Hi - Over the last few weeks, I have seen several emails on this mailing list from people trying to extract all data from C*, so that they can import that data into other analytical tools that provide much richer analytics functionality than C*. Extracting all data from C* is a full-table scan, which is not the ideal use case for C*. However, people don't have much choice if they want to do ad-hoc analytics on the data in C*. Unfortunately, I don't think C* comes with any built-in tools that make this task easy for a large dataset. Please correct me if I am wrong. Cqlsh has a COPY TO command, but it doesn't really work if you have a large amount of data in C*.
I am aware of couple of approaches for extracting all data from a table in C*: 1) Iterate through all the C* partitions (physical rows) using the Java Driver and CQL. 2) Extract the data directly from SSTables files. Either approach can be used with Hadoop or Spark to speed up the extraction process. I wanted to do a quick survey and find out how many people on this mailing list have successfully used approach #1 or #2 for extracting large datasets (terabytes) from C*. Also, if you have used some other techniques, it would be great if you could share your approach with the group. Mohammed
