Tag Archives: cassandra

Let’s Talk Top 7 Options for Database Gumbo

When one starts to dig into databases things get really complex really fast. There’s not only a whole plethora of database companies and projects, but database types, storage engines, and other options and functionality to choose from. One place to get a start is just to take a look at the crazy long list of databases on db-engines. In this post I’m going to take a look at a few of the top database engines to create a starting point – which I’ll reference – for future video streaming coding sessions (follow me @ twitch.tv/adronhall).

My Options for Database Gumbo

  1. Apache Cassandra / DataStax Enterprise
  2. Postgresql
  3. SQL Server
  4. Elasticsearch
  5. Redis
  6. SQLite
  7. Dynamo DB

The Reasons

Ok, so the list is as such, and as stated it’s my list. There are a lot of databases, and of course some are still more used such as Oracle. However here’s some of the logic and reasoning behind my choices above.

Oracle

First off I feel like I need to broach the Oracle topic. Mostly because of their general use in industry. I’m not doing anything with Oracle now, nor have I for years for a long, long, LONG list of reasons. Using their software tends to be buried in bureaucratic, oddly broken and unnecessary usage today anyway. They use predatory market tactics, completely dishonorable approach to sales and services, as well as threatening and suing people for doing benchmarks, and a host of other practices. In face to face experiences, Oracle tends to give off experiences, that Lawrence from Office Space would say, “naw man, I think you’d get your ass kicked for that!” and I agree. Oracle’s practices are too often disgusting. But even from the purely technical point of view, the Oracle Database and ecosystem itself really isn’t better than other options out there. It is indeed a better, more intelligently strategic and tactical option to use a number of alternatives.

Apache Cassandra / DataStax Enterprise

This combo has multiple reasons and logic to be on the list. First and foremost, much of my work today is using DataStax Enterprise (DSE) and Apache Cassandra since I work for DataStax. But it’s important to know I didn’t just go to DataStax because I needed a job, but because I chose them (and obviously they chose me by hiring me) because of the team and technology. Yes, they pay me, but it’s very much a two way street, I advocate Cassandra and DSE because I personally know the tech is top tier and solid.

On the fact that Apache Cassandra is top tier and solid, it is simply the remaining truly masterless distributed database that provides a linear path of scalability on the market that you can use, buy support for, and is actually actively and knowingly maintained not just by DataStax but by members of the community. One could make an argument for MongoDB but I’ll maybe elaborate on that in the future.

In addition to being a solid distributed database there are capabilities inherent in Apache Cassandra because of the data types and respective the CQL (Cassandra Query Language) that make it a great database to use too. DataStax Enterprise extends that to provide spatial (re: GIS/Geo Data/Queries), graph data, analytics engine, and more built on other components like SOLR and related technology. Overall a great database and great prospective combinations with the database.

Postgresql

Postgres is a relational database that has been around for a long time. It’s got some really awesome features like native JSON support, which I’m a big fan of. But I digress, there’s tons of other material that lays out thoroughly why to use Postgres which I very much agree with.

Just from the perspective of the extensive and rich data types Postgres is enough to be put on this list, but considering there are a lot of reasons around multi-tenancy, scalability, and related characteristics that are mostly unique to Postgres it’s held a solid position.

SQL Server

This one is on my list for a few reasons that have nothing to do with features or capabilities. This is the first database I was responsible for in its entirety. Administration, queries, query tuning, setup, and developer against with the application tier. I think of all my experience, this database I’ve spent the most time with, with Apache Cassandra being a close second, then Postgres and finally Riak.

Kind of a pattern there eh? Relational, distributed, relational, distributed!

The other thing about SQL Server however is the integrations, tooling, and related development ecosystem around SQL Server is above and beyond most options out there. Maybe, with a big maybe, Oracle’s ecosystem might be comparable but the pricing is insanely different. In that SQL Server basically can carry the whole workload, reporting, ETL, and other feature capabilities that the Oracle ecosystem has traditionally done. Combine SQL Server with SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services), SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services), and other online systems like Azure’s SQL Database and the support, tooling, and ecosystem is just massive. Even though I’ve had my ins and outs with Microsoft over the years, I’ve always found myself enjoying working on SQL Server and it’s respective tooling options and such. It’s a feature rich, complete, solidly, and generally well performing relational database, full stop.

