Why are you keeping all your indexes in the same row? We do a similar thing (maintain several indexes over the same data) and we just have an index column family with keys like "dest192.168.0.1" which means destination index of 192.168.0.1. You can do rows like User_Keys_By_Last_Name_adams and User_Keys_By_Last_Name_alden. You can keep the matching main column family key as the column name. This will ensure that your index is evenly distributed throughout your cluster.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Ed Anuff" <e...@anuff.com> To: user@cassandra.apache.org Sent: Thursday, August 25, 2011 12:48:49 PM Subject: Re: Customized Secondary Index Schema How many unique last names do you anticipate having? How many characters in the last name do you anticipate keeping in your index? You can easily do the math to figure out how many you could fit on a node. I think you'll find that the ceiling might be quite a bit higher than you think. If you have over a couple of hundred million users it might not be the best approach. There are a lot of very simple ways to split it up over multiple rows. As is the case with most things regarding Cassandra, the off-the-cuff assumptions only get you so far before you have to do some math and do some tests. As I mentioned in my talk, for simple uses cases like this, you probably should just start with the built in secondary indexes, but I assume you already have explored those. Ed On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 9:27 AM, Alvin UW < alvi...@gmail.com > wrote: Yes, this is what I am worrying about. 2011/8/24 Ryan King < r...@twitter.com > On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 10:03 AM, Alvin UW < alvi...@gmail.com > wrote: > Hello, > > As mentioned by Ed Anuff in his blog and slides, one way to build customized > secondary index is: > We use one CF, each row to represent a secondary index, with the secondary > index name as row key. > For example, > > Indexes = { > "User_Keys_By_Last_Name" : { > "adams" : "e5d61f2b-…", > "alden" : "e80a17ba-…", > "anderson" : "e5d61f2b-…", > "davis" : "e719962b-…", > "doe" : "e78ece0f-…", > "franks" : "e66afd40-…", > … : …, > } > } > > But the whole secondary index is partitioned into a single node, because of > the row key. > All the queries against this secondary index will go to this node. Of > course, there are some replica nodes. > > Do you think this is a scalability problem, or any better solution to solve > it? Its certainly a scalability problem in that this solution has a hard ceiling (this index can't get larger than the capacity of any single node). It will probably work on small datasets, but if your dataset is small then why are you using cassandra? -ryan