Now you have been educated and informed about why you should use Cassandra. You have been walked through setting up Cassandra and column family creation, and have even covered the various client/protocol options available to access the Cassandra data store programmatically. As mentioned earlier, Hector has so far been the most widely used API for accessing Cassandra, though the Datastax and Astyanax drivers are fast catching up. For our exercise, we'll use the Hector API.

The use case we want to implement here is to use Cassandra to support real-time, adhoc reporting for telecom data that is being collated, parsed, and enriched using a Storm topology.

As depicted in the preceding figure, the use case requires live telecom Call Detail Record (CDR) capture using the data collection components (for practice, we can use sample records and a simulator shell script to mimic the live CDR feeds). The collated live feed is pushed into the RabbitMQ broker...