Teaching Apache Cassandra to Reject Sad Data
Ever worried about a 4GB DVD rip being pushed into a single database column, wreaking havoc on your CDC pipeline?
Apache Cassandra's new constraints framework is the elegant solution you've been waiting for, giving you powerful, granular control over your data at the schema level.
Join Apache Cassandra committer Bernardo Botella Corbi (Apple) in this fantastic session from Community Over Code 2025 as he unveils this game-changing feature. Forget cluster-wide, inflexible guardrails. It's time to define precise rules for each column, right where it matters most.
In this talk, you'll discover:
The Motivation: Learn about the real-world problems (like CDC and Kafka limits) that sparked the creation of the framework.
Deep Dive: Explore the architecture and see how easy it is to implement your own constraints by extending a simple abstract class.
Built-in Power: Get a tour of the out-of-the-box constraints, including size, regex, isJSON, not null, and more.
The Ultimate Flexibility: Learn how the framework supports custom, pluggable constraints via SPI, allowing you to inject your own enterprise-specific validation logic with zero changes to Cassandra's core code.
But the real magic happens in the live demo! Can you build a constraint that uses an LLM to check if a message is "happy" before allowing it into the database?
Watch as Bernardo implements the "Happiness Constraint" and shows just how incredibly powerful and creative you can be with this new system.
This isn't just a new feature; it's a new paradigm for data validation in Cassandra, born from a true community effort.
Bio:
Originally from Spain, I am an engineer passionate about what I do, and how communities and groups of people can come together to create wonderful things. Having worked on tech companies over the last years, both on customer facing products and devices and on the backends and architectures that support them, I love the challenges and keep working to overcome them to provide better solutions for everyone.