Elasticsearch

Ok, this is kind of a distributed database of sorts but focused more exclusively (not totally since it’s kind of expanded its roles) search engine. Overall I’ve had good experiences with Elasticsearch and it’s respective ELK (or Elastic ecosystem) of tooling and such, with some frustrating flakiness here and there over the years. Most of my experience has come from an operational point of view with Elasticsearch. I’ve however done a fair bit of work over the years in supporting teams that are doing actual software development against the system. I probably won’t write a huge amount about Elasticsearch in the coming months, but I’ll definitely bring it up at certain times.

Redis / SQLite / DynamoDB

These I’ll be covering in the coming months. For Redis and DynamoDB I have wanted to dig in for some comparison analysis from the perspective of implementing data tiers against these databases, where they are a good option, and determining where they’re just an outright bad option.

For SQLite I’ve used it on and off for many years, but have wanted to sit down and just learn it and try out some of its features a bit more.

Twitz Coding Session in Go – Cobra + Viper CLI Wrap Up + Twitter Data Retrieval

Part 3 of 3 – Coding Session in Go – Cobra + Viper CLI for Parsing Text Files, Retrieval of Twitter Data, and Exports to various file formats.

UPDATED PARTS:

  1. Twitz Coding Session in Go – Cobra + Viper CLI for Parsing Text Files
  2. Twitz Coding Session in Go – Cobra + Viper CLI with Initial Twitter + Cassandra Installation
  3. Twitz Coding Session in Go – Cobra + Viper CLI Wrap Up + Twitter Data Retrieval (this post)

Updated links to each part will be posted at bottom of  this post when I publish them. For code, written walk through, and the like scroll down below the video and timestamps.

0:54 The thrashing introduction.
3:40 Getting started, with a recap of the previous sessions but I’ve not got the sound on so ignore this until 5:20.
5:20 I notice, and turn on the volume. Now I manage to get the recap, talking about some of the issues with the Twitter API. I step through setup of the app and getting the appropriate ID’s and such for the Twitter API Keys and Secrets.
9:12 I open up the code base, and review where the previous sessions got us to. Using Cobra w/ Go, parsing and refactoring that was previously done.
10:30 Here I talk about configuration again and the specifics of getting it setup for running the application.
12:50 Talking about Go’s fatal panic I was getting. The dependency reference to Github for the application was different than what is in application and don’t show the code that is actually executing. I show a quick fix and move on.
17:12 Back to the Twitter API use by using the go-twitter library. Here I review the issue and what the fix was for another issue I was having previous session with getting the active token! Thought the library handled it but that wasn’t the case!
19:26 Now I step through creating a function to get the active oath bearer token to use.
28:30 After deleting much of the code that doesn’t work from the last session, I go about writing the code around handling the retrieval of Twitter results for various passed in Twitter Accounts.

The bulk of the next section is where I work through a number of functions, a little refactoring, and answering some questions from the audience/Twitch Chat (working on a way to get it into the video!), fighting with some dependency tree issues, and a whole slew of silliness. Once that wraps up I get some things committed into the Github repo and wrap up the core functionality of the Twitz Application.

58:00 Reviewing some of the other examples in the go-twitter library repo. I also do a quick review of the other function calls form the library that take action against the Twitter API.
59:40 One of the PR’s I submitted to the project itself I review and merge into the repo that adds documentation and a build badge for the README.md.
1:02:48 Here I add some more information about the configuration settings to the README.md file.

1:05:48 The Twitz page is now updated: https://adron.github.io/twitz/
1:06:48 Setup of the continuous integration for the project on Travis CI itself: https://travis-ci.org/Adron/twitz
1:08:58 Setup fo the actual travis.yml file for Go. After this I go through a few stages of troubleshooting getitng the build going, with some white space in the ole’ yaml file and such. Including also, the famous casing issue! Ugh!
1:26:20 Here I start a wrap up of what is accomplished in this session.

NOTE: Yes, I realize I spaced and forgot the feature where I export it out to Apache Cassandra. Yes, I will indeed have a future stream where I build out the part that exports the responses to Apache Cassandra! So subcribe, stay tuned, and I’ll get that one done ASAP!!!

