How to Load Data from Cassandra into Hadoop using Spark

Cassandra is a great open-source solution for accessing data at web scale, thanks in no small part to its low-latency performance. And if you’re a power user of Cassandra, there’s a high probability you’ll want to analyze the data it contains to create reports, apply machine learning, or just do some good old fashioned digging.

However, Cassandra can prove difficult to use as an analytical warehouse, especially if you’re using it to serve data in production around the clock. But one approach you can take is quite simple: copy the data to Hadoop (HDFS).

But how? There are a few feasible approaches – but the easiest to implement and scale, in my experience, is using an Apache Spark application using YARN on your Hadoop cluster to pull the data from Cassandra and into HDFS.

And it all hinges on using a piece of software from DataStax, the distributor of Cassandra, called the Spark Cassandra Connector. It’s a thing of beauty, so my hat is off to the engineering team that made it available to the community. With that said…

What is the DataStax Spark Cassandra Connector?

To quote their very-detailed documentation:

This library lets you expose Cassandra tables as Spark RDDs, write Spark RDDs to Cassandra tables, and execute arbitrary CQL queries in your Spark applications.

https://github.com/datastax/spark-cassandra-connector

Since our use case is to offload Cassandra data to HDFS, we can directly benefit from “exposing Cassandra tables as Spark RDDs”, since we can write RDDs quite trivially to HDFS.

What Versions of Spark, Cassandra, Java and Scala are supported?

It’s worth noting the most up-to-date version-to-version compatibility chart that exists for the connector and its support for Spark, Cassandra, Java, and Scala.

Connector	Spark	Cassandra	Cassandra Java Driver	Minimum Java Version	Supported Scala Versions
2.4	2.4	2.1.5*, 2.2, 3.0	3.0	8	2.11
2.3	2.3	2.1.5*, 2.2, 3.0	3.0	8	2.11
2.0	2.0, 2.1, 2.2	2.1.5*, 2.2, 3.0	3.0	8	2.10, 2.11
1.6	1.6	2.1.5*, 2.2, 3.0	3.0	7	2.10, 2.11
1.5	1.5, 1.6	2.1.5*, 2.2, 3.0	3.0	7	2.10, 2.11
1.4	1.4	2.1.5*	2.1	7	2.10, 2.11
1.3	1.3	2.1.5*	2.1	7	2.10, 2.11
1.2	1.2	2.1, 2.0	2.1	7	2.10, 2.11
1.1	1.1, 1.0	2.1, 2.0	2.1	7	2.10, 2.11
1.0	1.0, 0.9	2.0	2.0	7	2.10, 2.11

So, for the sake of this example, let’s say we’re going with the row in bold, which utilizes version 2.0 of the connector.

How to Use the Connector in a Spark App

Start by importing the connector in your build.sbt file in your project:

"com.datastax.spark" %% "spark-cassandra-connector" % "2.0.9"

Then, simply utilize it using the spark.read() API, as below:

Then, just execute it however you like – I tend to do it from a spark-submit command.

I’ve noticed this need for Cassandra to Hadoop loading across the community for some time now, and now that I’ve got a recommended method, I’m happy to share it with you all. If you have any questions, please drop them in a comment below this post. Cheers!