apache cassandra query/full text search

Question

Hi everyone, I've been playing around with apache's cassandra project. Done a fair bit of readin and i have some fairly complex examples that i've done, including inserting single and batch sets of data, retrieving a single and multiple data sets based on keys. Some of the articles i've looked at include

http://www.rackspacecloud.com/blog/2010/05/12/cassandra-by-example http://github.com/digg/lazyboy http://arin.me/blog/wtf-is-a-supercolumn-cassandra-data-model http://www.sodeso.nl/?p=80

I've got a fairly good grasp of the concepts explained and have even implemented a simple app.

None of the articles describe how one would go about performing a query where, for eg, the query is a search term a user has typed in.

Does anyone know how or can suggest how i'd go about performing such a query? Or perhaps a way to create a searchable index, full text search or anything even remotely close?

thanks in advance

(P.S to admins or user with rep over 1500: tag "apache-cassandra" needed, it's becoming more and more important)

Answer 1

You will probably split text into words, and than use these words as keys to your "index". Each word will contain timestamp ordered column family with list of IDs to your articles, messages etc. So you can only perform simple searches over keys (words). When searching more than one word, use intersection over these column families.

This is very simple approach, if you need more complex queries look at Lucandra - http://github.com/tjake/Lucandra - Lucandra is a fulltext search engine with Cassandra as backend storage.