Bulk import

This page documents bulk import for YugabyteDB’s Cassandra compatible YCQL API.

We will first export data from existing Apache Cassandra and MySQL tables. Thereafter, we will import the data using the various bulk load options supported by YugabyteDB. We will use a generic IoT timeseries data use case as a running example to illustrate the import process.

Create Destination Table

Following is the schema of the destination YugabyteDB table.

CREATE KEYSPACE example;
USE EXAMPLE;

CREATE TABLE SensorData (
  customer_name text,
  device_id int,
  ts timestamp,
  sensor_data map<text, double>,
  PRIMARY KEY((customer_name, device_id), ts)
);

Prepare Source Data

We will prepare a csv (comma-separated values) file where each row of entries must match with the column types declared in the table schema above. Concretely, each comma-separated value must be a valid Cassandra Query Language (CQL) literal for its corresponding type, except the top-level quotes are not needed (e.g. foo rather than ‘foo’ for strings).

Generate Sample Data

If you do not have the data already available in a database table, you can create sample data for the import using the instructions below.

#!/bin/bash

# Usage: ./generate_data.sh <number_of_rows> <output_filename>
# Example ./generate_data.sh 1000 sample.csv

if [ "$#" -ne 2 ]
then
  echo "Usage: ./generate_data.sh <number_of_rows> <output_filename>"
  Echo "Example ./generate_data.sh 1000 sample.csv"
  exit 1
fi

> $2 # clearing file
for i in `seq 1 $1`
do 
  echo customer$((i%10)),$((i%3)),2017-11-11 12:30:$((i%60)).000000+0000,\"{temp:$i, humidity:$i}\" >> $2
done

customer1,1,2017-11-11 12:32:1.000000+0000,"{temp:1, humidity:1}"
customer2,2,2017-11-11 12:32:2.000000+0000,"{temp:2, humidity:2}"
customer3,0,2017-11-11 12:32:3.000000+0000,"{temp:3, humidity:3}"
customer4,1,2017-11-11 12:32:4.000000+0000,"{temp:4, humidity:4}"
customer5,2,2017-11-11 12:32:5.000000+0000,"{temp:5, humidity:5}"
customer6,0,2017-11-11 12:32:6.000000+0000,"{temp:6, humidity:6}"

Export from Apache Cassandra

If you already had the data in an Apache Cassandra table, then use the following command to create a csv file with the data.

cqlsh> COPY example.SensorData TO '/path/to/sample.csv';

Export from MySQL

If you already had the data in a MySQL table named SensorData, then use the following command to create a csv file with the data.

SELECT customer_name, device_id, ts, sensor_data
FROM SensorData 
INTO OUTFILE '/path/to/sample.csv' FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',';

Import Data

These instructions are organized by the size of the input datasets, ranging from small (few MB of data), to medium (GB) to large (TB or larger) datasets.

Small Datasets (MBs)

Cassandra’s CQL Shell provides the COPY FROM (see also COPY TO) command which allows importing data from csv files.

cqlsh> COPY example.SensorData FROM '/path/to/sample.csv';

Medium Datasets (GBs)

cassandra-loader is a general purpose bulk loader for CQL that supports various types of delimited files (particularly csv files). For more details, review the README of the YugabyteDB cassandra-loader fork. Note that cassandra-loader requires quotes for collection types (e.g. “[1,2,3]” rather than [1,2,3] for lists).

Install cassandra-loader

You can do this as shown below.

$ wget https://github.com/yugabyte/cassandra-loader/releases/download/v0.0.27-yb-2/cassandra-loader

$ chmod a+x cassandra-loader

Run cassandra-loader

time ./cassandra-loader \
	-dateFormat 'yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSSSSSX' \
	-f sample.csv \
	-host <clusterNodeIP> \
	-schema "example.SensorData(customer_name, device_id, ts, sensor_data)"

For additional options, refer to the cassandra-loader options.

Large datasets (TBs or larger)

For large datasets that are in the order of terabytes, YugabyteDB’s bulk-importer is the tool to be used. Currently, it is supported only for AWS based deployments. Further documentation on this topic will be added soon. Meanwhile, reach out to [email protected] for more details.