I have a situation where I need to accumulate values in Cassandra on an ongoing basis. Atomic increments are still in the works apparently (see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-721) so for the time being I'll be using Hadoop, and attempting to feed in both the existing values and the new values to a M/R process where they can be combined together and written back out to Cassandra.
The approach I'm taking is to use Hadoop's CombineFileInputFormat to blend the existing data (using Cassandra's ColumnFamilyInputFormat) with the newly incoming data (using something like Hadoop's SequenceFileInputFormat). I was just wondering, has anyone here tried this, and were there issues? I'm worried because the CombineFileInputFormat has restrictions around splits being from different pools so I don't know how this will play out with data from both Cassandra and HDFS. The other option, I suppose, is to use a separate M/R process to replicate the data onto HDFS first, but I'd rather avoid the extra step and duplication of storage. Also, if you've tackled a similar situation in the past using a different approach, I'd be keen to hear about it... Thanks Mark
