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Posted to commits@cassandra.apache.org by Apache Wiki <wi...@apache.org> on 2012/02/16 18:20:16 UTC

[Cassandra Wiki] Update of "CassandraLimitations" by JonathanEllis

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The "CassandraLimitations" page has been changed by JonathanEllis:
http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/CassandraLimitations?action=diff&rev1=29&rev2=30

Comment:
link composite columns

  = Limitations =
- 
  == Stuff that isn't likely to change ==
   * All data for a single row must fit (on disk) on a single machine in the cluster. Because row keys alone are used to determine the nodes responsible for replicating their data, the amount of data associated with a single key has this upper bound.
   * A single column value may not be larger than 2GB.  (However, large values are read into memory when requested, so in practice "small number of MB" is more appropriate.)
@@ -9, +8 @@

   * The key (and column names) must be under 64K bytes.
  
  == Artifacts of the current code base ==
-  * Cassandra has two levels of indexes: key and column.  But in super columnfamilies there is a third level of subcolumns; these are not indexed, and any request for a subcolumn deserializes _all_ the subcolumns in that supercolumn.  So you want to avoid a data model that requires large numbers of subcolumns.  https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-598 is open to remove this limitation.
+  * Cassandra has two levels of indexes: key and column.  But in super columnfamilies there is a third level of subcolumns; these are not indexed, and any request for a subcolumn deserializes _all_ the subcolumns in that supercolumn.  So you want to avoid a data model that requires large numbers of subcolumns. [[http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/introduction-to-composite-columns-part-1|Composite columns]] do not have this limitation.
   * <<Anchor(streaming)>>Cassandra's public API is based on Thrift, which offers no streaming abilities -- any value written or fetched has to fit in memory.  This is inherent to Thrift's design and is therefore unlikely to change.  So adding large object support to Cassandra would need a special API that manually split the large objects up into pieces. A potential approach is described in http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-265.  As a workaround in the meantime, you can manually split files into chunks of whatever size you are comfortable with -- at least one person is using 64MB -- and making a file correspond to a row, with the chunks as column values.
  
  == Obsolete Limitations ==