Evan Weaver wrote:
So technically this is not a bikeshed, because I'm happy to do all the
work. I'll even submit a patch for Digg's Python client. Since there
are no production deployments of ASF, and only a couple
well-maintained clients, now is the time to break the world. A few
hours of work now will pay off richly in terms of community
involvement and reduced noob-explanation-time.
Post-keyspace we have this situation
1: objects with table in their name:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dehora/3812812718/sizes/l/
2: objects with keyspace in their name
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dehora/3812812498/sizes/l/
What I take from this either is the code is dissonant with the current
consensus or current consensus is an hallucination :)
So if we go through this, the community needs to commit to renaming
objects and clearing out dead concepts. IME patch based processes resist
this kind of high level rework unless the community and especially the
reviewers are up for it.
In short:
Cluster
Database
Record collection
Record
Attribute collection
Attribute
We could call the cluster "database collection", but even I'm not
going to go that far. I realize that each level is merely a collection
of the collections under it, but an "attribute collection collection
collection collection" is no help to day-to-day usage. ;-)
"Cluster" has a lot of meaning in the Java world already (a collection
of app servers) and is tied to the physical model - all the others are
tied to the logical model of the data.
Putting "Database" underneath "Cluster" misses the point that the
database is distributed across the cluster - - even it it's not right
for Cassandra, "BigTable" captures this concept well. For me, that the
database remains the uppermost concept even after physical distribution
is largely the point of Cassandra.
> A few
> hours of work now will pay off richly in terms of community
> involvement and reduced noob-explanation-time.
For usage and the API, there are other concepts that need to be
articulated properly for Cassandra users, such as slice, reverse, range,
mutation, consistency, path, parent. I'd like to believe these matter
in the domain and are not fallout from using thrift/rpc ;)
Bill
