question

Hi @chandrasekar.b03_190734,

it sounds to me that you only have one node in your cluster.

You can confirm the topology of your cluster by running a nodetool status on your Cassandra node.

For a single node cluster, the concept of replication does not make much sense. This node will have all the data, and there will only be one copy of the data. If the node is down, no node will service any requests.

Increasing the replication factor beyond your number of nodes will not result in more replicas being stored. But it will create some weird errors when reading and writing with consistency levels that are greater than the number of nodes.

Here is an example:

On a single node cluster, I created a keyspace with replication factor 42:

CREATE KEYSPACE huge WITH replication = {'class': 'SimpleStrategy', 'replication_factor': '42'}  AND durable_writes = true;

I added a simple table:

CREATE TABLE huge.table1 (
    id text PRIMARY KEY,
    data text
);

and I successfully inserted some data:

cqlsh> insert into huge.table1 (id, data) values ('id1', 'data1');
cqlsh> select * from huge.table1 ;

 id  | data
-----+-------
 id1 | data1

(1 rows)

This works, because cqlsh uses a consistency level of LOCAL ONE by default.

Now, if I try to write with consistency ALL:

cqlsh> consistency all
Consistency level set to ALL.

cqlsh> insert into huge.table1 (id, data) values ('id2', 'data2');
NoHostAvailable: ('Unable to complete the operation against any hosts', {<Host: 127.0.0.1:9042 MyDataCenter>: Unavailable('Error from server: code=1000 [Unavailable exception] message="Cannot achieve consistency level ALL" info={\'required_replicas\': 42, \'alive_replicas\': 1, \'consistency\': \'ALL\'}',)})

By allowing a replication factor greater than the number of nodes, you are creating a scenario where most consistency levels would fail.

I hope this helps.