Brisk made Hadoop play nice with Cassandra, but more importantly, easy to use. And this is critical for the Hadoop ecosystem. Datastax worked really hard and delivered an amazing distribution.

However, they shifted their product strategy, and decided they are discontinuing Brisk:

• http://www.datastax.com/2011/09/two-new-offerings-today-from-datastax
• http://www.datastax.com/2011/09/committing-hive-driver-into-apache-cassandra
• http://www.datastax.com/2011/09/replies-to-your-feedback-on-brisk-announcement

Since Brisk is now discontinued, this fork is an effort to make Brisk work with the latest packages of Cassandra, Pig, Hive, while retaining the original functionnality of Brisk, that is, running MR jobs without HDFS, directly on top of Cassandra.

Also, effort is ongoing to integrate Cascading/Cascalog as well. The end goal would be to have an awesome Cassandra based Hadoop distribution, easy to setup and to use.

HOWEVER, this is IN NO WAY an effort to preempt Datastax in their endeavours. They were nice enough to leave the sources for people to use, which we are!

If you want a professional, entreprise-grade Cassandra offering, please consider reviewing their offerings on: http://www.datastax.com/products

This package contains a HDFS compatable layer (CFS) and a CassandraJobConf which can be used to run MR jobs without HDFS or dedicated job/task trackers.

It also includes a hive-driver for accessing data in cassandra as well as a hive meta-store implementation.

Hadoop jobs and Hive are setup to work with MR cluster.

For detailed docs please see: http://www.datastax.com/docs/0.8/brisk/index

You can also discuss Brisk on freenode #datastax-brisk

On linux systems, you need to run the following as root

echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory

This is to avoid OOM errors when tasks are spawned.

To try it out run:

1. compile and download all dependencies

    ant
   

2. start cassandra with built in job/task trackers

    ./bin/brisk cassandra -t
   

3. view jobtracker

    http://localhost:50030
   

4. examine CassandraFS

    ./bin/brisk hadoop fs -lsr cfs:///
   

5. start hive shell or webUI

    ./bin/brisk hive
   

   or

    ./bin/brisk hive --service hwi
   

open web browser to http://localhost:9999/hwi