What is Cassandra Bombardier?

A Python bombardier based on Pycassa, that batch inserts:

• a custom defined number of rows
• with a custom defined number of columns
• with a custom defined number of processes

into Cassandra

The goal is to:

• optimize Cassandra setup / config to get the best write performance
• learn Cassandra and Pycassa
• go to sleep with geeky pride and digital satisfaction

Here is How to Play

Start Bombardiering

$ python cassandra-bombardier.py
 Usage: cassandra-bombardier.py <number of rows> <number of columns in a single row> [<number of processes>]

As you can see from the usage, you need to provide a number of rows and a number of columns to be created for each row. [ Optionally you can also add a number of processes to insert rows to Cassandra in paralleal. By default, if number of processes is not provided, a single process will be used ]

Single Process

Let's start from inserting 100,000 rows where each row has 7 columns:

$ python cassandra-bombardier.py 100000 7
inserting 100000 rows 7 columns each, with 1 process(es) => took 11.048162 seconds

Multiple Processes

Cassandra was designed with parallelism in mind, so let's make it happy and use 8 processes to inserting 100,000 rows ( 7 columns each ) in parallel:

$ python cassandra-bombardier.py 100000 7 8
inserting 100000 rows 7 columns each, with 8 process(es) => took 6.310905 seconds

Here is How to Setup / Configure

If you have PIP / VirtualEnv installed

'cd' to the cassandra-bombardier root, and do

$ pip install -r requirements

OR Install Pycassa Manually

http://pycassa.github.com/pycassa/index.html ( follow the pycassa instructions: you'd also need to install "thrift05")

Start Cassandra ( may need 'sudo' )

$ /usr/local/bin/cassandra -f

Start Cassandra CLI

$ /usr/local/bin/cassandra-cli

Enter these four to create a test keyspace / column family

[default@unknown]   connect localhost/9160;
[default@unknown]   create keyspace Keyspace1;
[default@unknown]   use Keyspace1;
[default@Keyspace1] create column family ColumnFamily1;

Whenever you need to delete all the data inserted previously, truncate the family ( sounds cruel, but.. gotta do it ):

[default@Keyspace1] truncate ColumnFamily1;