Storing Weighted Graph Time Series in Cassandra

Question

I am new to Cassandra, and I want to brainstorm storing time series of weighted graphs in Cassandra, where edge weight is incremented upon each time but also updated as a function of time. For example,

w_ij(t+1) = w_ij(t)*exp(-dt/tau) + 1

My first shot involves two CQL v3 tables:

First, I create a partition key by concatenating the id of the graph and the two nodes incident on the particular edge, e.g. G-V1-V2. I do this in order to be able to use the "ORDER BY" directive on the second component of the composite keys described below, which is type timestamp. Call this string the EID, for "edge id".

TABLE 1
- a time series of edge updates
- PRIMARY KEY: EID, time, weight


TABLE 2
- values of "last update time" and "last weight"
- PRIMARY KEY: EID
- COLUMNS: time, weight

Upon each tick, I fetch and update the time and weight values stored in TABLE 2. I use these values to compute the time delta and new weight. I then insert these values in TABLE 1.

Are there any terrible inefficiencies in this strategy? How should it be done? I already know that the update procedure for TABLE 2 is not idempotent and could result in inconsistencies, but I can accept that for the time being.

EDIT: One thing I might do is merge the two tables into a single time series table.

Answer 1

You should avoid any kind of read-before-write when it comes to Cassandra (and any other database where you can't do a compare-and-swap operation for the write).

Answer 2

First of all: Which queries and query-patterns does your application have? Furthermore I would be interested how often a new weight for each edge will be calculated and stored. Every second, hour, day?

Would it be possible to hold the last weight of each edge in memory? So you could avoid the reading before writing? Possibly some sort of lazy-loading mechanism of this value would be feasible.

If your queries will allow this data model, I would try to build a solution with a single column family.

Answer 3

I would avoid reading before writing in Cassandra as it really isn't a great fit. Reads are expensive, considerably more so than writes, and to sustain performance you'll need a large number of nodes for a relatively small amount of queries. What you're suggesting doesn't really lend itself to be a good fit for Cassandra, as there doesn't appear to be any way to avoid reading before you write. Even if you use a single table you will still need to fetch the last update entries to perform your write. While it certainly could be done, I think there is better tools for the job. Having said that, this would be perfectly feasible if you could keep all data in table 2 in memory, and potentially utilise the row cache. As long as table 2 isn't so large that it can fit the majority of rows in memory, your reads will be significantly faster which may make up for the need to perform a read every write. This would be quite a challenge however and you would need to ensure only the "last update time" for each row is kept in memory, and disk is rarely needed to be touched.

Anyway, another design you may want to look at is an implementation where you not only use Cassandra but also a cache in front of Cassandra to store the last updated times. This could be run alongside Cassandra or on a separate node but could be an in memory store of the last update times only, and when you need to update a row you query the cache, and write your full row to Cassandra (you could even write the last update time if you wished). You could use something like Redis to perform this function, and that way you wouldn't need to worry about tombstones or forcing everything to be stored in memory and so on and so forth.