Looking at the Cassandra 13 keynote [1], slide 56 regarding hinted
writes causing the lock to be taken even though the client thinks the
lock attempt failed, which the new CAS support fixes.
I have some database migrations to run on Cassandra, so I still need a
long lived lock somewhere to prevent two or more migrations running
concurrently, so CAS doesn't directly solve this problem.
It sounds like I could have a BOOLEAN column named "lock" but use CAS to
update it from false or NULL value to true and this avoids the problem
of hinted updates problem. The finally block would reset it to false or
NULL. This would be a simpler implementation than using the wait chain
algorithm.
Any problems with this?
Blair
[1] http://www.slideshare.net/jbellis/cassandra-summit-2013-keynote
[2] http://media.fightmymonster.com/Shared/docs/Wait%20Chain%20Algorithm.pdf
