Snappy Compression fails for Apache Cassandra on a Raspberry Pi

Although I’ve managed to get Apache Casssandra running on a Raspberry Pi I’ve been struggling to make any use of it.    I’ve been using the latest build of Cassandra (1.1.0) and when ever I’ve tried creating a column family I’ve been getting the following error:

SnappyCompressor.create() threw an error: org.xerial.snappy.SnappyError [FAILED_TO_LOAD_NATIVE_LIBRARY] null

As you are aware compression on Column Families was introduced in  Cassandra 1 for space saving and increased disk IO (http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/whats-new-in-cassandra-1-0-compression).  By default the compression is Snappy using the Google Snappy Library (http://code.google.com/p/snappy-java/ ) which is a wrapper for Google Snappy (http://code.google.com/p/snappy/) written in C++.  There is no port for Google Snappy on the Pi and my initial attempts to build one have not been successful (autogen.sh is failing with undefined macro AC_DEFINE)

You should be able to create a column family with DeflateCompressor from  cqlsh as follows:

create TABLE users (KEY varchar Primary key, password varchar, gender varchar) WITH compression_parameters:sstable_compressor = 'DeflateCompressor';

However that’s failing with the same Snappy Compressor error.   Describing the Keyspace with Cassandra-cli gives the following:

Keyspace: test:
  Replication Strategy: org.apache.cassandra.locator.SimpleStrategy
  Durable Writes: true
    Options: [replication_factor:1]
  Column Families:
    ColumnFamily: users
      Key Validation Class: org.apache.cassandra.db.marshal.UTF8Type
      Default column value validator: org.apache.cassandra.db.marshal.UTF8Type
      Columns sorted by: org.apache.cassandra.db.marshal.UTF8Type
      GC grace seconds: 864000
      Compaction min/max thresholds: 4/32
      Read repair chance: 0.1
      DC Local Read repair chance: 0.0
      Replicate on write: true
      Caching: KEYS_ONLY
      Bloom Filter FP chance: default
      Built indexes: []
      Column Metadata:
        Column Name: password
          Validation Class: org.apache.cassandra.db.marshal.UTF8Type
        Column Name: gender
          Validation Class: org.apache.cassandra.db.marshal.UTF8Type
      Compaction Strategy: org.apache.cassandra.db.compaction.SizeTieredCompactionStrategy
      Compression Options:
        sstable_compressor: DeflateCompressor
        sstable_compression: org.apache.cassandra.io.compress.SnappyCompressor

Note the two compressors in action.  I’m not sure quite what’s going on, or if this is the correct result at the moment but I’m continuing to investigate (any answers gratefully received.    So for now it’s back to Apache Cassandra 0.8.10 which doesn’t have compression and seems to work on the Pi (once the env file has been changed).

Update

Thanks to Jonathan Ellis for pointing out the command should be:

Create TABLE users2 (KEY varchar Primary key, password varchar, gender varchar) WITH compression_parameters:sstable_compression = 'DeflateCompressor';