[jira] Commented: (CASSANDRA-44) It isn't possible to easily add new column families to an existing cluster

["Jonathan Ellis (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-44?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12697212#action_12697212 ] 

Jonathan Ellis commented on CASSANDRA-44:
-----------------------------------------

Maintaining CF definitions looks like a good use case for Zookeeper to me.  We could do it like this:

 - on startup, a cassandra node must contact zookeeper and read the column family data.  this is the only time it will abort if ZK is not available.
 - when an operation is requested for a columnfamily that does not exist, the node checks zookeeper to see if that column has been added
 - additionally, we can check every hour or so for new columns and removed columns.  so removed CFs could accept ops for a while after officially being "removed." 
 - adding and removing CFs would be done with a web interface.  (I'm strongly in favor of moving the web UI to Jython; it's much better suited for this than raw Java.)

At the znode level, we would have /columfamilies/[tablename]/[columnfamily1|columnfamily2|...] where the columnfamily znodes contain the sort information and any other attributes that was previously being stored in TableMetadata.

Notes to keep adminning a ZK ensemble relatively painless:

 - use the Cassandra seed nodes as the ZK ensemble members.  (Both seed nodes and ZK require a relatively small number of machines in the cluster to participate.)  We can ship a config file so that cassandra will continue to Just Work on localhost.

Thoughts?

> It isn't possible to easily add new column families to an existing cluster
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: CASSANDRA-44
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-44
>             Project: Cassandra
>          Issue Type: Bug
>            Reporter: Eric Evans
>            Priority: Minor
>
> Once a cluster is created, adding new column families to the configuration file will not result in their creation. See also: http://groups.google.com/group/cassandra-dev/browse_thread/thread/78598f808e10b984/fe26cae1689d5474

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