Pillar

Pillar manages migrations for your Cassandra data stores.

Pillar grew from a desire to automatically manage Cassandra schema as code. Managing schema as code enables automated build and deployment, a foundational practice for an organization striving to achieve Continuous Delivery.

Pillar is to Cassandra what Rails ActiveRecord migrations or Play Evolutions are to relational databases with one key difference: Pillar is completely independent from any application development framework.

Installation

Prerequisites

1. Java SE 6 runtime environment
2. Cassandra 1.2 with the native CQL protocol enabled

From Source

This method requires Simple Build Tool (sbt). Building an RPM also requires Effing Package Management (fpm).

% sbt assembly   # builds just the jar file in the target/ directory

% sbt rh-package # builds the jar and the RPM in the target/ directory
% sudo rpm -i target/pillar-1.0.0-DEV.noarch.rpm

The RPM installs Pillar to /opt/pillar.

Packages

Download the latest RPM here

Usage

Terminology

Data Store : A logical grouping of environments. You will likely have one data store per application.

Environment : A context or grouping of settings for a single data store. You will likely have at least development and production environments for each data store.

Migration : A single change to a data store. Migrations have a description and a time stamp indicating the time at which it was authored. Migrations are applied in ascending order and reversed in descending order.

Command Line

Here's the short version:

1. Write migrations, place them in conf/pillar/myapp/migrations.
2. Add pillar settings to conf/application.conf.
3. % pillar initialize myapp
4. % pillar migrate myapp

Migration Files

Migration files contain metadata about the migration, a CQL statement used to apply the migration and, optionally, a CQL statement used to reverse the migration. Each file describes one migration. You probably want to name your files according to time stamp and description, 1370028263_creates_views_table.cql, for example. Pillar reads and parses all files in the migrations directory, regardless of file name.

Pillar supports reversible, irreversible and reversible with a no-op down statement migrations. Here are examples of each:

Reversible migrations have up and down properties.

-- description: creates views table
-- authoredAt: 1370028263
-- up:

CREATE TABLE views (
  id uuid PRIMARY KEY,
  url text,
  person_id int,
  viewed_at timestamp
)

-- down:

DROP TABLE views

Irreversible migrations have an up property but no down property.

-- description: creates events table
-- authoredAt: 1370023262
-- up:

CREATE TABLE events (
  batch_id text,
  occurred_at uuid,
  event_type text,
  payload blob,
  PRIMARY KEY (batch_id, occurred_at, event_type)
)

Reversible migrations with no-op down statements have an up property and an empty down property.

-- description: adds user_agent to views table
-- authoredAt: 1370028264
-- up:

ALTER TABLE views
ADD user_agent text

-- down:

The Pillar command line interface expects to find migrations in conf/pillar/migrations unless overriden by the -d command-line option.

Configuration

Pillar uses the Typesafe Config library for configuration. The Pillar command-line interface expects to find an application.conf file in ./conf or ./src/main/resources. Given a data store called faker, the application.conf might look like the following:

pillar.faker {
    development {
        cassandra-seed-address: "127.0.0.1"
        cassandra-keyspace-name: "pillar_development"
    }
    test {
        cassandra-seed-address: "127.0.0.1"
        cassandra-keyspace-name: "pillar_test"
    }
    acceptance_test {
        cassandra-seed-address: "127.0.0.1"
        cassandra-keyspace-name: "pillar_acceptance_test"
    }
}

Reference the acceptance spec suite for details.

The pillar Executable

The package installs to /opt/pillar by default. The /opt/pillar/bin/pillar executable usage looks like this:

Usage: pillar [OPTIONS] command data-store

OPTIONS

-d directory
--migrations-directory directory  The directory containing migrations

-e env
--environment env                 environment

-t time
--time-stamp time                 The migration time stamp

PARAMETERS

command     migrate or initialize

data-store  The target data store, as defined in application.conf

Examples

Initialize the faker datastore development environment

% pillar -e development initialize faker

Apply all migrations to the faker datastore development environment

% pillar -e development migrate faker

Library

You can also integrate Pillar directly into your application as a library. Reference the acceptance spec suite for details.

In addition, version 1.0.1 of Pillar implements a "destroy" method to drop a keyspace.

Release Notes

• 1.0.1 Implements a "destroy" method to drop a keyspace