Recent content on RustyRazorblade Consulting
Claude Code has become an indispensable part of my daily workflow. I use it for everything from writing code to debugging production issues. But while Claude is incredibly capable out of the box, there are areas where injecting specialized domain knowledge makes it dramatically more useful. That’s why I built a plugin marketplace. Yesterday I released rustyrazorblade/skills , a collection of…
This is the fourth post in my series on improving the cost efficiency of Apache Cassandra through increased node density. In the last post , we explored compaction strategies, specifically the new UnifiedCompactionStrategy (UCS) which appeared in Cassandra 5. Streaming Throughput Compaction Throughput and Strategies Repair (you are here) Query Throughput Garbage Collection and Memory Management…
I’ve started working on a new project that I’d like to share, easy-cass-mcp , an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server specifically designed to assist Apache Cassandra operators. After spending over a decade optimizing Cassandra clusters in production environments, I’ve seen teams consistently struggle with how to interpret system metrics, configuration settings, schema design, and…
I’m taking a quick break from my series on Cassandra node density to share some news with the Cassandra community: easy-cass-stress has officially been donated to the Apache Software Foundation and is now part of the Apache Cassandra project ecosystem as cassandra-easy-stress . Why This Matters Over the past decade, I’ve worked with countless teams struggling with Cassandra performance…
This is the third post in my series on optimizing Apache Cassandra for maximum cost efficiency through increased node density. In the first post , I examined how streaming operations impact node density and laid out the groundwork for understanding why higher node density leads to significant cost savings. In the second post , I discussed how compaction throughput is critical to node density and…
This is the second post in my series on improving node density and lowering costs with Apache Cassandra. In the previous post , I examined how streaming performance impacts node density and operational costs. In this post, I’ll focus on compaction throughput, and a recent optimization in Cassandra 5.0.4 that significantly improves it, CASSANDRA-15452 . This post assumes some familiarity with…
This is the first post of several I have planned on optimizing Apache Cassandra for maximum cost efficiency. I’ve spent over a decade working with Cassandra and have spent tens of thousands of hours data modeling, fixing issues, writing tools for it, and analyzing it’s performance. I’ve always been fascinated by database performance tuning, even before Cassandra. A decade ago I…
Apache Cassandra 5.0 has officially landed! This highly anticipated release brings a range of new features and performance improvements to one of the most popular NoSQL databases in the world. Having recently hosted a webinar covering the major features of Cassandra 5.0, I’m excited to give a brief overview of the key updates and show you how to easily get hands-on with the latest release using…
I’ve got some fun news to start the week off for users of easy-cass-lab: I’ve just released version 5. There are a number of nice improvements and bug fixes in here that should make it more enjoyable, more useful, and lay groundwork for some future enhancements. When the cluster starts, we wait for the storage service to reach NORMAL state, then move to the next node. This is in…
If you’re encountering Python errors when starting cqlsh on a macOS system, this post is for you.
I’m excited to announce that the latest version of easy-cass-lab now supports Cassandra 5.0 RC-1, which was just made available last week! This update marks a significant milestone, providing users with the ability to test and experiment with the newest Cassandra 5.0 features in a simplified manner. This post will walk you through how to set up a cluster, SSH in, and run your first stress…
I’m happy to share some exciting news for all Cassandra enthusiasts! My open source project, easy-cass-lab , is now installable via a homebrew tap. This powerful tool is designed to make testing any major version of Cassandra (or even builds that haven’t been released yet) a breeze, using AWS. A big thank-you to Jordan West who took the time to make this happen! What is easy-cass-lab?…
I’m pleased to announce that I’ve opened training signups for Operator Excellence to the public for July and August. If you’re interested in stepping up your game as a Cassandra operator, this course is for you. Head over to the training page to find out more and sign up for the course.
