Question

I’m having problems reading data from Cassandra using the Cassandra Gem….
Here is my code:

require 'cassandra'
@states = {}
@client = Cassandra.new('Logs', "10.1.1.11:9160")
@client.get_range(:PlaybackStates) do |ckey,bb|
    @states[bb["State"].to_sym] = key
end
pp @states

I get this:

{:DrmInit=>"\x00\x00\x00(",
 :Buffering=>"\x00\x00\x00x",
 :PreBuffering=>"\x00\x00\x002",
 :Debug=>"\x00\x00\x016",
 :FullScreen=>"\x00\x00\x01\x90",
 :Seek=>"\x00\x00\x00\x96",
 :LoadManifest=>"\x00\x00\x00\x14",
 :Play=>"\x00\x00\x00d"}

This is what I expected:

{:DrmInit=>[40],
 :Buffering=>[120],
 :PreBuffering=>[50],
 :Debug=>[310],
 :FullScreen=>[400],
 :Seek=>[150],
 :LoadManifest=>[20],
 :Play=>[100]}

I can get this result by doing this in code:

require 'cassandra'
@states = {}
@client = Cassandra.new('Logs', "10.1.1.11:9160")
@client.get_range(:PlaybackStates) do |ckey,bb|
    @states[bb["State"].to_sym] = ckey.unpack("N*") # unpacking the string with N*
end
pp @states

I also get binary representations of TimeStamp & Date fields……
Am I doing something wrong?? Why are the datatypes not being converted by the GEM??

Answer 1

The cassandra gem from Twitter does not understand datatypes other than UTF8 at the moment. As a result it will interpret native integers and other datatypes as strings.

I recommend using the cassandra-cql gem instead. It provides full support for mapping native Cassandra datatypes to native Ruby types.

https://github.com/kreynolds/cassandra-cql

http://rubygems.org/gems/cassandra-cql