[jira] [Created] (FLINK-4502) Cassandra connector documentation has misleading consistency guarantees

["Elias Levy (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Elias Levy created FLINK-4502:
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             Summary: Cassandra connector documentation has misleading consistency guarantees
                 Key: FLINK-4502
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-4502
             Project: Flink
          Issue Type: Bug
          Components: Documentation
    Affects Versions: 1.1.0
            Reporter: Elias Levy


The Cassandra connector documentation states that  "enableWriteAheadLog() is an optional method, that allows exactly-once processing for non-deterministic algorithms."  This claim appears to be false.

From what I gather, the write ahead log feature of the connector works as follows:
- The sink is replaced with a stateful operator that writes incoming messages to the state backend based on checkpoint they belong in.
- When the operator is notified that a Flink checkpoint has been completed it, for each set of checkpoints older than and including the committed one:
  * reads its messages from the state backend
  * writes them to Cassandra
  * records that it has committed them to Cassandra for the specific checkpoint and operator instance
   * and erases them from the state backend.

This process attempts to avoid resubmitting queries to Cassandra that would otherwise occur when recovering a job from a checkpoint and having messages replayed.

Alas, this does not guarantee exactly once semantics at the sink.  The writes to Cassandra that occur when the operator is notified that checkpoint is completed are not atomic and they are potentially non-idempotent.  If the job dies while writing to Cassandra or before committing the checkpoint via committer, queries will be replayed when the job recovers.  Thus the documentation appear to be incorrect in stating this provides exactly-once semantics.

There also seems to be an issue in GenericWriteAheadSink's notifyOfCompletedCheckpoint which may result in incorrect output.  If sendValues returns false because a write failed, instead of bailing, it simply moves on to the next checkpoint to commit if there is one, keeping the previous one around to try again later.  But that can result in newer data being overwritten with older data when the previous checkpoint is retried.  Although given that CassandraCommitter implements isCheckpointCommitted as checkpointID <= this.lastCommittedCheckpointID, it actually means that when it goes back to try the uncommitted older checkpoint it will consider it committed, even though some of its data may not have been written out, and the data will be discarded.





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