Learn about keyspaces in this blog, including what they are, how to make changes to them, and how to drop them.
Cassandra Keyspace
Numerous businesses rely on Apache Cassandra, An open-source NoSQL distributed database, for its scalability and high availability without sacrificing performance. The ideal platform for mission-critical data, with proven fault tolerance on commodity hardware or cloud infrastructure.
Go through this short video from Intellipaat elucidating on Cassandra:
What is Keyspace?
Comparable to a database in relational database management systems, a keyspace is a data container in Cassandra (RDMBS). One keyspace per application or as many as are required based on usage and requirements, exists in a cluster. The data included in keyspaces are unrelated to one another and each keyspace is an independent entity.
A keyspace is an outermost object in a Cassandra cluster that controls how data replicates on nodes. Rows indexed by keys, data types, data center awareness, replication factor, and keyspace strategy are the main components of keyspaces. Core objects called column families, which are similar to tables in RDBMS, are also present.
A keyspace has a number of characteristics that characterize its general behavior, such as the degree of replication, data center awareness, holding strategy, etc. In a cluster, more than one keyspace is possible. Additionally, having more than one keyspace for each application is conceivable but not advised in order to prevent an unstructured data model.
Are you interested? Check out Intellipaat’s Apache Cassandra Training Certification Course and enroll now!
Let’s dive deeper to get better insights into Keyspace in Cassandra
Get 100% Hike!
Master Most in Demand Skills Now!
Components of Cassandra Keyspace
When you construct a keyspace, you must provide a few necessary keyspace components. These elements include:
Replication Technique
The replication strategy identifies the nodes where replicas will be positioned while constructing a keyspace. You can achieve fault tolerance, high availability, and dependability by placing replicas on various nodes.
There are one potential tactics:
Simple Approach: Use this method if you just want to deploy a cluster to one data center and for test and development environments. The entire cluster is affected by the replication factor. The first replica on a node is placed there by the partitioner. Then, regardless of the data center or location, additional replicas are spread clockwise on the following nodes.
Network Topology Strategy
If you need to deploy your group across various data hubs, this method is suitable. To allow for potential development, you can still use it with just one data center. Network Topology Strategy is efficient for both development and production. To prevent situations whenever one rack goes down, replicas are normally installed on nodes that are not in the same rack.
Compare the two NoSQL tools Cassandra and MongoDB in this riveting blog post now!
Features of Keyspace in Cassandra
Let’s discuss the features of Keyspace in Cassandra:
- Elastic scalability: Cassandra is very scalable; when needed, more hardware may be added to handle more customers and data.
- Business-critical: applications that cannot afford failure rely on Cassandra’s always-on architecture since it has no single point of failure and is always available.
- Fast linear-scale performance: Cassandra is linearly scalable, which means that as the number of nodes in the cluster grows, throughput also grows. As a result, it keeps a short response time.
- Cassandra Keyspace supports all Data forms: supports all conceivable data forms, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Depending on your needs, it can dynamically adapt to changes in your data structures.
- Speedup Writes: Cassandra was created to run on low-cost, common hardware and to provide fast writes. Without losing read efficiency, it can store hundreds of terabytes of data and execute lightning-fast writes.
Learn more about Cassandra in this comprehensive Cassandra Tutorial now!
Types of Keyspace Operations
Now, we should know about the types of Keyspace operations required that are Create, Alter, and Drop.
A keyspace is an object that stores user-defined types and column families. Keyspace in Cassandra is comparable to an RDBMS database. Column families, indexes, user-defined types, data center awareness, a keyspace strategy, a replication factor, etc. are all stored in the keyspace.
Cassandra’s “Create Keyspace” command is required to create keyspace.
The syntax for Create Operation:
Create keyspace KeyspaceName with replication={'class':strategy name,
'replication_factor': No of replications on different
Nodes};
The Cassandra constructed keyspace’s replication factor, strategy name, and durable writes features can all be changed with the “Alter Keyspace” command.
The syntax for Alter Operation:
Alter Keyspace KeyspaceName with replication={'class':'StrategyName', 'rep_fact': no of rep in different nodes}
with DURABLE_WRITES=true/false
While modifying Keyspace in Cassandra, key aspects
- Keyspace Name: In Cassandra, the keyspace name cannot be changed.
- Strategy Name: The name of the strategy can be changed by specifying a new name.
- Replication Factor: By supplying a new replication factor, the replication factor can be changed.
- By setting true or false: as the value of DURABLE WRITES, the value can be changed. It is accurate by default. If set to false, the commit log will not be updated, and vice versa.
- Execution: This screenshot shows the “Alter Keyspace” command, which changed DataCenter1’s keyspace strategy from “SimpleStrategy” to “NetworkTopologyStrategy” and its replication factor from 3 to 1.
The “Drop Keyspace” command removes the whole Cassandra keyspace, along with all of the data, column families, user-defined types, and indexes. Cassandra takes a snapshot before dropping it. Unless IF EXISTS is applied, Cassandra will produce an error if the keyspace does not exist.
Here is the Database Training Course provided by Intellipaat to get you professionally certified.
Application of Keyspace in Cassandra
- Keyspace is required to manage enormous volumes of data across numerous commodity servers
- It’s required for data replication of nodes.
- Cassandra Keyspace is used as a data container similar to RDMS and NoSQL
- Column families, indexes, user-defined types, data center awareness, a keyspace strategy, a replication factor, etc. are all stored in the keyspace.
- Additionally, more than one keyspace might exist for each application.
Check out the Cassandra Top Interview Questions to clear Cassandra interviews now!
Conclusion
Now, we hope keyspace in Cassandra is pretty clear. We tried to explain what is Keyspace, its different components, different types of Keyspace, and its application. We have discussed how to establish a new keyspace, alter it, or delete it from Cassandra, which is similar to databases in the world of RDBMS. We can identify data replication on data nodes and a few other attributes with the aid of keyspace. We hope if you would like to go into the field of Cassandra deeper than it’s quite obvious, this blog would try to brush up on all your concepts that are much needed in this field.