Reading data from Cassandara in RTDM

[mysas1]

Hi Guys,

Could you help me understand how do we read data from Cassandara in SAS RTDM. Since cassandara stores data as key value pair, direct integration with RTDM (which requires structured data) seems difficult, also no SAS/Access for cassandara complicates the things further. One approach I could think of and need your evaluation is to have a parser piece of code deployed between the RTDM and cassandara database. The parser code will convert incoming file from RTDM to a format which is understood by cassandara and vice versa. This conversion of XMLs would have to be again deployed as a BI webservice. So in short the process node from the RTDM campaign will pass a normalized XML to the BI service, this web service (the parser code) will then convert the normalized XML in to an XML which would be understood by cassandara and fetch data. Again the response from cassandara would be converted to normalized XML by the parser code and the normalized XML would be given to RTDM for further processing. However this seems to be a time consuming process, hence request your guidance to understand the best possible solution in this case.

Regards,

mySAS1   

[Dmitry_Alergant]

Hi, it can be done that way but this is no the most straightforward way out there. 

A more straightforward way would be to enable an unofficial (but still working) Groovy support for RTDM Process Nodes, and implement a customized "SAS Process" using Groovy script that calls Cassandra through its Java API libraries, as Groovy is a JVM-based language and can refer to JAR libraries.

See here: http://support.sas.com/kb/60/630.html

That's what we did on a couple of our projects where we connected RTDM to NoSQL databases (Redis, Cassandra etc).

Good luck!

[mysas1]

Hi Dimitriy,

Thanks for your response. If I understand correctly are you implying instead of the parser code which might consume more time, to write a groovy code in the process node of RTDM and make a connection to Cassandara. Groovy code has to convert the datagrid received from RTDM and convert into a form which can be sent to Cassandara, and when cassandara responds with the required data in a specific format, the groovy code again converts it into a format understood by SAS RTDM. 

Thanks,

mySAS1

[Dmitry_Alergant]

Yeah, that's what we have been doing in similar situations.

Good luck!