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Posted to commits@cassandra.apache.org by Apache Wiki <wi...@apache.org> on 2009/10/22 20:36:51 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=4&rev2=5
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== Artifacts of the current code base ==
* Cassandra's compaction code currently deserializes an entire row (per columnfamily) at a time. So all the data from a given columnfamily/key pair must fit in memory. Fixing this is relatively easy since columns are stored in-order on disk so there is really no reason you have to deserialize row-at-a-time except that that is easier with the current encapsulation of functionality.
- * 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. This can be fixed; the core classes involved are SuperColumn and SequenceFile.
+ * 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.
* 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; I don't see it changing. So adding large object support to Cassandra would need a special API that manually split the large objects up into pieces. Jonathan Ellis sketched out one approach in https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-265.
== Obsolete Limitations ==