Comments on: Is Bigger Better ?

By: Sebastien

Sebastien — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 11:53:59 +0000

@Gilles Cassandra support has finally been added to BigRecord… see http://www.bigrecord.org/cassandra-support-and-general-updates/

By: Greg

Greg — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 00:38:05 +0000

@Gilles Within the next month, I’ll be developing Bigrecord more actively, and the Cassandra adapter’s been on my todo list for a while now.

As I understand it, all client access to Cassandra is now done through Thrift anyway, so the native Java client isn’t even an option. The performance concerns were with regard to HBase only, since we have not used Cassandra at all in-house.

By: Gilles

Gilles — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 08:29:07 +0000

We are considering using BigRecord to connect our rails app to Cassandra. We would be able/willing to help with the adapter.

What’s the current status of your work? We’d prefer a Thrift-based implementation than a Java-based one. Did your concerns with performance still hold?

By: Greg

Greg — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:58:37 +0000

@Trent The Cassandra adapter was working partially in Bigrecord back a few months ago. Unfortunately, the API, and Cassandra itself seemed to be rather unstable so development halted on it. Depending on how stable Cassandra is now, an adapter is possible within a few months.

By: Trent

Trent — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:22:11 +0000

Any idea when a Cassandra adapter will be available?

By: joost

joost — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:29:02 +0000

There’s also http://code.google.com/p/hypertable/wiki/HyperRecord. In both cases, the projects are specific to one database. While we started with HBase, the goal is to abstract the Object-Data mapping layer from the specific database implementation, much like how ActiveRecord works for any SQL database. It would be great to eventually integrate these and other efforts (like http://github.com/sishen/hbase-ruby), though. There is Power In a Union.

By: Jonathan Ellis

Jonathan Ellis — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:56:23 +0000

Did you see CassandraObject? Looks like the goals are pretty similar. http://github.com/NZKoz/cassandra_object

By: Scott Sayles

Scott Sayles — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:57:45 +0000

joost, thanks for the reply. Yeah, I think I didn’t realized that the java dependency was only at the drb solution layer. This sounds like a great boon for the Rails community.

By: joost

joost — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:17:36 +0000

A Thrift implementation actually wouldn’t difficult. It would simply be a new implementation of AbstractAdapter. When we started working with HBase, there was no Thrift API, so we created the driver, which plays the same role in wrapping the HBase java client code. We haven’t implemented the Thrift adapter because the jRuby+Drb solution works well and because we have some (possibly unfounded) concerns about Thrift performance.
Note that the Java dependency is isolated to the hbase-driver; your Rails app does not have to run in jRuby.

By: Scott Sayles

Scott Sayles — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 06:21:03 +0000

Awesome. Would be nice to have a non-Java dependency. Wouldn’t it be possible to integrate HBase with pure Ruby via Thrift and remove that dependency? In any case, thanks for putting this out. I’ll be checking it out.