A Pig storage class that reads all columns from a given ColumnFamily, or writes properly formatted results into a ColumnFamily. Setup: First build and start a Cassandra server with the default configuration and set the PIG_HOME and JAVA_HOME environment variables to the location of a Pig >= 0.7.0 install and your Java install. NOTE: if you intend to _output_ to Cassandra, until there is a Pig release that uses jackson > 1.0.1 (see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PIG-1863) you will need to build Pig yourself with jackson 1.4. To do this, edit Pig's ivy/libraries.properties, and run ant. If you would like to run using the Hadoop backend, you should also set PIG_CONF_DIR to the location of your Hadoop config. Finally, set the following as environment variables (uppercase, underscored), or as Hadoop configuration variables (lowercase, dotted): * PIG_INITIAL_ADDRESS or cassandra.thrift.address : initial address to connect to * PIG_RPC_PORT or cassandra.thrift.port : the port thrift is listening on * PIG_PARTITIONER or cassandra.partitioner.class : cluster partitioner For example, against a local node with the default settings, you'd use: export PIG_INITIAL_ADDRESS=localhost export PIG_RPC_PORT=9160 export PIG_PARTITIONER=org.apache.cassandra.dht.RandomPartitioner Then you can build and run it like this: contrib/pig$ ant contrib/pig$ bin/pig_cassandra -x local example-script.pig This will run the test script against your Cassandra instance and will assume that there is a MyKeyspace/MyColumnFamily with some data in it. It will run in local mode (see pig docs for more info). If you'd like to get to a 'grunt>' shell prompt, run: contrib/pig$ bin/pig_cassandra -x local Once the 'grunt>' shell has loaded, try a simple program like the following, which will determine the top 50 column names: grunt> rows = LOAD 'cassandra://MyKeyspace/MyColumnFamily' USING CassandraStorage() AS (key, columns: bag {T: tuple(name, value)}); grunt> cols = FOREACH rows GENERATE flatten(columns); grunt> colnames = FOREACH cols GENERATE $0; grunt> namegroups = GROUP colnames BY (chararray) $0; grunt> namecounts = FOREACH namegroups GENERATE COUNT($1), group; grunt> orderednames = ORDER namecounts BY $0; grunt> topnames = LIMIT orderednames 50; grunt> dump topnames; Slices on columns can also be specified: grunt> rows = LOAD 'cassandra://MyKeyspace/MyColumnFamily&slice_start=C2&slice_end=C4&i&limit=1&reversed=true' USING CassandraStorage() AS (key, columns: bag {T: tuple(name, value)}); Binary values for slice_start and slice_end can be escaped such as '\u0255' Outputting to Cassandra requires the same format from input, so the simplest example is: grunt> rows = LOAD 'cassandra://MyKeyspace/MyColumnFamily' USING CassandraStorage(); grunt> STORE rows into 'cassandra://MyKeyspace/MyColumnFamily' USING CassandraStorage(); Which will copy the ColumnFamily. Note that the destination ColumnFamily must already exist for this to work.