1:31:10 Further CI troubleshooting as one build is green and one build is yellow. More CI troubleshooting! Learn about the travis yaml here.
1:34:32 Finished, just the bad ass outtro now!

The Codez

In the previous posts I outlined two specific functions that were built out:

  • Part 1 – The config function for the twitz config command.
  • Part 2 – The parse function for the twitz parse command.

In this post I focused on updating both of these and adding additional functions for the bearer token retrieval for auth and ident against the Twitter API and other functionality. Let’s take a look at what the functions looked like and read like after this last session wrap up.

The config command basically ended up being 5 lines of fmt.Printf functions to print out pertinent configuration values and environment variables that are needed for the CLI to be used.

The parse command was a small bit changed. A fair amount of the functionality I refactored out to the buildTwitterList() and exportFile, and rebuildForExport functions. The buildTwitterList() I put in the helper.go file, which I’ll cover a littler later. But in this file, which could still use some refactoring which I’ll get to, I have several pieces of functionality; the export to formats functions, and the if else if logic of the exportParsedTwitterList function.

Next up after parse, it seems fitting to cover the helpers.go file code. First I have the check function, which simply wraps the routinely copied error handling code snippet. Check out the file directly for that. Then below that I have the buildTwitterList() function which gets the config setting for the file name to open to parse for Twitter accounts. Then the code reads the file, splits the results of the text file into fields, then steps through and parses out the Twitter accounts. This is done with a REGEX (I know I know now I have two problems, but hey, this is super simple!). It basically finds fields that start with an @ and then verifies the alphanumeric nature, combined with a possible underscore, that then remove unnecessary characters on those fields. Wrapping all that up by putting the fields into a string/slice array and returning that string array to the calling code.

The next function in the Helpers.go file is the getBearerToken function. This was a tricky bit of code. This function takes in the consumer key and secret from the Twitter app (check out the video at 5:20 for where to set it up). It returns a string and error, empty string if there’s an error, as shown below.

The code starts out with establishing a POST request against the Twitter API, asking for a token and passing the client credentials. Catches an error if that doesn’t work out, but if it can the code then sets up the b64Token variable with the standard encoding functionality when it receives the token string byte array ( lines 9 and 10). After that the request then has the header built based on the needed authoriztaion and content-type properties (properties, values? I don’t recall what spec calls these), then the request is made with http.DefaultClient.Do(req). The response is returned, or error and empty response (or nil? I didn’t check the exact function signature logic). Next up is the defer to ensure the response is closed when everything is done.

Next up the JSON result is parsed (unmarshalled) into the v struct which I now realize as I write this I probably ought to rename to something that isn’t a single letter. But it works for now, and v has the pertinent AccessToken variable which is then returned.

Wow, ok, that’s a fair bit of work. Up next, the findem.go file and related function for twitz. Here I start off with a few informative prints to the console just to know where the CLI has gotten to at certain points. The twitter list is put together, reusing that same function – yay code reuse right! Then the access token is retrieved. Next up the http client is built, the twitter client is passed that and initialized, and the user lookup request is sent. Finally the users are printed out and below that a count and print out of the count of users is printed.

I realized, just as I wrapped this up I completely spaced on the Apache Cassandra export. I’ll have those post coming soon and will likely do another refactor to get the output into a more usable state before I call this one done. But the core functionality, setup of the systemic environment needed for the tool, the pertinent data and API access, and other elements are done. For now, that’s a wrap, if you’re curious about the final refactor and the Apache Cassandra export then subscribe to my Twitch @adronhall and/or my YouTube channel ThrashingCode.

UPDATED SERIES PARTS

    1. Twitz Coding Session in Go – Cobra + Viper CLI for Parsing Text Files
    2. Twitz Coding Session in Go – Cobra + Viper CLI with Initial Twitter + Cassandra Installation
    3. Twitz Coding Session in Go – Cobra + Viper CLI Wrap Up + Twitter Data Retrieval (this post)

     

Creating Distributed Database Application Starter Kits

I’ve boarded a bus, and as always, when I board a bus I almost always code. Unless of course there are people I’m hanging out with then I chit chat, but right now this is the 212 and I don’t know anybody on this chariot anyway. So into the code I go.

