How do you use the Cassandra tool sstableloader?

Question

I'm trying to use the sstableloader to load data into an existing Cassandra ring, but cant figure out how to actually get it to work. I'm trying to run it on a machine that has a running cassandra node on it, but when I run it I get an error saying that port 7000 is already in use, which is the port the running Cassandra node is using for gossip.

So does that mean I can only use sstableloader on a machine that is in the same network as the target cassandra ring, but isn't actually running a cassandra node?

Any details would be useful, thanks.

Answer 1

Played around with sstableloader, read the source code, and finally figured out how to run sstableloader on the same machine that hosts a running cassandra node. There are two key points to get this running. First you need to create a copy of the cassandra install folder for sstableloader. This is becase sstableloader reads the yaml file to figure out what ipaddress to use for gossip, and the existing yaml file is being used by Cassandra. The second point is that you'll need to create a new loopback ipaddress (something like 127.0.0.2) on your machine. Once this is done, change the yaml file in the copied Cassandra install folder to listen to this ipaddress.

I wrote a tutorial going more into detail about how to do this here: http://geekswithblogs.net/johnsPerfBlog/archive/2011/07/26/how-to-use-cassandrs-sstableloader.aspx

Answer 2

The Austin Cassandra Users Group just had a presentation on this: http://www.slideshare.net/alex_araujo/etl-with-cassandra-streaming-bulk-loading/