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Cassandra performance: split or not to split CF?

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Janbalik
Member

Hi @ll,

I'm working on the design of a Cassandra database to learn about it. But I have a question I would like some expert help me to clarify:

I have read that the rows of each column family are distributed through the nodes, thus each node has a part of the rows of a given column family. Does it mean that it is not a good idea to divide a column family into many column families even when that column family has millions of rows?

My experience with RDBMS says that is better to split very big tables into smaller tables to get a better performance, but it seems that in Cassandra there is no need of this and, even more, if I have many column families I would need more memory. Am I right? Is it better keeping many rows in a column family to get a better performance than split the column family in many?

Thanks!

Posted 3 months ago #
arviarya
Member

You can split a column family on requirement basis. It depends how you are organizing your data or fetch. Generally, huge columns columns families may throw lots of data in your program that you may not need.
Better organise your data in single and multiple CFs as per requirement. There are advantage of split CFs if you do not need to read both/all CFs for fetch.
Writes are faster, hence you can send few duplicate data in both CFs to avoid joins.

Posted 3 months ago #