Say I have 2 nodes and a table that has 5 partitions how would that be distributed across nodes... If the number of nodes is = number of partitions then that's understandable but what if the number of partitions> number of nodes.
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How is data stored if the number of partitions is greater than number of nodes?
The number of partitions doesn't have any relationship with the number of nodes in a cluster.
Each node in the cluster is responsible for a range of tokens that is a subset of data in the "ring" of tokens. In the case of virtual nodes (num_tokens), each node owns multiple token ranges.
Cassandra's partitioner uses a hashing algorithm (the default Murmur3Partitioner uses the MurmurHash3 function) to convert the partition keys to a token value. Each partition in a table gets distributed around the ring of nodes in each DC based on its equivalent token value derived by the partitioner.
To illustrate how Cassandra determines where partitions are stored, let me use this example 3-node cluster:
$ nodetool ring community
Datacenter: Cassandra
==========
Address Rack Status State Load Owns Token
3074457345618258602
10.101.33.146 rack1 Up Normal 174.98 KiB 33.33% -9223372036854775808
10.101.33.196 rack1 Up Normal 164.12 KiB 33.33% -3074457345618258603
10.101.36.82 rack1 Up Normal 200.86 KiB 33.33% 3074457345618258602
From this example, here are the range of tokens owned by each node:
10.101.36.82 : -3074457345618258602 to 3074457345618258602 10.101.33.146 : 3074457345618258603 to -9223372036854775808 10.101.33.196 : -9223372036854775807 to -3074457345618258603
As you can see from the table above, each node owns a large number of tokens. When you add or remove nodes from the cluster, the range of tokens owned by each node will change.
Using an example partition key pk = 'Ramirez', the Murmur3 hash function returns the token value as:
Murmur3Partitioner('Ramirez') = -4404190778401486753
This means that the partition with pk = 'Ramirez' belongs to node 10.101.33.196 since the token for "Ramirez" (-4404190778401486753) is in the range owned by node 10.101.33.196 in the table above.
When a coordinator gets a write request for a partition where pk = 'Ramirez', the coordinator will forward the write to node 10.101.33.196. Similarly, when a coordinator gets a read request for the partition where pk = 'Ramirez', the data will be retrieved from node 10.101.33.196.
For more information, see Data distribution and replication. Cheers!
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