Storing media files in Cassandra

Question

I tried to store the audio/video files in the database.

Is cassandra able to do that ? if yes, how do we store the media files in cassandra.

How about storing the metadata and original audio files in cassandra

Answer 1

Yes, Cassandra is definitely able to store files in its database, as "blobs", strings of bytes.

However, it is not ideal for this use case:

First, you are limited in blob size. The hard limit is 2GB size, so large videos are out of the question. But worse, the documentation from Datastax (the commercial company behind Cassandra's development) suggests that even 1 MB (!) is too large - see https://docs.datastax.com/en/cql/3.1/cql/cql_reference/blob_r.html.

One of the reasons why huge blobs are a problem is that Cassandra offers no API for fetching parts of them - you need to read (and write) a blob in one CQL operation, which opens up all sorts of problems. So if you want to store large files in Cassandra, you'll probably want to split them up into many small blobs - not one large blob.

The next problem is that some of Cassandra's implementation is inefficient when the database contains files (even if split up to a bunch of smaller blobs). One of the problems is the compaction algorithm, which ends up copying all the data over and over (a logarithmic number of times) on disk; An implementation optimized for storing files would keep the file data and the metadata separately, and only "compact" the metadata. Unfortunately neither Cassandra nor Scylla implement such a file format yet.

All-in-all, you're probably better off storing your metadata in Cassandra but the actual file content in a different object-store implementation.