Book Image

Seven NoSQL Databases in a Week

By : Sudarshan Kadambi, Xun (Brian) Wu
Book Image

Seven NoSQL Databases in a Week

By: Sudarshan Kadambi, Xun (Brian) Wu

Overview of this book

This is the golden age of open source NoSQL databases. With enterprises having to work with large amounts of unstructured data and moving away from expensive monolithic architecture, the adoption of NoSQL databases is rapidly increasing. Being familiar with the popular NoSQL databases and knowing how to use them is a must for budding DBAs and developers. This book introduces you to the different types of NoSQL databases and gets you started with seven of the most popular NoSQL databases used by enterprises today. We start off with a brief overview of what NoSQL databases are, followed by an explanation of why and when to use them. The book then covers the seven most popular databases in each of these categories: MongoDB, Amazon DynamoDB, Redis, HBase, Cassandra, In?uxDB, and Neo4j. The book doesn't go into too much detail about each database but teaches you enough to get started with them. By the end of this book, you will have a thorough understanding of the different NoSQL databases and their functionalities, empowering you to select and use the right database according to your needs.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Appropriate use cases for Cassandra


There are several known, good use cases for Cassandra. Understanding how Cassandra's write path works can help you in determining whether or not it will work well for your use case:

Cassandra applies writes both in memory and on disk.

Note

The commit log exists to provide durability. If a Cassandra node experiences a plug-out-of-the-wall event, the commit log is verified against what is stored on disk when the Cassandra process is restarted. If there was any data stored in memory that had not yet been persisted to disk, it is replayed from the commit log at that time.

Overview of the internals

The preceding figure showed that write is stored both in memory and on disk. Periodically, the data is flushed from memory to disk:

Note

The main thing to remember is that Cassandra writes its sorted string data files (SSTable files) as immutable. That is, they are written once, and never modified. When an SSTable file reaches its maximum capacity, another is written. Therefore...