Howdy! So, last week I finally got around to playing with Cassandra. After a while I understood the basics. To test this assumption I started working on my own Client implementation since "Learning-by-doing" is what I do and existing Ruby Clients (which are awesome) already abstracted too much for me to really grasp what was going on. Java is not really my thing (anymore) so I began with the Thrift API and Ruby.
Anyways back to Topic. This library is now is available at: http://github.com/thheller/greek_architect Since I have virtually no experience with Cassandra (but plenty with SQL) I started with the first use-case which I have programmed a bunch of times before. User Management. I build websites which are used by other people, so I need to store them somewhere. Step #1: Creating Users and persisting them in Cassandra Example here: http://github.com/thheller/greek_architect/blob/master/spec/examples/user_create_spec.rb I hope my rspec-style documentation doesnt confuse too many people since I already have a gazillion questions for this simple, but also VERY common use-case. Since a question is best asked with a concrete example to refer to, here goes my first one: Would any of you veterans build what I built the way I did? (refering to the cassandra design, not the ruby client) I insert Users with UUID keys into one ColumnFamily. I then index them by creating a row in another ColumnFamily using the Name as Key and then adding one column holding a reference to the User UUID. I also insert a reference into another ColumnFamily holding a List of Users partitioned by Date. I'm really unsure about the index design, since they dont get updated when a User row is removed. I could hook into the remove call (like I did into mutations) and cascade the deletes where needed, but 10+ years of SQL always want to tell me I'm crazy for doing this stuff! I'd really appreciate some feedback. Cheers, Thomas
