Details
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Improvement
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Status: Resolved
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Normal
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Resolution: Duplicate
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None
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None
Description
Replication factors like RF=2 can't provide strong consistency and availability because if a single node is lost it's impossible to reach a quorum of replicas. Stepping up to RF=3 will allow you to lose a node and still achieve quorum for reads and writes, but requires committing additional storage.
The requirement of a quorum for writes/reads doesn't seem to be something that can be relaxed without additional constraints on queries, but it seems like it should be possible to relax the requirement that 3 full copies of the entire data set are kept. What is actually required is a covering data set for the range and we should be able to achieve a covering data set and high availability without having three full copies.
After a repair we know that some subset of the data set is fully replicated. At that point we don't have to read from a quorum of nodes for the repaired data. It is sufficient to read from a single node for the repaired data and a quorum of nodes for the unrepaired data.
One way to exploit this would be to have N replicas, say the last N replicas (where N varies with RF) in the preference list, delete all repaired data after a repair completes. Subsequent quorum reads will be able to retrieve the repaired data from any of the two full replicas and the unrepaired data from a quorum read of any replica including the "transient" replicas.
Configuration for something like this in NTS might be something similar to
{ DC1="3-1", DC2="3-2" }where the first value is the replication factor used for consistency and the second values is the number of transient replicas. If you specify
{ DC1=3, DC2=3 }then the number of transient replicas defaults to 0 and you get the same behavior you have today.
Attachments
Issue Links
- is superceded by
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CASSANDRA-14404 Transient Replication & Cheap Quorums: Decouple storage requirements from consensus group size using incremental repair
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- Open
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