I’ve been re-reviewing the Docker and related collateral we offer at DataStax. In that review it seems like it would be worth having some starter kit applications along with these “default” Docker options. This post I’ve created to provide the first language & tech stack of several starter kits I’m going to create.

Starter Kit – The Todo List Template

This first set of starter kits will be based upon a todo list application. It’s really simple, minimal in features, and offers a complete top to bottom implementation of a service, and an application on top of that service all built on Apache Cassandra. In some places, and I’ll clearly mark these places, I might add a few DataStax Enterprise features around search, analytics, or graph.

The Todo List

Features: The following detail the features, from the users perspective, that this application will provide. Each implementation will provide all of these features.

  • A user wants to create a user account to create todo lists with.
  • A user wants to be able to store a username, full name, email, and some simple notes with their account.
  • A user wants to be able to create a todo list that is identified by a user defined name. (i.e. “Grocery List”, “Guitar List”, or “Stuff to do List”)
  • A user want to be able to logout and return, then retrieve a list from a list of their lists.
  • A user wants to be able to delete a todo list.
  • A user wants to be able to update a todo list name.
  • A user wants to be able to add items to a todo list.
  • A user wants to be able to update items in the todo list.
  • A user wants to be able to delete items in a todo list.

Architecture: The following is the architecture of the todo list starter kit application.

  • Database: Apache Cassandra.
  • Service: A small service to manage the data tier of the application.
  • User Interface: A web interface using React/Vuejs ??

As you can see, some of the items are incomplete, but I’ll decide on them soon. My next review is to check out what I really want to use for the user interface, and also to get a user account system figured out. I don’t really want to create the entire user interface, but instead would like to use something like Auth0 or Okta.

May I Ask?

There are numerous things I’d love help with. Are there any user stories you think are missing? Should I add something? What would make these helpful to you? Leave a comment, or tweet at me @Adron. I’d be happy to get some feedback and other’s thoughts on the matter so that I can ensure that these are simple, to the point, usable, and helpful to people. Cheers!

Twitz Coding Session in Go – Cobra + Viper CLI with Initial Twitter + Cassandra Installation

Part 2 of 3 – Coding Session in Go – Cobra + Viper CLI for Parsing Text Files, Retrieval of Twitter Data, Exports to various file formats, and export to Apache Cassandra.

UPDATED PARTS:

  1. Twitz Coding Session in Go – Cobra + Viper CLI for Parsing Text Files
  2. Twitz Coding Session in Go – Cobra + Viper CLI with Initial Twitter + Cassandra Installation (this post)
  3. Twitz Coding Session in Go – Cobra + Viper CLI Wrap Up + Twitter Data Retrieval

Updated links to each part will be posted at bottom of  this post when I publish them. For code, written walk through, and the like scroll down below the video and timestamps.

Hacking Together a CLI Installing Cassandra, Setting Up the Twitter API, ENV Vars, etc.

0:04 Kick ass intro. Just the standard rocking tune.

3:40 A quick recap. Check out the previous write “Twitz Coding Session in Go – Cobra + Viper CLI for Parsing Text Files” of this series.

4:30 Beginning of completion of twitz parse command for exporting out to XML, JSON, and CSV (already did the text export previous session). This segment also includes a number of refactorings to clean up the functions, break out the control structures and make the code more readable.

In the end of refactoring twitz parse came out like this. The completed list is put together by calling the buildTwitterList() function which is actually in the helpers.go file. Then prints that list out as is, and checks to see if a file export should be done. If there is a configuration setting set for file export then that process starts with a call to exportParsedTwitterList(exportFilename string, exportFormat string, ... etc ... ). Then a simple single level control if then else structure to determine which format to export the data to, and a call to the respective export function to do the actual export of data and writing of the file to the underlying system. There’s some more refactoring that could be done, but for now, this is cleaned up pretty nicely considering the splattering of code I started with at first.

50:00 I walk through a quick install of an Apache Cassandra single node that I’ll use for development use later. I also show quickly how to start and stop post-installation.

Reference: Apache Cassandra, Download Page, and Installation Instructions.

53:50 Choosing the go-twitter API library for Go. I look at a few real quickly just to insure that is the library I want to use.

Reference: go-twitter library

56:35 At this point I go through how I set a Twitter App within the API interface. This is a key part of the series where I take a look at the consumer keys and access token and access token secrets and where they’re at in the Twitter interface and how one needs to reset them if they just showed the keys on a stream (like I just did, shockers!)

