<story><title>Almost every Cassandra feature has some surprising behavior</title><url>http://blog.parsely.com/post/1928/cass/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Tloewald</author><text>The thing about encoding multiple fields within a cell using \x01 somewhat bugs me -- not because it&amp;#x27;s a hack but because it&amp;#x27;s yet another example of needless reinvention of wheels. Good old ASCII has characters specifically devoted to separating fields, keys, etc. that no-one uses for anything else. Why not use them instead of inventing a new character that does the same thing? (By the same token, there was never any need for CSV &lt;i&gt;or&lt;/i&gt; tab-delimited text since those characters can&amp;#x27;t be typed into spreadsheet cells; parsing CSV can be a pain, and TABs can be typed.)&lt;p&gt;If you care, the characters are:&lt;p&gt;FS -- file separator 1C&lt;p&gt;GS -- group separator 1D&lt;p&gt;RS -- record separator 1E&lt;p&gt;US -- unit separator 1F&lt;p&gt;As you can see, they also have the benefit of being &lt;i&gt;self-describing&lt;/i&gt; (unlike \x01, as the article points out).&lt;p&gt;(The sad thing is I only learned about these characters because I had to parse files in a 1960s format originally designed to be stored on tape drives -- and they used these delimiters and they worked great.)</text></comment>
<story><title>Almost every Cassandra feature has some surprising behavior</title><url>http://blog.parsely.com/post/1928/cass/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dvirsky</author><text>The thing is that contrary to many other tools, you can&amp;#x27;t run Cassandra with almost any of its default settings (maybe besides ports). In most tools you&amp;#x27;ll need to tweak a few defaults, with Cassandra you need to thoroughly read the docs on every little configuration in the server and schema definitions (especially if you&amp;#x27;re working in multiple DCs), you&amp;#x27;ll always find a little surprise if you skim through it.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also almost mandatory to read the internal design docs of cassandra even if you&amp;#x27;re not the admin but just working with it. And modelling data is a lost less trivial than it looks - and almost always not what you assume.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, this is the best talk I&amp;#x27;ve seen on Cassandra data modeling even if you know Cassandra but not on an expert level. I made sure everyone on my team saw it at least once. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=qphhxujn5Es&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=qphhxujn5Es&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>