What Happened To Alternate Storage And Rocksandra?

[Gareth Collins <ga...@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I remember a couple of years ago there was some noise about Rocksandra
(Cassandra using rocksdb for storage) and opening up Cassandra to alternate
storage mechanisms.

I haven't seen anything about it for a while now though. The last commit to
Rocksandra on github was in Nov 2019. The associated JIRA items
(CASSANDRA-13474 and CASSANDRA-13476) haven't had any activity since 2019
either.

I was wondering whether anyone knew anything about it. Was it decided that
this wasn't a good idea after all (the alleged performance differences
weren't worth it...or were exaggerated)? Or is it just that it still may be
a good idea, but there are no resources available to make this happen (e.g.
perhaps the original sponsor moved onto other things)?

I ask because I was looking at RocksDB/Kafka Streams for another project
(which may replace some functionality which currently uses Cassandra)...and
was wondering if there could be some important info about RocksDB I may be
missing.

thanks in advance,
Gareth Collins

Re: What Happened To Alternate Storage And Rocksandra?

[onmstester onmstester <on...@zoho.com.INVALID>]

Beside the enhancements at storage layer, i think there are couple of good ideas in Rocksdb that could be used in Cassandra, like the one with disabling sort at memtable-insert part (write data fast like commitlig) and only sort the data when flushing/creating sst files.

Sent using https://www.zoho.com/mail/






---- On Fri, 12 Mar 2021 23:47:05 +0330 Elliott Sims <el...@backblaze.com> wrote ----


I'm not too familiar with the details on what's happened more recently, but I do remember that while Rocksandra was very favorably compared to Cassandra 2.x, the improvements looked fairly similar in nature and magnitude to what Cassandra got from the move to the 3.x sstable format and increased use of off-heap memory.  That might have damped a lot of the enthusiasm for further development.


On Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 10:50 AM Gareth Collins <ma...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I remember a couple of years ago there was some noise about Rocksandra (Cassandra using rocksdb for storage) and opening up Cassandra to alternate storage mechanisms.



I haven't seen anything about it for a while now though. The last commit to Rocksandra on github was in Nov 2019. The associated JIRA items (CASSANDRA-13474 and CASSANDRA-13476) haven't had any activity since 2019 either.



I was wondering whether anyone knew anything about it. Was it decided that this wasn't a good idea after all (the alleged performance differences weren't worth it...or were exaggerated)? Or is it just that it still may be a good idea, but there are no resources available to make this happen (e.g. perhaps the original sponsor moved onto other things)?



I ask because I was looking at RocksDB/Kafka Streams for another project (which may replace some functionality which currently uses Cassandra)...and was wondering if there could be some important info about RocksDB I may be missing.



thanks in advance,

Gareth Collins

Re: What Happened To Alternate Storage And Rocksandra?

[Elliott Sims <el...@backblaze.com>]

I'm not too familiar with the details on what's happened more recently, but
I do remember that while Rocksandra was very favorably compared to
Cassandra 2.x, the improvements looked fairly similar in nature and
magnitude to what Cassandra got from the move to the 3.x sstable format and
increased use of off-heap memory.  That might have damped a lot of the
enthusiasm for further development.

On Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 10:50 AM Gareth Collins <ga...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I remember a couple of years ago there was some noise about Rocksandra
> (Cassandra using rocksdb for storage) and opening up Cassandra to alternate
> storage mechanisms.
>
> I haven't seen anything about it for a while now though. The last commit
> to Rocksandra on github was in Nov 2019. The associated JIRA items
> (CASSANDRA-13474 and CASSANDRA-13476) haven't had any activity since 2019
> either.
>
> I was wondering whether anyone knew anything about it. Was it decided that
> this wasn't a good idea after all (the alleged performance differences
> weren't worth it...or were exaggerated)? Or is it just that it still may be
> a good idea, but there are no resources available to make this happen (e.g.
> perhaps the original sponsor moved onto other things)?
>
> I ask because I was looking at RocksDB/Kafka Streams for another project
> (which may replace some functionality which currently uses Cassandra)...and
> was wondering if there could be some important info about RocksDB I may be
> missing.
>
> thanks in advance,
> Gareth Collins
>

Re: What Happened To Alternate Storage And Rocksandra?

[Jeff Jirsa <jj...@gmail.com>]

As someone who watched some of the work (but wasn’t really involved), I think a bunch of it fizzled for various reasons

The rocks stuff was built (mostly? Completely?) by one company for their use case (the best kind of open source), but wasn’t in a form that was easy to commit upstream - the work to make clean abstractions to make it pluggable ran up against other priorities and ultimately slowed to a halt.

Some of the abstractions are patch available or committed, but I’m not sure if the rocksandra folks are likely to continue rebasing and trying to get it finished / upstreamed post 4.0

That said, there are indeed a ton of things in rocks I hope we adopt. 

> On Mar 12, 2021, at 10:50 AM, Gareth Collins <ga...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I remember a couple of years ago there was some noise about Rocksandra (Cassandra using rocksdb for storage) and opening up Cassandra to alternate storage mechanisms.
> 
> I haven't seen anything about it for a while now though. The last commit to Rocksandra on github was in Nov 2019. The associated JIRA items (CASSANDRA-13474 and CASSANDRA-13476) haven't had any activity since 2019 either.
> 
> I was wondering whether anyone knew anything about it. Was it decided that this wasn't a good idea after all (the alleged performance differences weren't worth it...or were exaggerated)? Or is it just that it still may be a good idea, but there are no resources available to make this happen (e.g. perhaps the original sponsor moved onto other things)?
> 
> I ask because I was looking at RocksDB/Kafka Streams for another project (which may replace some functionality which currently uses Cassandra)...and was wondering if there could be some important info about RocksDB I may be missing.
> 
> thanks in advance,
> Gareth Collins

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