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

Cassandra hardware selection, installation, and configuration


Cassandra is designed to be run in the cloud or on commodity hardware, so (relative to relational databases) you usually don't need to worry about breaking the bank on expensive, heavy-duty hardware. Most documentation on hardware recommendations for Cassandra is somewhat cryptic and reluctant to put forth any solid numbers on hardware requirements. The Apache Cassandra project documentation[1] has a section titled Hardware Choices, which states:

While Cassandra can be made to run on small servers for testing or development environments (including Raspberry Pis), a minimal production server should have at least 2 cores and 8 GB of RAM. Typical production servers have 8 or more cores and 32 GB of RAM.

RAM

One aspect to consider is that Cassandra runs on a JVM. This means that you need to have at least enough random access memory (RAM) to hold the JVM heap, plus another 30-50% or so for additional OS processes and off-heap storage...