UnavailableException is bit tricky. It means, that not all replicas required by CL received update. Actually you do not know, whenever update was stored or not, and actually what went wrong.
This is the case, why writing with CL.ALL might get problematic. It is enough, that only one replica is off-line and you will get exception. Remember also, that CL.ALL means, all replicas in all Data Centers - not only local DC. Writing with QUORUM_LOCAL could be better idea. There is only one CL, where exception guarantees, that data was really not stored: CL.ANY with hinted handoff enabled. One more thing: write goes always to all replicas independent from provided CL. Client request blocks only until required replicas respond - however this response is asynchronous. This means, when you write with lower CL, replicas will get data with the same speed, only your client does not wait for acknowledgment from all of them. Ciao, Maciej On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Mohit Agarwal <coolmoh...@gmail.com>wrote: > Hi guys, > > I am trying to understand what happens when an UnavailableException is > thrown. > > a) Suppose we are doing a ConsistencyLevel.ALL write on a 3 node cluster. > My understanding is that if one of the nodes is down and the coordinator > node is aware of that(through gossip), then it will respond to the request > with an UnavailableException. Is this correct? > > b) What happens if the coordinator isn't aware of a node being down and > sends the request to all the nodes and never hears back from one of the > node. Would this result in a TimedOutException or a UnavailableException? > > c) I am trying to understand the cases where the client receives an error, > but data could have been inserted into Cassandra. One such case is the > TimedOutException. Are there any other situations like these? > > Thanks, > Mohit >