57:55 Here I discuss and show where to setup the environment variables inside of Goland IDE to building and execution of the CLI. Once these are setup they’ll be the main mechanism I use in the IDE to test the CLI as I go through building out further features.

1:00:18 Updating the twitz config command to show the keys that we just added as environment variables. I set these up also with some string parsing and cutting off the end of the secrets so that the whole variable value isn’t shown but just enough to confirm that it is indeed a set configuration or environment variable.

1:16:53 At this point I work through some additional refactoring of functions to clean up some of the code mess that exists. Using Goland’s extract method feature and other tooling I work through several refactoring efforts that clean up the code.

1:23:17 Copying a build configuration in Goland. A handy little thing to know you can do when you have a bunch of build configuration options.

1:37:32 At this part of the video I look at the app-auth example in the code library, but I gotta add the caveat, I run into problems using the exact example. But I work through it and get to the first error messages that anybody would get to pending they’re using the same examples. I get them fixed however in the next session, this segment of the video however provides a basis for my pending PR’s and related work I’ll submit to the repo.

The remainder of the video is trying to figure out what is or isn’t exactly happening with the error.

I’ll include the working findem code in the next post on this series. Until then, watch the wrap up and enjoy!

1:59:20 Wrap up of video and upcoming stream schedule on Twitch.

UPDATED SERIES PARTS

    1. Twitz Coding Session in Go – Cobra + Viper CLI for Parsing Text Files
    2. Twitz Coding Session in Go – Cobra + Viper CLI with Initial Twitter + Cassandra Installation (this post)
    3. Twitz Coding Session in Go – Cobra + Viper CLI Wrap Up + Twitter Data Retrieval

 

Lena presents “So You Want to Run Data-Intensive Systems on Kubernetes”

If you’re interested in running data-intensive systems (think Apache Cassandra, DataStax Enterprise, Kafka, Spark, Tensorflow, Elasticsearch, Redis, etc) in Kubernetes this is a great talk. @Lenadroid covers what options are available in Kubernetes, how architectural features around pods, jobs, stateful sets, and replica sets work together to provide distributed systems capabilities. Other features she continues and delves into include custom resource definitions (CRDs), operators, and HELM Charts, which include future and peripheral feature capabilities that can help you host various complex distributed systems. I’ve included references below the video here, enjoy.

References:

Cassandra Datacenter & Racks

The last post in this series is Distributed Database Things to Know: Consistent Hashing.

Let’s talk about the analogy of Apache Cassandra Datacenter & Racks to actual datacenter and racks. I kind of enjoy the use of the terms datacenter and racks to describe architectural elements of Cassandra. However, as time moves on the relationship between these terms and why they’re called datacenter and racks can be obfuscated.

Take for instance, a datacenter could just be a cloud provider, an actual physical datacenter location, a zone in Azure, or region in some other provider. What an actual Datacenter in Cassandra parlance actually is can vary, but the origins of why it’s called a Datacenter remains the same. The elements of racks also can vary, but also remain the same.

Origins: Racks & Datacenters?

Let’s cover the actual things in this industry we call datacenter and racks first, unrelated to Apache Cassandra terms.

Racks: The easiest way to describe a physical rack is to show pictures of datacenter racks via the ole’ Google images.

racks.png

A rack is something that is located in a data-center, or even just someone’s garage in some odd scenarios. Ya know, if somebody wants serious hardware to work with. The rack then has a number of servers, often various kinds, within that rack itself. As you can see from the images above there’s a wide range of these racks.

Datacenter: Again the easiest way to describe a datacenter is to just look at a bunch of pictures of datacenter, albeit you see lots of racks again. But really, that’s what a datacenter is, is a building that has lots and lots of racks.

data-center.png

However in Apache Cassandra (and respectively DataStax Enterprise products) a datacenter and rack do not directly correlate to a physical rack or datacenter. The idea is more of an abstraction than hard mapping to the physical realm. In turn it is better to think of datacenter and racks as a way to structure and organize your DataStax Enterprise or Apache Cassandra architecture. From a tree perspective of organizing your cluster, think of things in this hierarchy.