As a long time participant with the Cassandra project, I’ve witnessed firsthand the evolution of this incredible database. From its early days to the present, our journey has been marked by continuous innovation, challenges, and a relentless pursuit of excellence. I’m thrilled to share that I’ll be streaming several working sessions over the next several weeks as I evaluate the…
Streaming In the world of software engineering, especially within the realm of distributed systems, continuous learning and experimentation are not just beneficial; they’re essential. As a software engineer with a focus on distributed systems, particularly Apache Cassandra, I’ve taken this ethos to heart. My journey has led me to not only explore the intricacies of Cassandra’s…
As I promised in December , I redid my presentation from the Cassandra Summit 2023 on a live stream . You can check it out at the bottom of this post. Going forward, I’ll be live-streaming on Tuesdays at 10AM Pacific on my YouTube channel . Next week I’ll be taking a look at tlp-stress , which is used by the teams at some of the biggest Cassandra deployments in the world to benchmark…
Hello, friends in the Apache Cassandra community! I recently had the pleasure of speaking at the Cassandra Summit in San Jose. Unfortunately, we ran into an issue with my screen refusing to cooperate with the projector, so my slides were pretty distorted and hard to read. While the talk is online, I think it would be better to have a version with the right slides as well as a little more time.…
I am thrilled to share some significant updates and exciting plans with my readers and the Cassandra community. As we draw closer to the end of the year, I’m preparing for an important speaking engagement and mapping out a year ahead filled with engaging and informative activities. Cassandra Summit Presentation: Mastering Performance Tuning I am honored to announce that I will be speaking at…
Welcome back to the month of profiling! The first two weeks we took a look at using the async-profiler to generate flame graphs and bcc-tools to understand your hardware. This week we’ll be focusing on eBPF , a rapidly evolving technology that lets you extract a ton of useful information out of the Linux Kernel even if a tool wasn’t built specifically for it. Think of it as a tool that…
Welcome back to my series on performance profiling! In this second installment, we’re shifting our focus towards a hands-on exploration of our hardware using the power of bcc-tools . Building on the foundational knowledge from our first post about flame graphs, we are now ready to delve deeper into the intricacies of system performance. These tools are a great way of understanding if…
Welcome to the first article of ‘The Month of Profiling,’ a series I will be presenting throughout November. We’ll explore a range of technologies that are crucial for identifying and resolving performance issues, as well as for fine-tuning your systems. The series will conclude with a detailed walkthrough on how to integrate these technologies for effective performance…
Introduction Apache Cassandra remains the preferred choice for organizations seeking a massively scalable NoSQL database. To guarantee predictable performance, Cassandra administrators and developers rely on benchmarking tools like tlp-stress , nosqlbench , and ndbench to help them discover their cluster’s limits. In this post, we will explore the latest advancements in tlp-stress ,…
Note: Before we dive into this review of AxonOps and their offerings, it’s important to note that this blog post is part of a paid engagement in which I provided product feedback. AxonOps had no influence or say over the content of this post and did not have access to it prior to publishing. In the ever-evolving landscape of data management, companies are constantly seeking solutions that…
This post will introduce you to tlp-stress, a tool for benchmarking Apache Cassandra. I started tlp-stress back when I was working at The Last Pickle. At the time, I was spending a lot of time helping teams identify the root cause of performance issues and needed a way of benchmarking. I found cassandra-stress to be difficult to use and configure, so I ended up writing my own tool that worked in a…
Saying “it’s been a while since I wrote anything here” would be an understatement, but I’m back, with a lot to talk about in the upcoming months. First off - if you’re not aware, I continued writing, but on The Last Pickle blog . There’s quite a few posts there, here are the most interesting ones: 14 Things To Do When Setting Up a New Cassandra Cluster Apache…
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here. Part of the reason has been due to the writing I’ve done over on the blog at The Last Pickle . In the lsat few years, I’ve written about our tlp-stress tool, tips for new Cassandra clusters , and a variety of performance posts related to Compaction , Compression , and GC Tuning . The other reason is the eight blog posts…
Kotlin 1.3 was released recently. There’s a number of interesting changes. Coroutines have graduated from experimental, contracts, and inline classes have been useful in my own work so far. You can read about the changes on the Kotlin website There’s another feature I find very useful: the new Result type. I first used the Result Monad in Rust. I don’t write much Rust anymore,…
In this post I’ll be discussing the fundamentals of the Logical Volume Manager in Linux, usually simply referred to as LVM. I’ve used LVM occasionally over the years, but for the most part I would just create a single big partition on my disk, toss XFS on it and call it a day. Recently that changed when I decided to replace my aging home media server with a new beast of a box that I…
In this I’ll discuss a uncommonly used but useful technique of accessing variables and methods which have been declared as private in the JVM, using the Apache Commons Lang library to work around the restriction. The description from the project page reads: The standard Java libraries fail to provide enough methods for manipulation of its core classes. Apache Commons Lang provides these…
After almost five years of using Pelican as my static site generator, I’ve migrated to the Hugo tool. While I enjoyed Pelican and it’s flexibility, it’s performance started to bother me when building a site from scratch. Depending on what else was running on my laptop, a full build could take 15-20 seconds. This isn’t the end of the world, but in comparison Hugo takes less…
Edit: The source code for this post is located on GitHub Sometimes when I travel I end up trying to learn something completely new. For a while I was playing with Rust, Capn Proto, Scala, or I’d start a throwaway project at an airport and just tinker. My passion is and has always been databases. I’ve maintained this blog for roughly a decade, starting with MySQL for the first part of…
If you were to take a look at my blog, you’d think I’d flipped a table and left the tech industry. Not the case at all. I’m still writing, but less frequently, and on the TLP blog . I intend to start writing here again, but the material will likely focus around topics other than Cassandra, since I’m already writing about it elsewhere. Here are the posts I’ve authored…
Instacluster announced on the Apache Cassandra user list that they are making their supported branch of the Cassandra 3.7 tick tock release publicly available ( see GitHub repo ). Bug fixes that go into 3.8, 3.9, etc will be back ported to the Instacluster LTS. You can read the blog post about the decision . Some people I’ve talked to are concerned about having different commercial entities…
I haven’t blogged in a while, which is a bummer because I was determined to write an article a week for the entire year. I haven’t even come remotely close to that goal. I’ve recently switched jobs from DataStax to Consulting with The Last Pickle , which has been pretty hectic. Add to that 3 presentations at the Cassandra Summit and the end result is very little time for personal…
I’ve spent the last 4 years working in the big data world with Cassandra because it’s the only practical solution if you have a requirement to scale out, uptime is a priority, and you need predictable performance. I’ve heard different ways of describing where Cassandra fits in your architecture, but I think the best way to think of it is close to your customer . Think of the…
One of the problems of learning a new database is getting used to a new way of data modeling. PostgreSQL looks different from Redis, which is different from a graph, and is different from Cassandra. Cassandra Dataset Manager aims to reduce the time spent in a frustrating trial and error process trying to learn proper data modeling techniques for Apache Cassandra and Datastax Enterprise by…
I posted a short preview showing off some of the work I’ve been doing recently on Cassandra Dataset Manager, a tool to help new Cassandra users learn how to create proper data models. There’s documentation , but it’s still under heavy development.
