Driver for Apache Cassandra by DataStax. Which supersedes the cql-rb gem (thank you Theo for doing an awesome job).