  • Cluster
    • Datacenter(s)
      • Rack(s)
        • Server(s)
          • Node (vnode)

Apache Cassandra Datacenter

An Apache Cassandra Datacenter is a group of nodes, related and configured within a cluster for replication purposes. Setting up a specific set of related nodes into a datacenter helps to reduce latency, prevent transactions from impact by other workloads, and related effects. The replication factor can also be setup to write to multiple datacenter, providing additional flexibility in architectural design and organization. One specific element of datacenter to note is that they must contain only one node type:

Depending on the replication factor, data can be written to multiple datacenters. Datacenters must never span physical locations.Each datacenter usually contains only one node type. The node types are:

  • Transactional: Previously referred to as a Cassandra node.
  • DSE Graph: A graph database for managing, analyzing, and searching highly-connected data.
  • DSE Analytics: Integration with Apache Spark.
  • DSE Search: Integration with Apache Solr. Previously referred to as a Solr node.
  • DSE SearchAnalytics: DSE Search queries within DSE Analytics jobs.

Apache Cassandra Racks

An Apache Cassandra Rack is a grouped set of servers. The architecture of Cassandra uses racks so that no replica is stored redundantly inside a singular rack, ensuring that replicas are spread around through different racks in case one rack goes down. Within a datacenter there could be multiple racks with multiple servers, as the hierarchy shown above would dictate.

To determine where data goes within a rack or sets of racks Apache Cassandra uses what is referred to as a snitch. A snitch determines which racks and datacenter a particular node belongs to, and by respect of that, determines where the replicas of data will end up. This replication strategy which is informed by the snitch can take the form of numerous kinds of snitches, some examples include;

  • SimpleSnitch – this snitch treats order as proximity. This is primarily only used when in a single-datacenter deployment.
  • Dynamic Snitching – the dynamic snitch monitors read latencies to avoid reading from hosts that have slowed down.
  • RackInferringSnitch – Proximity is determined by rack and datacenter, assumed corresponding to 3rd and 2nd octet of each node’s IP address. This particular snitch is often used as an example for writing a custom snitch class since it isn’t particularly useful unless it happens to match one’s deployment conventions.

In the future I’ll outline a few more snitches, how some of them work with more specific detail, and I’ll get into a whole selection of other topics. Be sure to subscribe to the blog, the ole’ RSS feed works great too, and follow @CompositeCode for blog updates. For discourse and hot takes follow me @Adron.

Distributed Database Things to Know Series

  1. Consistent Hashing
  2. Apache Cassandra Datacenter & Racks (this post)

 

New Trio of Series: Go, Bash, and Distributed Databases

I’m starting three new series and only making this post now that I’ve got the first round posted and live. Each of these I’ll be back posting so that I have a kind of linked list of blog entries for each of the series. So if you’re into learning Go, I’ve got that going, or you’re into bash hacking, got that too, and of course if you’re digging into distributed systems and databases, I’m tackling that too. It’s kind of the trio of core technologies I’m working on these days, enjoy:

The Nuances of Go – This is going to be a series where I go through some of the details of Go. It’s going to be kind of all over the board, but drill into usage of the language, the why, and what for of various features, capabilities, and related topics.

‘bash’ A.K.A. The Solution for Everything – Bash has been around for a while. But let’s not talk about how old it is, the shell has been used and is being used by about every single operating system on the planet. It’s hugely popular and it isn’t exactly being replaced. You can also basically do anything on a computer that you would want to or need to do with it. However there are lot’s of features and commands one ought to know, this series is going to tackle a new command every new post and go into details of how to use it, what it can be used for, and related tips n’ tricks.

Distributed Database Things to Know – This series is going to cover various features and nuances of the Cassandra distributed database cluster technology. I’ll be diving into a whole host of capabilities, code, and a pointer or three back to white papers when relevant that helped bring these distributed databases into existence.

My goal with each of these is to rise early Monday morning, and time box each article to about 30 minutes. 30 minutes for Go, 30 minutes for bash, and 30 for Cassandra. Then I’ll publish those throughout the week. I set this goal with the hilarious fact that I’m taking time to go record some LinkedIn learning courses on Go and Terraform. With that it might be a week before you see the next trio published. But they’re halfway written already so I might surprise myself. Happy thrashing code!