Background
We have chosen Cassandra as our storage engine since we have an application that must handle async messaging between many users on the website and event storing (some types of analytics, what happens on site and when, etc.). Also we have a voting platform so we are storing votes per users per day and Cassandra are good in those use cases.
Recently we got new requirements to build a relational model on top of our existing system (at least we think it is relational). Some types of political candidates with lists of jobs, education, historical voting, endorsements, etc.
Problem
We have relations which can be edited on both ends (i.e. candidate is supported by companies, but in our admin panel that company can be edited without candidate). A candidate is one row in our Cassandra DB identified by a UUID. On the front end, we would need full information about candidates (political party, schools, jobs, voting history, supporting companies). We want to place the majority of candidate info in a single row so we can read data with a single read. However when we place the list of supporting companies UDT we have problems editing it (we need to change it in company_by_id
and candidate_by_id
tables).
Question
How to solve the editing problem and relational model issues in our situation?
We came up with couple of solutions:
candidates_by_supporting_company
. When updating company, we update candidates who have that company as well.We are leaning towards option 3 since we will add Spark anyway, we will stay with only Cassandra database (which does not complicate maintenance and deployment of one more database) and we get sort of JOINS and GROUP BY efficient on application level with it.
What do you think?
If you want to use only cassandra the right way to proceed is the number 1: denormalization. But if yu have a lot of relationships it will bring a lot of effort at application level. If adding an other dbms is not a problem in your environment, using the right tool for the right job is the best choice: number 3 for me