Apache Cassandra 3.3 was released last week. As per the Tick Tock release schedule , this release is focused on bug fixes and no new features were introduced. For practical purposes, consider this a bug fix release to Cassandra 3.2. All told there were almost 50 bugs fixed in this release. Many of the bugs fixed in this version also applied to Cassandra 3.0.3, which was also released last week.
If you’ve looked into using Cassandra at all, you probably have heard plenty of warnings about its secondary indexes. If you’ve come from a relational background, you may have been surprised when you were told to create multiple tables ( materialized views ) instead of relying on indexes. This is because Cassandra is a distributed database, and the impact of doing a query that hits…
Introduction Building a web app relying on database calls with CPython (the standard Python distribution) is pretty easy, but can suffer from performance problems. Python itself isn’t particularly fast, and in 2.x, it’s concurrency story is especially weak. For starters, there’s the dreaded GIL . The GIL prevents us from taking advantage of multi core systems, so even if we use…
The 3.0 release of Apache Cassandra marked an important milestone. One of the biggest updates was CASSANDRA-8099 , the JIRA to modernize the storage engine. It was also the first release in the new Tick Tock cycle , which lands a new release of Cassandra every month. Even .x numbers (such as 3.2) are feature releases, and odd .x numbers (such as 3.1) are bug fix releases. Cassandra 3.2, released…
In my previous post , I briefly mentioned FrankDux , a new project I’m working on. FrankDux is a framework for quickly building RPC microservices in Python. This is a preview of it’s functionality and subject to change. A goal of FrankDux is to provide a means of building stateless microservices that’s as easy as working with Flask or Bottle, but also the conveniences of…
In a previous post , I introduced a new project, KillrAnswers. I had originally planned on writing KillrAnswers using Rust , leveraging the Cap’n Proto library for RPC and object serialization. I’ve had some time to think about this, and decided to switch back to Python. I also started my own RPC project, FrankDux , based on ZeroMQ and MessagePack for object serialization instead of…
I have built a completely useless database. I had a couple flights across the country this week so I decided to test some ideas in Rust . If you’re not yet familiar with Rust, it’s a systems language focusing on performance, safety, and concurrency. I’ve really enjoyed using it so far and every day it feels much more natural. I’ve been thinking about database internals a…
Introduction In my previous post I introduced RAMP, a family of algorithms for managing atomicity on reads across distributed database partitions. The first algorithm discussed was RAMP-Fast, which is designed to perform with as few network round trips as possible at the cost of storing significant amounts of metadata. I suggest reading my first post if you aren’t familiar with RAMP as…
Introduction In this post I’ll introduce RAMP, a family of algorithms for performing atomic reads across partitions when working with distributed databases. The original paper, Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions , was written by Peter Bailis, Alan Fekete, Ali Ghodsi, Joseph M. Hellerstein and Ion Stoica, of UC Berkeley and University of Sydney. Peter has graciously reviewed…
The last few months have been a non stop whirlwind of traveling and speaking. I’ve been very fortunate to have spoken at Strata New York, give a couple sessions at the Cassandra Summit, and even had a few minutes on stage for the Cassandra Summit keynote (I’m at minute 22 with Luke Tillman). When I have time, I end up hacking on random projects. For example, a couple months ago I was…
MySQL is a popular choice for new projects. It’s a flexible database that’s easy to set up and start querying. There’s loads of documentation, examples and frameworks it works with, such as Wordpress, Pandas, Ruby on Rails, and Django. From the above paragraph it reads like a pretty fantastic database, and at small scale it can be great. The problem arises when you need to scale…
A little while back I wrote a post on working with DataFrames from PySpark, using Cassandra as a data source. DataFrames are, in my opinion, a fantastic, flexible api that makes Spark roughly 14 orders of magnitude nicer to work with as opposed to RDDs. When I wrote the original blog post, the only way to work with DataFrames from PySpark was to get an RDD and call toDF() . Sound freaking amazing…
In this post I’ll walk through the process of reading in various plain text database files using Pandas, and then joining together the different DataFrames. All my work was done through an IPython notebook. I decided to mess around with the labor statistics database that’s up on Amazon. My end goal was to save all the relevant information into Cassandra for future analysis with…