Storage engine

A description about Cassandra's storage structure and engine.

Cassandra uses a storage structure similar to a Log-Structured Merge Tree, unlike a typical relational database that uses a B-Tree. Cassandra avoids reading before writing. Read-before-write, especially in a large distributed system, can produce stalls in read performance and other problems. For example, two clients read at the same time, one overwrites the row to make update A, and the other overwrites the row to make update B, removing update A. Reading before writing also corrupts caches and increases IO requirements. To avoid a read-before-write condition, the storage engine groups inserts/updates to be made, and sequentially writes only the updated parts of a row in append mode. Cassandra never re-writes or re-reads existing data, and never overwrites the rows in place.

A log-structured engine that avoids overwrites and uses sequential IO to update data is essential for writing to solid-state disks (SSD) and hard disks (HDD) On HDD, writing randomly involves a higher number of seek operations than sequential writing. The seek penalty incurred can be substantial. Using sequential IO (thereby avoiding write amplification and disk failure), Cassandra accommodates inexpensive, consumer SSDs extremely well.