RESTBase/StorageDesign

Retention policies using application-level TTLs
This approach uses a schema identical to that of the current storage model, one that utilizes wide rows to model a one-to-many relationship between a title and its revisions, and a one-to-many relationship between each revision and its corresponding renders. It differs only in how it approaches retention.

Retention
Since renders are keyed on a type-1 UUID, retaining a single current render, and (at least) 24 hours worth of past renders, is as simple as batching a range delete with new renders, using a  predicate 24 hours less than the one being inserted. Limiting renders is more challenging, since the revision is an integer, without any temporal context. As a result, additional storage is needed to establish relationships between timestamps and corresponding revisions.

Records in the  table are keyed by domain (on the assumption that MediaWiki sharding would never be more granular than this). Updates can be performed probabilistically, if necessary. TTLs can be applied to prevent unbounded partition growth.

Time-line storage
Only a single time-line is needed for all logical tables (e.g. parsoid html, data, and section offsets, mobileapps, etc), so to eliminate update duplication, the time-line is separately maintained by change-propagation.

The distribution of edit frequencies across Wikimedia projects is quite extreme, ranging from approximately 1/day, to nearly 200K/day. Without sampling, the lowest edit frequencies are sufficient to manage retentions of not less than 24 hours efficiently. The highest frequencies (again, without sampling) could place an unnecessary burden on storage in exchange or a resolution that vastly exceeds what is needed. Sampling applied to all time-line updates to correct for high frequency edits would render indexing of domains with lower edit frequencies less efficient. Ideally, rate-limiting by domain can be employed to sample writes from the few high edit frequency projects without effecting those with lower edit frequencies. The examples above demonstrated storage of the time-line in Cassandra, but there is no requirement to do so. Redis for example, would likely prove adequate for this use case. For example, the contents of the time-line need not be perfectly durable, a catastrophic loss of all entries would merely delay the culling of past revisions, and only for a period equal to that of the retention configured. The time-line can be replicated to remote data-centers, but this is not a requirement, it could for example be independently generated in each without impacting correctness.

Pros

 * Easy to implement (low code delta)
 * Least risk; Inherits correctness from current (well tested) implementation
 * Minimal read / write amplification

Cons

 * Creates a hard-dependency on Cassandra 3.x (needed to create range tombstones using inequality operators)

Table-per-query
This approach materializes views of results using distinct tables, each corresponding to a query.

Queries

 * The most current render of the most current revision (table: )
 * The most current render of a specific revision (table: )
 * A specific render of a specific revision (table: )

Algorithm
Data in the  table must be durable, but the contents of   and   can be ephemeral (should be, to prevent unbounded growth), lasting only for a time-to-live after the corresponding value in   has been superseded by something more recent. There are two ways of accomplishing this, either by a) copying the values on a read from, or b) copying them on update, prior to replacing a value in. Neither of these strategies are ideal.

For example, with non-VE use-cases, copy-on-read is problematic due to the write-amplification it creates (think: HTML dumps). Additionally, in order to fulfill the VE contract, the copy must be done in-line to ensure the values are there for the forthcoming save, introducing additional transaction complexity, and latency. Copy-on-update over-commits by default, copying from  for every new render, regardless of the probability it will be edited, but happens asynchronously without impacting user requests, and can be done reliably. This proposal uses the copy-on-update approach.

Update logic pseudo-code:

Option A
Precedence is first by revision, then by render; The  table must always return the latest render for the latest revision, even in the face of out-of-order writes. This presents a challenge for a table modeled as strictly key-value, since Cassandra is last write wins. As a work around, this option proposes to use a constant for write-time, effectively disabling the database's in-built conflict resolution. Since Cassandra falls back to a lexical comparison of values when encountering identical timestamps, a binary value encoded first with the revision, and then with a type-1 UUID is used to satisfy precedence requirements.

Option B
Identical to the A proposal above, with the exception of how the  table is implemented; In this approach,   is modeled as "wide rows", utilizing a revision-based clustering key. For any given, re-renders result in the   and   attributes being overwritten each time. To prevent unbounded grow of revisions, range deletes are batched with the.

Strawman Cassandra schema:

Example: Batched INSERT+DELETE

Pros

 * Expiration using Cassandra TTL mechanism

Cons

 * Read-on-write
 * Write amplification (4 additional writes on each update)

Option A

 * Breaks  semantics (without timestamps tombstones do not have precedence)


 * Defeats a read optimization designed to exclude SSTables from reads (optimization relies on timestamps)
 * Defeats a compaction optimization meant to eliminate overlaps for tombstone GC (optimization relies on timestamps)
 * Is an abuse of the tie-breaker mechanism
 * Lexical value comparison only meant as a fall-back for something considered a rare occurrence (coincidentally identical timestamps)
 * Lexical value comparison is not part of the contract, could change in the future without warning (has changed in the past without warning)
 * Cassandra semantics are explicitly last write wins; This pattern is a violation of intended use/best-practice, and is isolating in nature

Option B

 * Introduces a dependency on Cassandra 3.x (option B only)

Cassandra 3.x
At the time of this writing, the production cluster is running Cassandra 2.2.6, so any of the solutions above that rely on features(s) in Cassandra 3.x call this out as a drawback. However, there are compelling reasons to move to Cassandra 3.x beyond just the capability that enable the proposals cited above:
 * Proper support for JBOD configurations (CASSANDRA-6696) allows us to solve the blast radius that having a single large RAID-0 creates
 * A side-effect of how CASSANDRA-6696 was implemented enables us to partition the compaction workload, improving key locality, and reducing read latency
 * Changes to how row indexing is handled drastically reduce partition overhead on the heap, making wider partitions possible
 * Storage in versions >= Cassandra 3.0.0 are more compact on disk (often more compact without compression than older versions with).