Harry, we're in a similar situation and are starting to work out our own ruby client. The biggest issue is that it doesn't make much sense to build a higher level abstraction on anything other than CQL3, given where things are headed. At least this is our opinion. At the same time, CQL3 is just barely becoming usable and still seems rather deficient in wide-row usage. The tricky part is that with the current CQL3 you have to construct quite complex iterators to retrieve a large result set. Which means that you end up having to either parse CQL3 coming in to insert the iteration stuff, or you have to pass CQL3 fragments in and compose them together with iterator clauses. Not fun stuff either way. The only good solution I see is to switch to a streaming protocol (or build some form of "continue" on top of thrift) such that the client can ask for a huge result set and the cassandra coordinator can break it into sub-queries as it sees fit and return results chunk-by-chunk. If this is really the path forward then all abstractions built above CQL3 before that will either have a good piece of complex code that can be deleted or worse, will have an interface that is no longer best practice. Good luck! Thorsten
On 8/1/2012 1:47 PM, Harry Wilkinson wrote: > Hi, > > I'm looking for a Ruby client for Cassandra that is pretty high-level. > I am really hoping to find a Ruby gem of high quality that allows a > developer to create models like you would with ActiveModel. > > So far I have figured out that the canonical Ruby client for Cassandra > is Twitter's Cassandra gem <https://github.com/twitter/cassandra/> of > the same name. It looks great - mature, still in active development, > etc. No stated support for Ruby 1.9.3 that I can see, but I can > probably live with that for now. > > What I'm looking for is a higher-level gem built on that gem that > works like ActiveModel in that you just include a module in your model > class and that gives you methods to declare your model's serialized > attributes and also the usual ActiveModel methods like 'save!', > 'valid?', 'find', etc. > > I've been trying out some different NoSQL databases recently, and for > example there is an official Ruby client > <https://github.com/basho/riak-ruby-client> for Riak with a domain > model that is close to Riak's, but then there's also a gem called > 'Ripple' <https://github.com/seancribbs/ripple> that uses a domain > model that is closer to what most Ruby developers are used to. So it > looks like Twitter's Cassandra gem is the one that stays close to the > domain model of Cassandra, and what I'm looking for is a gem that's a > Cassandra equivalent of RIpple. > > From some searching I found cassandra_object > <https://github.com/NZKoz/cassandra_object>, which has been inactive > for a couple of years, but there's a fork > <https://github.com/data-axle/cassandra_object> that looks like it's > being maintained, but I have not found any kind of information to > suggest the maintained fork is in general use yet. I have found quite > a lot of gems of a similar style that people have started and then not > really got very far with. > > So, does anybody know of a suitable gem? Would you recommend it? Or > perhaps you would recommend not using such a gem and sticking with the > lower-level client gem? > > Thanks in advance for your advice. > > Harry
